Tag Archives: Books
17 Great Books on the Border to Read Instead of ‘American Dirt’
There’s no shortage of talented Latinx writers with all kinds of stories to tell. Let’s make space for them.
If you’ve been online in the past few months, you’ve probably seen ads for American Dirt, Jeanine Cummins’ heavily promoted new novel about Mexican-Americ...Read More
The Internet Broke Democracy. To Fix It, Design for Human Rights.
Author Samuel Woolley argues that a slew of new technologies will further degrade political life unless we rein them in.
In 2013, when Samuel Woolley began studying online misinformation as a graduate student at the University of Washington, hardly anyone was worried about the sub...Read More
The 30 Best Texas Books of The Decade, from Amarillo to Utopia
As you scramble for a holiday gift or ponder what you’d like to peruse by the fire, we’ve got 10 years of Texas books to suggest.
The twists and turns of these 30 Texas novels, nonfiction narratives, and other works published between January 2010 and December 2019 reveal undercurrents that...Read More
An Observer Staff Guide to the 2019 Texas Book Festival
It’s an embarrassment of riches.
The 24th annual Texas Book Festival, happening this Saturday and Sunday in downtown Austin, is expected to draw approximately 50,000 curious readers to hear fro...Read More
American Health Care is Broken, Especially in Texas. What Can We Do About It?
Physician Marty Makary’s new book shows how sky-high medical bills can ruin patients’ lives—but puts the burden on individuals to demand change.
Add yet another first place health care ranking no one wants for Texas: We have the highest hospital bills in the country. A new study has found that Texas pr...Read More
Our 10 Favorite Texas Books of 2018
Politics, immigration, poetry, LSD, art and yes, vampires: There’s a little something for everyone on this list.
If there’s a bright side to the fact that, politically speaking, we spent 2018 still deep in what people on Twitter wearily call “the darkest timeline,” i...Read More
The Lone Star State Teems with Snakes, Lizards and Toads in ‘Herping Texas’
Michael Smith and Clint King's entertaining and rambling book recounts years of cold-blooded adventuring.
When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time hunting for critters. The Dallas suburbs are a resolutely tamed landscape, with little in the way of big wildlife. But i...Read More
‘Trinity’ Offers a Beautifully Fragmented Portrait of the Inventor of the Nuclear Bomb
Hall paints a portrait of Oppenheimer through refraction, resulting in a novel that captures his life fully, but indirectly.
It’s been more than 73 years since the first nuclear bomb the world had ever seen exploded in the New Mexico desert. That bomb was the product of the Los Alam...Read More
‘Presidio’ is a Beautiful, Atmospheric Texas Novel that Doesn’t Cohere
Randy Kennedy’s debut is packed — sometimes bloated — with rich characters and lovely detail that conjures small-town Texas.
Epigraphs from luminaries like John Ashbery, Clarice Lispector and Robert Smithson hint at the high-art ambitions of Randy Kennedy’s debut novel, Presidio. Th...Read More
