Books

September 30, 1993

Street Stories

How the memoir of an unknown and homeless writer brought him fame and a place to live.

By Anne Dingus

July 31, 1993

Mean Streets

Larry McMurtry rallies Lonesome Dove’s geriatric survivors for a last perilous, meandering adventure in Streets of Laredo.

By Robert Draper

April 30, 1993

Court Reporter

Renowned legal scholar and law professor Charles Alan Wright is deadly serious—about murder mysteries.

By Anne Dingus

February 1, 1993

Return of the Native Son

For years he renounced his Texas ties. Now Larry McMurty is once again calling Archer City home.

December 1, 1992

Keyboard Kops

Hacker Crackdown tells how the feds busted employees of a Texas games company for a crime they didn’t commit.

By Gary Cartwright

November 1, 1992

This fall, photographer Jim Arndt and Western props supplier Tyler Beard visited the annual event in Burnet to chew the fat with many of the craftsmen featured in The Cowboy Boot Book (Peregrine Smith Books), their pictorial guide to fancy footgear. Arndt and Beard have dressed Western

Politics & Policy|

November 1, 1992

The Price of Being Molly

Being the nation’s most famous interpreter of Texas politics sounds like fun. But for Molly Ivins, success has been no laughing matter.

By Mimi Swartz

June 30, 1992

Elvisualizations

Elvis fans will have their very own sightings in a new book, In Search of Elvis, just published by the Summit Group in Fort Worth ($12.95). The cartoon book is a knockoff of the prodigiously successful Where’s Waldo? children’s series, but Summit’s publicity coordinator Bryan Drake suspects that more parents

June 30, 1992

The Invisible Man

El Paso author Cormac McCarthy has always shunned fame, but his latest novel may finally force him into the spotlight.

By Robert Draper

May 31, 1992

Picture Perfect

As the sole studio photographer in Granger from 1924 to 1955, John Trlica recorded on film most of the important occasions—public and private—in the Central Texas farming community. Because Trlica kept meticulous records and saved every negative, his shop became the repository for an intensely documented history of a small

April 1, 1992

Having a Cow

Beyond Beef blames cattle for the decline of civilization—not to mention famine, pestilence, destruction, and death.

By Elmer Kelton

February 1, 1992

The Real Education of Little Tree

An Alabama Klansman posing as a folksy Texas novelist almost pulled off the literary hoax of the century.

By Dana Rubin

December 1, 1991

John the Baptist, Spain, 1954

Photograph by George Krause

September 30, 1991

Let’er Rip!

Brown’s formula for success guarantees a happy ending.

By Helen Thompson

September 30, 1991

Sincerely, Clint

Oilman, sports-man, high liver, Clint Murchison also knew how to write a good letter.

By Gary Cartwright

April 30, 1991

Aural Fixation

My eyes are on the road ahead, but my ears are in a book.

By Gregory Curtis

March 1, 1991

A Lovers’ Knot

The Raven’s Bride sheds new light on the scandal that set Tennessee governor Sam Houston on the road to Texas.

December 1, 1990

Back in the Saddle

Larry McMurtry returns to the mythic West and spins a thoughtful and touching tale.

September 30, 1990

That Mojo Season

An outsider exposes the hidden risks in Odessa’s bigger-than-life brand of football.

August 31, 1990

Remember the Alamo?

A new assault on Texas’ most cherished myth proves that the Battle of the Alamo is far from over.

April 30, 1990

Shock Treatment

Three new books deliver sordid stories of drugged-up cops, kinky murderers, and a real-life drug kingpin.

By Chester Rosson

April 1, 1990

The Man Who Never Stops

Robert A. Caro has spent fifteen years writing his monumental biography of Lyndon Johnson. He is halfway through.

By Stephen Harrigan

January 1, 1990

A Child’s Garden of Texas

The young—and even the not-so-young-can travel back through the state’s glorious past simply by opening up any one of these fourteen children’s classics.

By Anne Dingus

December 1, 1989

Continental Drift

Five beautifully produced books explore the Americas, from anonymous folk art to the great muralists, from revolutionary heroes to a Texas ranching patriarch.

September 30, 1989

Whistling in the Dark

Larry McMurtry explores the far side of forty in his new novel.

August 31, 1989

The Way of the Buffalo

Dallas novelist C. W. Smith takes a long, hard look at a subject with a painful history.

June 30, 1989

Territorial Imperative

A fresh look at the U.S. war with Mexico shows that the effects of this forgotten conflict are still being felt today.

By T. Fehrenbach

May 31, 1989

Moving On

Dave Hickey’s fine short stories are enhanced by the scarcity; Texas expatriate William Humphrey takes on the Cherokees’ Trail of Tears.

March 1, 1989

Days in the Country, Nights on the Town

New fiction takes the reader on forays into Louisiana swamps, excursions into smoke-filled Austin honky-tonks, and down life’s highway with a lady trucker

November 1, 1988

Hasty Copy

Dan Jenkins’ latest takes a tough-cookie journalist out of a thirties movie and puts her into a chase through Depression-era Fort Worth; Sarah Glasscock populates her fictional Alpine with a cast of real characters.

September 30, 1988

The Old West, the New South

In Anything for Billy, Larry McMurtry trounces the Western myth; Frederick Barthelme, in Two Against One, casts a cold eye on a self-desdtructing marriage.

July 31, 1988

Long Live the Kink

Kinky Friedman dropped out for a while, but it sure beat dropping dead. Now the warped warbler is back with a play, a movie deal, and murder mystery number three.

By David Gaines

May 31, 1988

Character Flaw

A tour of the Texas psyche, with guides like Sam Houston, Katherine Anne Porter, and John Henry Faulk; a novel of adolescence addresses carnal knowledge and fundamentalist religion.

Politics & Policy|

May 1, 1988

Learning to Love the Bomb

Can a Texas publisher of technical books make a difference in the nuclear powers’ arms race? You bet.

By Michael Ennis

Politics & Policy|

March 1, 1988

Should This Man Be President?

For all his integrity and noble intentions, George Bush has yet to prove he’s got the agenda of a true statesman.

By Nicholas Lemann

March 1, 1988

The Soft Sell

Once, the term “paperback original” was reserved for second-rate work. Now, thanks to an innovative editor, two Texas novelists are proud to see their books in softcover.

December 1, 1987

Growing Up With George and Martha

By turning two tiny dots into two huge hippos, James Marshall made an indelible mark on children’s literature, and little people laughed happily ever after.

By Stephen Harrigan

December 1, 1987

Poison Pen

Dallas’ drive-in film critic Joe Bob Briggs made us laugh at bad movies. When we became the butt of the joke, it wasn’t funny anymore.

By Drew Jubera

September 30, 1987

Novel Approach

Three novelists discover that a Texas connection need not be a tie that binds.

By Thomas "Hollywood" Henderson

Sports|

September 1, 1987

Unsportsmanlike Conduct

When he played for the Dallas Cowboys, Hollywood Henderson had everything. Here he tells how he lost it.

June 30, 1987

Oil Gluttons

Getty Oil dropped into the market like raw steak into a bay full of sharks: Oil and Honor clarifies the waters. Beverly Lowry keeps the pages turning in her deft and racy roman à clef. The Perfect Sonya.

April 1, 1987

The Next Picture Show

In Larry McMurtry’s Texasville, the teenagers from The Last Picture Show await their thirtieth high school reunion amid the hard times in Thalia and, as always, the war between the sexes.

March 1, 1987

Slim Pickens

Boone, T. Boone Pickens’ autobiography, is most interesting when it names names and tells tales, but such moments surface only occasionally and sink quickly.

By Paul Burka

February 1, 1987

The Apple Version

Walt Disney, Howard Johnson, and Margery Post Merriweather have one thing in common: they’re all trapped inside Max Apple’s new novel.

January 1, 1987

Science Marches On

UT historian William Goetzmann traces America’s belief in endless possibilities to the boundless curiosity of its earliest explorers.

By Paul Andrew Hutton

November 1, 1986

Forty-two Per Cent Potent

In the novel Paradise, Donald Barthelme offers a cereal box of current events and social observations; Laura Furman challenges the dogged ideal of family in Tuxedo Park; Karleen Koen’s Through a Glass is a crash-bang publishing event.