Journey to the Alamo - Melodie Cuate

Journey to the Alamo.

By Melodie A. Cuate. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2007. 144 pages, 5 x 7, 18 illustrations, ISBN 0896725928 $17.95 cloth. First in the new “Mr. Barrington's Mysterious Trunk Series.” http://www.ttup.ttu.edu/

Seventh-grader Hannah, her pesky brother Nick, and her best friend Jackie Montalvo are mysteriously transported from modern Austin, Texas to the Battle of the Alamo in 1836 for an “excellent adventure,” something Hannah needs. Melodie A. Cuate, a McAllen teacher of several years, tinkers with the tale telling device of Texas history teacher Mr. Barrington’s mysterious teaching trunk of artifacts and a clapping thunder storm to trip the trio through time to San Antonio. Hannah quickly finds herself under Susannah Dickinson’s care and fixing a ham sandwich for Colonel Travis, consoling the ailing Jim Bowie, and finding fascination with David Crockett (who looks like Mr. Barrington).

Hannah almost jumps the gun after she hears Travis famous speech before the legendary line in the dirt. The threesome do their part in maintaining the Defenders’ siege posture, dodging cannonballs, bickering a little among themselves, protecting one another, worrying about getting home, and finding their way back with Esparza’s and Bowie’s assistance. The kids’ souvenirs include a wooden cross for Hannah and a light bayonet scar for Nick. The youngsters are engaging, and the history is blessedly light but balanced and worthwhile. The brief Spanish glossary is a nice touch. Melodie Cuate’s story is readable and suspenseful.

The next in the series will be “Journey to San Jacinto.”

El Mosquite in My Kitchen - Don Sanders

El Mosquito in My Kitchen.

[musical CD]. Music and lyrics mostly by Don Sanders.

Produced by Robbie Parrish & Andy Bradley, recorded at Sugar Hill Studios (Houston). $15.00. http://www.donsanders.net/ djsanders@mindspring.com order through Don or through http://cdbaby.com/cd/donsanders

Don Sanders first got my attention before he started hanging around with a pretty librarian. There he was - performing at a book store, at a festival, and library functions. This was after he had been on the Texas music circuit for quite a while; running with the likes of Guy Clark, Townes Van Zandt, and Lyle Lovett and serving on the Kerrville Folk Festival Board. In the 1980’s he turned toward more theatrical venues – schools, theaters, festivals, etc. He emerged as a combined storyteller and folksinger. He was easy and pleasant to enjoy then live, and Sanders’ new mixed lingual CD for children, families, and educators is a toe-tapper and shoulder-roller.

He has others mixing in with guitar, harmonica, drum and block percussion, banjo, jaw harp, and trumpet, with some synthesizing. I may have heard xylophonic sounds.
Of the 14 songs, some are fun (El Mosquito) and others express consolation and support in the parent child relationship. Some are Sanders’ adaptations to older Mexican folk melodies with verses of his own composition. Several songs celebrate the simpler building blocks of childhood – a rainbow, the kitchen, planting a seed, cooperation, ponies, puppies, new shoes, and an adult favorite, naptime. Others allude to cultural heritage – Los Padres de San Francisco and Cowboy Bob.

The CD’s accompanying booklet enables parents to learn the words better to sing along. The six Spanish lyrics are there interpreted. The disk carries an added bonus as a pdf file – tips for children’s activities for each song. Can you make the cow sound “nyo,” buzz like a mosquito, simulate pulling weeds, and count your fingers? Evidently by my experience, Cowboy Don’s work also is excellent song and music to listen to while preparing supper.

Amarillo - Paul H. Carlson

Amarillo: The Story of a Western Town.

By Paul H. Carlson. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2006. xv, 283 pages. 53 photos, 3 maps, ISBN 0896725871, $28.95 red and tan cloth. http://www.ttup.ttu.edu/ ttup@ttu.edu

Paul Carlson (http://www.depts.ttu.edu/historydepartment/faculty/members/carlson_paul.html)
professes history at Texas Tech and has authored several books, some being Deep Time and the Texas High Plains, The Cowboy Way, and The Plains Indians which was translated into French. He’s credentialed and applauded. You’ll enjoy his Amarillo. It’s the first full history of the town. It should be widely purchased. It’s a good book filling a clear gap.

Early Native Americans found it important that the city rests between two rivers (the Red and the Canadian) and is near natural resources (the Alibates flint quarry). The surrounding ranchland gave it a reason for its original being, where the buffalo had previously been nourished for millennia. The influence of the JA, LIT, XIT, LS, LX, LE, Frying Pan, and T-Anchor ranches push the story as interplanetary space guilds glide in science fiction novels. But these prairie spacemen are real. The ranchers transported countless cattle along trails headed for the liquid life at Wild Horse Lake. The lake rests in a central location which was affirmed by the railroads. The city’s history is strongly influenced by Mid-westerners who acclimated.

Amarillo, the Queen City of the Texas Panhandle, reigns over “The Golden Spread,” encompassing the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles, and portions of other nearby states. To current residents at times the rest of Texas is an afterthought. In a sense Amarillo is the newest traditional city in the state, population almost 200,000.

But the story is more than trail dust, barbed wire, merchants, churches, movies, and grain silos. In 1900 the “Just Us Girls” started a library which acquired William H. Bush’s collection of books; see Bibliography of the Bush/ FitzSimon/ McCarty Southwestern Collections by William Neal Howard (APL, 1979). Carlson brings a little known event to life as Georgia O’Keefe arrived to paint and the teach high school students. Then there was oil and gas, a world-class helium deposit, and the controversial Pantex Army Ordnance Plant. Interspersed therein, Carlson notes the nearby Panhandle Plains Historical Museum and the West Texas State Normal College (now Aggieland on the Plains). Carlson does not neglect local color; Buffalo Bill, J. Evetts Haley, Route 66, T. Boone Pickens and Stanley Marsh 3’s buried Cadillacs have their place.

In summary, Carlson provides Amarillo at its morning, noon, and ascendancy to “Queen” of the Panhandle. Good reading.

El Paso - W.H. Timmons

El Paso: A Borderlands History.

By W. H. Timmons. El Paso: Texas Western Press, 2005. ISBN 0-87404-246-1 Paper $40.00, 6 x 9, 473 pp., photos, illustrations, bibliography, index, a re-issue of 1990. http://www.utep.edu/twp; twp@utep.edu

W.H. Timmons, born 1915, studied at the University of Chicago and the University of Texas at Austin. After teaching at the University of Texas at El Paso for 30 years, he became a professor emeritus of history. He knew El Paso. Timmons’ volume stretches from antiquity to the 1980s and includes many illustrations by Jose Cisneros. The 40-page bibliography is itself a starting point for historians of the El Paso region. You should have this volume and C. L. Sonnichsen’s Pass of the North as bookends. See Timmons’ archives at UTEP described at http://libraryweb.utep.edu/special/findingaids/timmonswh.cfm

Often referred to as the “oldest town in Texas with some justification, Timmons treats in detail the pre-American period before 1848 in the first third of the history. El Paso, like Amarillo, is stuck way out there on the map, and its connection to broader Texas is often overlooked, but without El Paso as an immigrant and transportation nexus the westering would have blunted and splayed elsewhere. The stagecoach and railroads passage were literal bloodlines in economic development. Fort Bliss became a major economic engine. Folks in El Paso have a blurry Rio Grande line with Mexico’s Juarez with which their history is critically entwined.

Timmons brings unexpected facts to life. A Chinese community developed in wake of their laborers in laying the 1870s railroads. Folks took tourist trips to the actual border line to witness the “Battle of Juarez” during the Mexican Revolution. The cultural life was enlivened by the novelist and artist Tom Lea, artist Jose Cisneros, and printer Carl Hertzog, a trio rivaling Austin’s Dobie, Bedichek and Webb writing triumvirate and Amarillo’s writer J. Evetts Haley and artist Harold Bugbee twosome.

Overall, Timmons is an excellent selection for reading and edification.

Getting Away With Murder - Bill Neal

Getting Away with Murder on the Texas Frontier:

Notorious Killings and Celebrated Trials.

By Bill Neal, Introduction by Gordon Morris Bakken. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2006. xix, 308 pages. 49 b/w photos, 3 illustrations, 1 map. ISBN 0896725790 $27.95 cloth http://www.ttup.ttu.edu/ ttup@ttu.edu

Bill Neal tells us how they did it. Neal has been a prosecuting and defense attorney for decades in West Texas, out where the lawless Wild West is still warm. He’s not the Bill O’Neal of a similar topic.

Laws are one thing, but the rules of popular justice, vigilantism, absconding witnesses, a quick getaway, fear of retribution, financial interests of the jury, race, the statute of limitations, personal friendship, the Victorian code, inexperienced prosecutors, lynching before justice ran its course, and, well, “didn’t the victim deserve it anyway” all played their roles. Neal focuses on legal matters, especially in the courtroom, generally cases you’ve not heard of before – they’re outrageous.

Neal populates his book with bank robbers, sheriff murderers, knife-wielders, gamblers, poison artists, angry mothers, and mail-order brides. In amongst them are lawyers, judges, and sheriffs trying to bring community stability.

Friendship goes a long way. Bill Richards in 1891 aided the legal “organization” of Cottle County, so his friend could get a friendlier trial environment in the new county.

Imagine in 1916, the guy who entered a crowded courtroom, shot and killed another guy on trial for murder, and wounded a witness and defense attorney for good measure. After four trails, he was scot-free. Neal brings us forward. Even in 1940, after a car thief- murderer confessed and was convicted, an appellate judge reversed the matter because he was not so sure that kicking and stomping somebody (namely Mrs. McHenry) to death was not based on too much inference.
You shake you head today over some outrageous dismissal, but that’s along tradition.
Neal’s examples are fresh and well written.

Dishes From the Wild Horse Desert - Melissa Guerra

Dishes from the Wild Horse Desert:

Norteño Cooking of South Texas.

By Melissa Guerra. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2006. ISBN: 0-7645-5892-7 Hardcover 288 pages colored and rose & white photos, map, bibliography, index. US $29.95 http://www.wiley.com/

Melissa Guerra (http://www.melissaguerra.com/) is deep in family culinary traditions of the Wild Horse Desert of South Texas and Northern Mexico. Her PBS series and book “The Texas Provincial Kitchen” has attested to her reliability and popularity.

This beautifully designed and lovingly written volume mixes history, cultural anecdotes with a hundred recipes fit for the common Wild Horse Desert kitchen, a part of Tex-Mex in general. The food originates from the ranch tradition rather than the city, but some springs from coastal restaurant inspirations, geographically outside the Desert but nearby. Most Tex-Mex, as well as most American Mexican cooking, first came up through this region that was a lush area until only a few centuries ago, and this book takes cook and diner home again. Local tea brews are included without particular reference to the curanderas. The chapter introductions and topical notes throughout are graceful and filled with accessible, detailed information. Guerra has been touring at the October Texas Book Festival, Common Market grocery outlets, and elsewhere.

The background for masa, tortillas, and tamales provides a basic lectionary for the northern corn and flour kitchen. The section on “Beverages” is just inspirational; get your blender and head for the fruit market. The “Enchilada Norteñas” are straightforward: ancho chiles, beef, onion, flour, and spiced with garlic, salt, pepper, and cumin, wrapped in corn tortillas, and topped with Cheddar. I’ve never tried cactus in my cornbread, but now adventures await me. The “Tortilla Soup” recipe is refreshing just to read and set my jowls watering. Pork is the proper flavoring for the frijoles. The section on “Game and Goat” will be attractive for those wishing to re-capture the days of the Wild Horse Desert range life.

Although she uses some lard, Guerra introduces the increasing use of corn oil. Beyond the expected fare, one finds recipes for “Whole Wheat Pancakes with Fresh Peach Syrup,” “Chile Con Carne,” “Traditional Bacalao (prepared salted cod),” “Speckled Trout Ceviche,” and “Chicken-fried Steak with Cream Gravy.”

Whether as cook or guide or conversationalist, Melissa Guerra is one to treat you well.

One Christmas in Old Tascosa - Casandra Firman

One Christmas in Old Tascosa.

By Casandra Firman as told by Quintille Speck-Firman Garmany. Foreword by Red Steagall and illustrated by Judy Wise. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2006. xi, 90 pages. 2 photos, 12 illustrations ISBN 089672588X $21.95 cloth
http://www.ttup.ttu.edu/ ttup@ttu.edu

Tascosa now includes Cal Farley’s Boy’s Town. Before that it was the wild and wooly West with Indians, buffaloes, gunfights, cowboys, and dancehalls. Between the two, the town virtually went to the ghosts. But here is a sweet story from the interregnum.

Garmany was a seven-year-old in 1931. The Depression Dust Bowl was on, but few would have realized it given how simple life was in Tascosa. Having more than one pencil was a student’s wealth.

At the time Tascosa’s lone resident was Frenchie McCormick, an elderly woman with a dancing history and an honored wedding vow to remain in Tascosa. Nearby in a one-room school house Christmas was approaching and the children’s Pageant was finally ready. And it was nearly, completely, absolutely wrecked. It wasn’t the children, the building, the costumes, or even a too-playful dog. It snowed on the day before the evening’s performance, so heavily that the audience could not come. Parents knew their children were okay with the teacher in the schoolhouse, but they could not get through the snow. And without an audience to love and smile over the Pageant’s young performers, it would be a failure. Then through the blizzard, Frenchie McCormick was spotted coming through the deep snow. The children warmed Mrs. McCormick. She took her place among the chairs out front. And she loved the youngsters’ presentation. And the children loved her for being there – just to see them.

Red Steagall, a Texas poet laureate, and Richard O’Brien append a song “Frenchie McCormick.” Merry Christmas!

Pitching Tents - Gail Mount

Pitching Tents.

By Gail Mount. Huntsville: Texas Review Press, 2005. ISBN 1-881515-76-1, paper $16.95 5 ½ x 8 ½ . 176 pp. http://www.shsu.edu/~www_trp/, dist by TAMU http://www.tamu.edu/upress/
Winner of the 2004 George Garrett Fiction Prize: Novel

Where is Aaron Spelling when you need him? This rollicking novel needs a sitcom venue. Gail Mount, a Fort Worth native, Rice graduate, UT teaching fellow, and experienced short story writer and playwright, tosses sedate novel-writing aside, and gives us Ezekiel and Vida, two seniors with a love of life and devil-may-care schemes. To the small town of Burro, Texas, Vida returns and immediately Ezekiel falls in love with her a second time. Mount’s fast-paced plot and the characters fast-paced plotting make the story fast reading, delightful reading. Ezekiel is a painterly artist who even derives an income there from; Vida is a burning individualist, now 80-years-old.

The town’s citizens have long categorized both as trouble makers. They start off caring for Mad Betty’s dead, naked body, he prepares an art show, she organizes a school for rebels, he deals with his mother, she deals with philosophy, and they touch each other gently. It is one rollicking scene after another. They wander apart and re-unite. Finally, after a year or so, they decide to really get wild. They marry and drive off into the sunset. If the concept of two creative oldsters making love and being in love with raucous language and civilly unacceptable behavior offends you, die young or sad. This couple does neither.

Where Skulls Speak Wind, Poems - Larry Thomas

Where Skulls Speak Wind, Poems.

By Larry D. Thomas. Huntsville: Texas Review Press, 2004. 80 pages, 5 ½ x 8 paperback, $12.95 ISBN 1-881515-64-8 http://www.shsu.edu/~www_trp/, dist by TAMU http://www.tamu.edu/upress/
Winner of the 2004 Texas Review Poetry Prize and 2004 Violet Crown Book Award for Prose & Poetry.

Larry Thomas was born and reared in West Texan, was educated at University of Houston, began writing poems in the navy, and retired from the Harris County Adult Probation Department in 1998. He now lives in Houston and Galveston. As with this volume, he has won prizes and recognition, and his poems have appeared widely in literary and popular journals and anthologies. His web site is http://www.thetexaspoet.com/

As you leaf through Larry Thomas’ volume, he gently takes you back the hand to a private, quiet slow dance. The dance begins in stark, western Texas where the wind will “never, never stop,” where the rivers when they sluice attract “frozen bodies, / … to the river’s edge, / and launched their secret, ghostly boats / creaking with the cargo of desire,” and where crosses, cyclones, and O’Keefe skulls convince the human populace of their sins so worthy of God’s punishment. There bull riders, antique cowmen, and grandmothers rock in the two-step with death.

In the wind sparrows feed and fight, ravens caw in the snow, and vultures in torn black fabric shine their beaks on bleached bones. Moving across the land, a brown pinto strikes a dazzling image in the snow, a black stallion thunders in the night, and longhorns “flaunt their sun struck hides.”

In Midland, youngsters remember their dry afternoons after church, rose colored Fords, dewberries, oh, the dewberries, first communions, mothers’ feather dusters.
In regret, there is long kept secret unknowingly shared by a father and son – acknowledged upon a death too late.

In West Texas not all gods are football players, some are awed by the red hummingbirds and spread their galactic “crushed light” as blessings on “everything we touched.”
Take a little light from Thomas, and you’ll dance a little longer.

Routine Heaven - Jack Myers

Routine Heaven.

By Jack Myers.

Huntsville: Texas Review Press, 2005. ISBN 1-881515-78-8 paper $14.95 51/2x 81/2. 96 pp. http://www.shsu.edu/~www_trp/, dist by TAMU http://www.tamu.edu/upress/
Winner of the 2005 Texas Review Poetry Prize

Jack Myers (http://www.smu.edu/english/people/FacultyProfiles/Myers.htm) lives in Mesquite, teaches at Southern Methodist University since 1975, and wins awards for his poetry. He was the 2003-2004 Texas Poet Laureate, gained entry to the Texas Institute of Letters, and took Austin’s Violet Crown.

Myers poetry is accessible and warmly playful and surprisingly cold at times. Myers refers to his dog so often that some readers may imagine that his dog may rival his wife as his most insightful medium, but folks at Dallas’ Writer’s Garret may differ. He may call himself a “failed calligrapher” but he is a successful poet. Reading his work is akin to your following him down some vernacular hallway only to find at his modest gesture the two of you watching yourselves watching yourselves in a mirror.

He informs on us all as in “Trying to find the origins of anger / by looking into my heart / is like a dead leaf feeling for its roots.” What husband has not had the delight of stumbling in on his wife’s hair washing, rinsing, and drying ritual? If you were Myers, you could catch a ghostly epiphany there in the hair. In “An Old Dog’s Tale” the commonplace hound shakes Baghdad missiles from his fur. Myers does not worry so much about Buddha “finding his way back” through a line of incarnations, but rather accepting his own humanity in “pouring water downhill.” Finally, readers will find practical life advice; for instance, what is the best quit smoking regimen, play “Strip Polka.”

Myers’ plain words and behind the scenes rhythm make for a comfortable reading companion.

Red River [movie soundtrack] Dimitri Tiomkin

Red River.

[a musical CD] Film score by Dimitri Tiomkin. Performed by Moscow Symphony Choir and Orchestra, conducted by William Stromberg. Naxos, 2005. 1 hour, 4 minutes.

Yes, John Wayne, Montgomery Clift, John Ford, and Howard Hawks take the usual credit for this classic 1948 Western movie depicting a cattle drive going north across the Red River up the Chisholm Trail. But earlier decades before, the Russians had their October Revolution, and creative talent crossed the Danube for freedom, as did Ukrainian Dimitri Tiomkin (born 1894). He found himself composing in Europe and America. The movies were attractive to the brash showman, and he became one of the greats of Hollywood’s Golden Age lush musical backgrounds.

Other works included Resurrection (1931), Lost Horizon (1937), It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), Duel in the Sun (1946), The Big Sky (1952), High Noon (1952), Giant (1956), Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957), and Rio Bravo (1959). By the 1950’s Tiomkin was the highest paid composed in Hollywood. After the Iron Curtain fell, the Moscow Symphony Choir and Orchestra early chose Tiomkin’s Red River worthy of revival for Russian audiences. This American release is a lesser version, compared to the European, but the Russians must have enjoyed the dynamic sweeps, the cattle runs, and weaving in American folk music. And they must have listened for the echoes of their homeland’s sounds.

Beaumont Boy (CD music) - Ezra Charles

Beaumont Boy. [musical CD]

By Ezra Charles and His Band. Sycamore Records. 2001, 2005. 10 tracks. $15.00 http://www.ezracharles.com/

Maybe Van Cliburn stole the Tchaikovsky, but Ezra Charles must have stolen the piano because it’s smoking hot, and this Beaumont Boy tours Greater Texas in piano boogie-woogie blues in another of his string of CDs. It’s snappy, got the heart and beat, and nine of the ten cuts (all but “House of Blue Lights”) are original lyrics and musical arrangements by Ezra.

He started at age 14 with Johnny Winter and has been hunting elephants ever since. His awards began decades ago and continue. His life musical range covers country, rockabilly, jazz, pop, rock and roll, gospel and certainly more. But Beaumont Boy delightfully celebrates Texas. You’ll hear of his adolescent naiveté, prides of Texas and fatherhood, romantic adventures, memorializing Stevie Ray Vaughn, and working Sixth Street. For a pick of the litter take either “Beaumont Boys” or “You Are the Music.” In the “Boys” it must be hard at the same time to run the keyboard and to wave a baton for a band including Harry James, the Big Bopper, Johnny Winter, Edgar Winter, Clay Walker, Tracy Byrd, and Mark Chesnutt all at the same time.

When the smoke clears, you’ll find Mike Seybold, Nancy Dalbey, Damon Sonnier, Derek Sonnier, and James Morado with the instruments, and Erza inhaling, ready to go again. If you’re in Houston, beside his regular gigs, find him in his hometown Bellaire, down at the Triangle in Mojo Mama’s on Casual Tuesdays for a while. The piano’s in the window.

Brush Country.

By Lionel Garcia. Huntsville: Texas Review Press, 2004. ISBN 1-881515-62-1 paper $12.95 5 1/2x8. 88 pages. http://www.shsu.edu/~www_trp/ Winner of the 2003 Texas Review Poetry Prize.

The widely acclaimed and successful writer, Lionel Garcia reflects on his rearing and heritage of his homeland, the brush country of Southwest Texas. Garcia’s poems begin with notices of the countryside – the dry, nearly barren land, with the cenizo and frijollo in bloom, a rabbit licking moisture from the leaves, and a red-tail hawk, a green jay, and a feeding deer. “The brush speaks to me / The voice is hard and strong, like the people.” The infrequent rain is almost mythological for the condemned. But there’s dancing on Saturday night at the ranch. The boys go off to war. His horse, Rocinante, dies and his grandfather works away from home. He struggles between sport and food with the killing of a deer. A dove, the wind, and a pelican lift him and leave him to be “I am the door at a Brush Country house.”

For a riding accident, the horse is killed to regain control of life forces, else what stability is there in life. A child dies, and the death is ascribed to God’s will, and the child is better dead than in this hard life, else what stability is there in life. A cowbell rings as if announcing the birds’ flight of fate. The priest reprimands the poor parishioners for risqué clothing, but even “God cannot change the fates of life.” Pacho intimates with Maria. The oilmen come, the hunter goes, and Garcia wonders about yesterday. A crazy woman cries for her children. A father denies his hunger.

Throughout a dry, persistent love lingers in the shadows. The cenizo and frijollo scent the air. Garcia concludes “How beautiful to live without / Remorse of what could have been.” Else, the reader may wonder what stability is there in life. Would you love the caliche upon which you were born?

Texas Heat - William Harrison

Texas Heat

by William Harrison. Huntsville, Texas Review Press, 2005. ISBN 1-881515-84-2, paperback. $18.95. http://www.shsu.edu/~www_trp/

The review of this love and loving short story collection is in the Texas Parlor blog (http://texasparlor.blogspot.com/ for October 4th). It’s an audio. I was a bit timid about writing about, well, you know. But apparently, people do these sorts of things in Texas. As I posted this entry there, my service provider notified that it would not longer be available to post audio postings. So, what you get is the unedited, hurried, first recording, maybe not unlike, well, you know. I speak nervously from a script for about 5 minutes.

Gone to Texas Heritage Recipes

Gone to Texas: Heritage Recipes, volume II.

Victoria: The Texas Settlement Region (PO Box 1132, 77902), 2004. three-ring binder under hard cover. 379 pages. $17.00 http://www.texas-settlement.org/

The Texas Settlement Region is an organization of counties “Dedicated to protecting our region's history, culture, and natural attractions while promoting our region as a heritage tourism destination.” The 18 counties compose the area of early American and European colonization, including, Aransas, Austin, Brazoria, Calhoun, Colorado, DeWitt, Fayette, Fort Bend, Goliad, Gonzales, Guadalupe, Jackson, Karnes, Lavaca, Matagorda, Refugio, Victoria, and Wharton Counties.

The webpage is a tidy, useful one. It has a hot directory of museums, historical markers (with narrative), Chambers of Commerce, and a lengthy “Visitors Guide” for history, culture, and natural attractions, with many color maps and photographs, arranged by county. Added to that is a portion of the “Indianola Trail Visitors Guide: From Indianola to New Braunfels” provided by the Texas Historical Commission.

The cookbook must have over 500 recipes of old and modern origins, interspersed with old sayings, historical notes, vintage photographs, and helpful hints. Most recipes are signed, with notes on family origin and some admission of out-right theft. There are 60 cookie and 50 cake recipes, but also find seven cobblers. Aside from sweets, there is a wide diversity of dishes. Expect strong representation of the German and Mexican food, but you will also find Polish, Alsatian, French, Czech, Danish, and if potatoes indict anything, Irish. When you visit the region, find a settler, you will not go hungry.

Fighting Padre - Edward Bastien

The Fighting Padre of Zapata :

Father Edward Bastien and the Falcon Dam Project.

By Edward Bastien; edited by María F Rollin. El Paso: Texas Western Press, 2003. Southwestern Studies Series No. 110. ISBN 0-87404-285-2 Paper $18.00. 6 x 9, 265 pp., b&w photos, appendices, notes, biblio. http://www.utep.edu/twp/

Father Bastien was a good priest. When he arrived in Zapata on the Rio Grande, poor folks were being rather cavalierly, if properly according to the bureaucrats, displaced and poorly compensated by a giant engineering project to create the Falcon Dam Reservoir. He took pen in hand and began mailing or nailing letters and newspaper articles in protest and supplication. From President Eisenhower and Senator Johnson on down, he wrote. He invented a pen name “I. Poz” (that is, Irate People of Zapata) to use in his writings to the Laredo Times.

With wit and persistence, Father Bastien respected the community’s needs and brought some needed change to the affair. Father Bastien eventually grew ill and was transferred to another charge from where he covertly continued his efforts. He eventually created an additional manuscript, a portion of this volume, and left it in the care of the editor’s family. The letters and articles are remarkable to read. The book is more than just its own story. If you or others wish to learn how to write letters in support for a cause, it is an excellent laboratory and inspiration. Maybe the folks trying to save Caddo Lake could use the good Father’s model.

In that case the Eagle would follow the Dove. The reviewer would have liked to see some photographic reproductions of the letters in the Father’s own hand and typescript. Editor Maria Rollin earned degrees in Spain and Texas and has taught in both. He current teaches ESL in the Laredo Community College. She is congratulated for her insight and loyalty. The Flores Magon brothers would be proud.

George Garrett - Jeb Livingood

George Garrett:

Going to See the Elephant: Pieces of a Writing Life.

Edited by Jeb Livingood. Huntsville: Texas Review Press, 2002. 195 pp. Paper: $18.95. ISBN 1-881515-42-7 http://www.shsu.edu/~www_trp/

George Garrett, retired from the University of Virginia, earned status as a Practicing Prince of Southern Letters, crowned by awards for novels, stories, poems, and essays, and has influenced American Letters now for decades. While not a Texan, his second book The Sleeping Gypsy and Other Poems was published in 1958 by the University of Texas Press, before his 30th birthday. He continued his Texas associations. These essays on his life and other writers range from Caedmon to Fitzgerald, Welty, Dickey, Chappell, Capote and their ilk, and on to modern academic cowboy and Indian shoot-outs over the role of college writing programs. Readers will find compassion and a sharp tongue. Texans may first pause on his short memorial of William Goyen, “Brother to Anyone with Ears to Hear.”

Garrett warmly acknowledges Goyen’s influence and personal graciousness. Prince Garrett describes that Goyen had “an honest and honorable East Texas face.” Katherine Ann Porter once responded to R.H.W. Dillard’s query “who was the best young American writer for me to read, the one writer whose work was of the highest quality and would teach me the most. She didn't even hesitate before giving her answer. ‘Read George Garrett,’ she said ….” (Virginia Quarterly Review, Summer 1999). Garrett mentions to young writers that earlier writers, long dead ones even, live in the present. Did he mean like winged creatures reaching for the sky or fools sitting atop flagpoles?

Cormac McCarthy's West - James Bell

Cormac McCarthy’s West: The Border Annotations.

By James Bell, Introduction by Patrick Shaw. El Paso: Texas Western Press, 2002. xxii, 154 pages. Maps, illus. notes, bibliog.

If Larry McMurtry is the Gray Eminence of Texas Letters, Cormac McCarthy is the Red Eminence. As an established writer of Kentucky, he moved to El Paso, and his scenes shifted from wet cave lands to dry plains. The old saints Porter and Goyen might pause before the Gray and Red bookshelves, admiring McMurtry’s canon, movies, and lifestyle and maybe pausing pensively to reach for McCarthy’s trail of allusive density.

“Allusive density,” such is Patrick Shaw’s term to describe an element of the El Paso cardinal’s holy work. James Bell’s work is a spiffed up doctoral dissertation, compiling these allusions into simple systems with commentary to ease the reader into the text. It reminds this reader of the creative readership of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Ring trilogy – the maps, the directories, the countless accessories “needed” to understand or expand the great written image. If creative literature is judged by the amount and texture of its commentary, Bell shows the texture is palpable.

In a way it’s rather simple. For each of the trilogy titles (All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain), Bell indexes and annotates the chronological references and then does the same for the characters and then does the same for the place names. Following those 9 indexes, he provides two others, cultural allusions and historical allusions in the Trilogy. Flipping through the pages, the reviewer finds words that attract as labeled photos in a family scrapbook. With the garden hoed so well by Bell, others can now come and pick further fruits. But will it all lead to desolation on down The Road.

Child of Many Rivers - Lucy Fischer-West

Child of Many Rivers: Journeys to and from the Rio Grande.

By Lucy Fischer-West, Foreword by Denise Chavez . Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2005. xvi, 190 pages. 32 b/w photos, index. ISBN 0896725561. $21.95 cloth http://www.ttup.ttu.edu/

This Child won the 2005 Southwest Book Award and was a 2006 WILLA Literary Award Finalist. Lucy Fischer-West teaches English at El Paso’s Cathedral High School, and her students are lucky that she does. You are lucky if you read the volume.

It started with contributions on her father and mother to the Texas Folklore Society. In the “Epilogue” she summarizes that “Rivers for me are a continuum, linking not only each other but also past and present and most importantly all the people who belong to them and have touched my life.”

Her father was a German sailor, her mother was the “youngest and most beautiful girl in a family of twelve” in Camargo, Chihuahua. As young girl, Lucy patted tortilla balls beside the Conchos River, and as a mature woman she washed her hands in the Ganges and received a blessing from Sister Teresa. Her autobiographical essays lure the reader through the gifts of cultures.

Whether she’s sharing the aroma of the El Paso market, the horrible auto accident near the River Clyde, French rocks with Paulette, touring India and Nepal on the Rotary trip “to improve international understanding,” Lucy’s waters mingle in a beautiful human stream. Un millon de gracias, Lucy.

Twilight Innings - Robert A. Fink

Twilight Innings: A West Texan on Grace and Survival.

By Robert A. Fink

Foreword by R. S. Gwynn. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2006. xvi, 152 pages. ISBN 0896725847 $24.95 cloth http://www.ttup.ttu.edu/

Robert A. Fink is W. D. and Hollis R. Bond Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene, Texas. He is known as the author of several books of poetry, but Twlight Innings collects essays from eleven diverse sources. He takes readers from his childhood and rearing in East Texas, to college, to Vietnam, and finally to Abilene where the sparseness of topography, sound, and people permit healing of wartime assaults, assuaged by academic acceptance of his poetic and Christian sensibilities. The Abilene sparseness is enriched by the common wealth shared by many places. He records “Accepting the call to Abilene means you’re among people who love a lot more than poetry.”

Old friends and ghosts sway amid students, family, and school counselors. They populate home, school, Sunday school, the rangeland, and the Guadalupe Mountains. Prairie Dog baseball enlivens metaphor, stabilizes reality and rescues the perishing.

Fink would offer you a hard rubber sphere wrapped in strings, covered by soft leather and ask you to feel the stitches. Take it.