Articles

Humanities Texas will host its sixth annual Holiday Book Fair at the historic Byrne-Reed House on Saturday, December 6, 2014, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. A number of noteworthy authors, including Lawrence Wright, Sarah Bird, James Magnuson, Elizabeth Crook, S. C. Gwynne, Naomi Shihab Nye, Bill Wittliff, Carrie Fountain, M. M. McAllen, Jacqueline Jones, Richard Parker, Margaret Lewis Furse, John Taliaferro, Wayne Thorburn, Emilio Zamora, Bethany Hegedus, Chris Tomlinson, James E. Bruseth, Tracy Dahlby, Steve Wilson, and Debra L. Winegarten, will visit with the public and sign copies of their latest books, which Humanities Texas will offer for purchase at a discounted price. Available titles include works of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry with selections for both adult and youth audiences.

Proceeds will benefit Texas libraries.

Park for free in the St. Martin's Evangelical Lutheran Church lot on the northwest corner of 15th and Rio Grande Streets, and enjoy coffee and a bake sale of donated and homemade treats.

Friends of Humanities Texas receive an additional 25% percent discount on Holiday Book Fair purchases!

Read below for more information about the authors and their books!

Thirteen Days in September: Carter, Begin, and Sadat at Camp David

Lawrence Wright

A gripping day-by-day account of the 1978 Camp David conference, when President Jimmy Carter persuaded Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian president Anwar Sadat to sign the first peace treaty in the modern Middle East, one which endures to this day. With his hallmark insight into the forces at play in the Middle East and his acclaimed journalistic skill, Lawrence Wright takes us through each of the thirteen days of the Camp David conference, illuminating the issues that have made the problems of the region so intractable, as well as exploring the scriptural narratives that continue to frame the conflict. In addition to his in-depth accounts of the lives of the three leaders, Wright draws vivid portraits of other fiery personalities who were present at Camp David—including Moshe Dayan, Osama el-Baz, and Zbigniew Brzezinski—as they work furiously behind the scenes. Wright also explores the significant role played by Rosalynn Carter. In Thirteen Days in September, Wright gives us a resonant work of history and reportage that provides both a timely revisiting of this important diplomatic triumph and an inside look at how peace is made.

Lawrence Wright, Thirteen Days in September: Carter, Begin, and Sadat at Camp David (Knopf, 2014).

In the New World: Growing Up with America from the Sixties to the Eighties

Lawrence Wright

We first meet Larry Wright in 1960. He is thirteen and moving with his family to Dallas, the essential city of the New World just beginning to rise across the southern rim of the United States. As we follow him through the next two decades—the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the devastating assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr., the sexual revolution, the crisis of Watergate, and the emergence of Ronald Reagan—we relive the pivotal and shocking events of those crowded years. In this new edition of his 1989 memoir, Lawrence Wright gives back to us with stunning force the feelings of those turbulent times when the euphoria of Kennedy’s America would come to its shocking end. Filled with compassion and insight, In the New World is both the intimate tale of one man's coming-of-age, and a universal story of the American experience of two crucial decades.

Lawrence Wright, In the New World: Growing Up with America from the Sixties to the Eighties (Vintage, 2013).

Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief

Lawrence Wright

Scientology presents itself as a scientific approach to spiritual enlightenment, but its practices have long been shrouded in mystery. Lawrence Wright—armed with his investigative talents, years of archival research, and more than two hundred personal interviews with current and former Scientologists—uncovers the inner workings of the church. We meet founder L. Ron Hubbard, the highly imaginative but mentally troubled science-fiction writer, and his tough, driven successor, David Miscavige. We go inside their specialized cosmology and language. We learn about the church's legal attacks on the IRS, its vindictive treatment of critics, and its phenomenal wealth. We see the church court celebrities such as Tom Cruise while consigning its clergy to hard labor under billion-year contracts. Through it all, Wright asks what fundamentally comprises a religion, and if Scientology in fact merits this constitutionally-protected label. Brilliantly researched, compellingly written, Going Clear pulls back the curtain on one of the most secretive organizations at work today.

Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (Vintage, 2013).

Above the East China Sea: A Novel

Sarah Bird

In her most ambitious, moving, and provocative novel to date, Sarah Bird makes a stunning departure. Above the East China Sea tells the entwined stories of two teenaged girls, an American and an Okinawan, whose lives are connected across seventy years by the shared experience of profound loss, the enduring strength of an ancient culture, and the redeeming power of family love. Propelled by a riveting narrative and set at the very epicenter of the headline-grabbing clash now emerging between the great powers, Above the East China Sea is at once a remarkable chronicle of how war shapes the lives of conquerors as well as the conquered and a deeply moving account of family, friendship, and love that transcends time.

Sarah Bird, Above the East China Sea: A Novel (Knopf, 2014).

Famous Writers I Have Known: A Novel

James Magnuson

In this brilliant mix of literary satire and crime caper, Frankie Abandonato, a small-time con man on the run, finds refuge by posing as V. S. Mohle—a famously reclusive writer—and teaching in a prestigious writing program somewhere in Texas. The program has been funded by Rex Schoeninger, the world’s richest novelist, who is dying. What rankles Rex is that, while he has written fifty bestsellers and never gotten an ounce of literary respect, Mohle wrote one slender novel, disappeared into the woods, and became an icon. Determined to come to terms with his past, Rex has arranged to bring his rival to Texas, only to find himself facing off against an imposter. Famous Writers I Have Known is not just an unforgettable literary romp but also a surprisingly tender take on two men—one a scam artist frantic to be believed, the other an old lion desperate to be remembered.

James Magnuson, Famous Writers I Have Known: A Novel (W. W. Norton & Company, 2014).

Monday, Monday: A Novel

Elizabeth Crook

In this gripping, emotionally charged novel, a tragedy in Texas changes the course of three lives. With electrifying storytelling and the powerful sense of destiny found in Ann Patchett's Bel Canto, and with the epic sweep of Jess Walter's Beautiful Ruins, Elizabeth Crook's Monday, Monday explores the ways in which we sustain ourselves and one another when the unthinkable happens. At its core, it is the story of a woman determined to make peace with herself, with the people she loves, and with a history that will not let her go. A humane treatment of a national tragedy, it marks a generous and thrilling new direction for a gifted American writer.

Elizabeth Crook, Monday, Monday: A Novel (Sarah Crichton Books, 2014).

Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion, and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson

S. C. Gwynne

From the author of the prizewinning New York Times bestseller Empire of the Summer Moon comes a thrilling account of how Civil War general Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson became a great and tragic American hero. Rebel Yell is written with the swiftly vivid narrative that is Gwynne's hallmark and is rich with battle lore, biographical detail, and intense conflict between historical figures. Gwynne delves deep into Jackson's private life, including the loss of his young beloved first wife and his regimented personal habits. It traces Jackson's brilliant twenty-four-month career in the Civil War—the period that encompasses his rise from obscurity to fame and legend—and his stunning effect on the course of the war itself.

S. C. Gwynne, Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion, and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson (Scribner, 2014).

Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History

S. C. Gwynne

In the tradition of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, S. C. Gwynne's Empire of the Summer Moon is a stunningly vivid historical account of the forty-year battle between Comanche Indians and white settlers for control of the American West, centering on Quanah Parker, the greatest Comanche chief of them all. Empire of the Summer Moon spans two astonishing stories. The first traces the rise and fall of the Comanches, the most powerful Indian tribe in American history. The second entails one of the most remarkable narratives ever to come out of the Old West: the epic saga of the pioneer woman Cynthia Ann Parker and her mixed-blood son Quanah, who became the last and greatest chief of the Comanches. S. C. Gwynne's account of these events is meticulously researched, intellectually provocative, and, above all, thrillingly told.

S. C. Gwynne, Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History (Scribner, 2010).

The Turtle of Oman: A Novel

Naomi Shihab Nye

This accessible, exquisite novel shines with gentle humor and explores themes of moving, family, nature, and immigration. It tells the story of Aref Al-Amri, who must say good-bye to everything and everyone he loves in his hometown of Muscat, Oman, as his family prepares to move to Ann Arbor, Michigan. This is acclaimed poet and National Book Award Finalist Naomi Shihab Nye's first novel set in the Middle East since her acclaimed Habibi. Nye's warmth, attention to detail, and belief in the power of empathy and connection shine from every page.

Naomi Shihab Nye, The Turtle of Oman: A Novel (Greenwillow Books, 2014).

A Maze Me: Poems for Girls

Naomi Shihab Nye

A collection of seventy-two poems written especially for girls ages twelve and up by the much-honored and beloved poet Naomi Shihab Nye. First love, friendship, school, family, community, having a crush, loving your mother and hating your mother, sense of self, body image, hopes and dreams . . . these poems by Naomi Shihab Nye—written expressly for this collection—will speak to girls of all ages. An honest, insightful, inspirational, and amazing collection.

Naomi Shihab Nye, A Maze Me: Poems for Girls (Greenwillow Books, 2005).

The Devil's Backbone

Bill Wittliff

Bill Wittliff's imaginative new book follows a boy named Papa as he seeks his missing mother before his father, a vicious horse trader, catches up to her. Papa's relentless journey thrusts him into adventures across the Central Texas Hill Country, down to Mexico, and even into the mysterious and ghostly lands of those known as the "Shimmery People." In The Devil's Backbone, Wittliff takes readers on an exciting journey through a rough 1880s frontier full of colorful characters and unexpected turns.

Bill Wittliff, The Devil's Backbone (University of Texas Press, 2014).

Instant Winner

Carrie Fountain

The wry, supple poems in Carrie Fountain's second collection take the form of prayers and meditations chronicling the existential shifts brought on by parenthood, spiritual searching, and the profound, often beguiling experience of being a self, inside a body, with a soul. Fountain's voice is at once deep and loose, enacting the dawning of spiritual insight, but without leaving the daily world, matching the feeling of the "pure holiness in motherhood" with the "thuds the giant dumpsters make behind the strip mall when they're tossed back to the pavement by the trash truck." In these wise, accessible, deeply emotional poems, she captures a contemporary longing for spiritual meaning that’s wary of prepackaged wisdom—a longing answered most fully by attending to the hustle and bustle of everyday life.

Carrie Fountain, Instant Winner (Penguin Books, 2014).

Maximilian and Carlota: Europe's Last Empire in Mexico

M. M. McAllen

In this new telling of Mexico's Second Empire and Louis Napoléon's installation of Maximilian von Habsburg and his wife, Carlota of Belgium, as the emperor and empress of Mexico, Maximilian and Carlota brings the dramatic, interesting, and tragic time of this six-year siege to life. From 1861 to 1866, the French incorporated the armies of Austria and Belgium—including forces from Crimea to Egypt—to fight and subdue the regime of Mexico’s Benito Juárez during the time of the U.S. Civil War. In a bid to oust Juárez, Mexican conservatives appealed to European leaders to select a monarch to run their country. Maximilian and Carlota's reign, from 1864 to 1867, was marked from the start by extravagance and ambition and ended with the execution of Maximilian by firing squad, with Carlota on the brink of madness. Maximilian and Carlota offers a vivid portrait of the unusual marriage of Maximilian and Carlota and of international high society and politics at this critical nineteenth-century juncture. This largely unknown era in the history of the Americas comes to life through this colorful telling of the couple's tragic reign.

M. M. McAllen, Maximilian and Carlota: Europe's Last Empire in Mexico (Trinity University Press, 2014).

A Dreadful Deceit: The Myth of Race from the Colonial Era to Obama's America

Jacqueline Jones

In 1656, a Maryland planter tortured and killed an enslaved man named Antonio, an Angolan who refused to work in the fields. Three hundred years later, Simon P. Owens battled soul-deadening technologies as well as the fiction of "race" that divided him from his co-workers in a Detroit auto-assembly plant. Separated by time and space, Antonio and Owens nevertheless shared a distinct kind of political vulnerability; they lacked rights and opportunities in societies that accorded marked privileges to people labeled "white." In A Dreadful Deceit, award-winning historian Jacqueline Jones traces the lives of Antonio, Owens, and four other African Americans to illustrate the strange history of "race" in America. In truth, Jones argues, race does not exist, and the very factors that we think of as determining it—a person's heritage or skin color—are mere pretexts for the brutalization of powerless people by the powerful. 

Jacqueline Jones, A Dreadful Deceit: The Myth of Race from the Colonial Era to Obama's America (Basic Books, 2013).

Lone Star Nation: How Texas Will Transform America

Richard Parker

To most Americans, Texas has been that love-it-or-hate-it slice of the country that has sparked controversy, bred presidents, and fomented turmoil from the American Civil War to George W. Bush. But that Texas is changing—and it will change America itself. Richard Parker takes the reader on a tour across today's booming Texas, an evolving landscape that is densely urban, overwhelmingly Hispanic, exceedingly powerful in the global economy, and increasingly liberal. This Texas will have to ensure upward mobility, reinvigorate democratic rights, and confront climate change—just to continue its historic economic boom. This is not the Texas of George W. Bush or Rick Perry. Instead, this is a Texas that will remake the American experience in the twenty-first century—as California did in the twentieth—with surprising economic, political, and social consequences. Along the way, Parker analyzes the powerful, interviews the insightful, and tells the story of everyday people because, after all, one in ten Americans in this century will call Texas something else: Home.

Richard Parker, Lone Star Nation: How Texas Will Transform America (Pegasus, 2014).

The Hawkins Ranch in Texas: From Plantation Times to the Present

Margaret Lewis Furse

In The Hawkins Ranch in Texas: From Plantation Times to the Present, Margaret Lewis Furse, a great-granddaughter of James B. and Ariella Hawkins and an active partner in today's Hawkins Ranch, has mined public records, family archives, and her own childhood memories to compose this sweeping portrait of more than 160 years of plantation, ranch, and small-town life. The Hawkins Ranch in Texas: From Plantation Times to the Present offers a panoramic view of agrarian lifeways and how they must adapt to changing times.

Margaret Lewis Furse, The Hawkins Ranch in Texas: From Plantation Times to the Present (Texas A&M University Press, 2013).

All the Great Prizes: The Life of John Hay, from Lincoln to Roosevelt

John Taliaferro

John Hay was both witness to and author of many of the most significant chapters in American history—from the birth of the Republican Party, the Civil War, and the Spanish-American War, to the prelude to the First World War. Much of what we know about Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt comes to us through the observations Hay made while private secretary to one and Secretary of State to the other. With All the Great Prizes, the first authoritative biography of Hay in eighty years, Taliaferro has turned the lens around, rendering a rich and fascinating portrait of this brilliant American and his many worlds. Hay's friends are a who's who of the era: Mark Twain, Horace Greeley, Henry Adams, Henry James, and virtually every president, sovereign, author, artist, power broker, and robber baron of the Gilded Age. As an ambassador and statesman, he guided many of the country's major diplomatic initiatives at the turn of the twentieth century: the Open Door with China, the creation of the Panama Canal, the establishment of America as a world leader. With this superb work, Taliaferro brings us an epic tale.

John Taliaferro, All the Great Prizes: The Life of John Hay, from Lincoln to Roosevelt (Simon & Schuster, 2013).

Red State: An Insider's Story of How the GOP Came to Dominate Texas Politics

Wayne Thorburn

As both a political scientist and a Republican party insider, Wayne Thorburn is especially qualified to explain how a solidly one-party Democratic state has become a Republican stronghold. He analyzes a wealth of data to show how changes in the state's demographics—including an influx of new residents, the shift from rural to urban, and the growth of the Mexican American population—have moved Texas through three stages of party competition, from two-tiered politics, to two-party competition between Democrats and Republicans, and then to the return to one-party dominance, this time by Republicans. His findings reveal that the shift from Democratic to Republican governance has been driven not by any change in Texans' ideological perspective or public policy orientation—even when Texans were voting Democrat, conservatives outnumbered liberals or moderates—but by the Republican party's increasing identification with conservatism since 1960.

Wayne Thorburn, Red State: An Insider's Story of How the GOP Came to Dominate Texas Politics (University of Texas Press, 2014).

The World War I Diary of José de la Luz Sáenz

Emilio Zamora, trans.

A skilled and dedicated teacher in South Texas before and after the war, Sáenz's patriotism, his keen observation of the discrimination he and his friends faced both at home and in the field, and his unwavering dedication to the cause of equality have for years made this book a valuable resource for scholars, though only ten copies are known to exist and it has never before been available in English. Equally clear in these pages are the astute reflections and fierce pride that spurred Sáenz and others to pursue the postwar organization of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC). This English edition of one of only two known war diaries of a Mexican American in the Great War is translated with an introduction and annotation by noted Mexican American historian Emilio Zamora.

José de la Luz Sáenz, The World War I Diary of José de la Luz Sáenz, trans. Emilio Zamora (Texas A&M University Press, 2014).

Grandfather Gandhi

Bethany Hegedus

One thick, hot day, Arun Gandhi travels with his family to Grandfather Gandhi’s village. Silence fills the air—but peace feels far away for young Arun. When an older boy pushes him on the soccer field, his anger fills him in a way that surely a true Gandhi could never imagine. Can Arun ever live up to the Mahatma? Will he ever make his grandfather proud? In this remarkable personal story, Arun Gandhi, with Bethany Hegedus, weaves a stunning portrait of the extraordinary man who taught him to live his life as light. Evan Turk brings the text to breathtaking life with his unique three-dimensional collage paintings.

Arun Gandhi, Bethany Hegedus, and Evan Turl, illus., Grandfather Gandhi (Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2014).

Tomlinson Hill: The Remarkable Story of Two Families Who Share the Tomlinson Name—One White, One Black

Chris Tomlinson

Tomlinson Hill is the stunning story of two families—one white, one black—who trace their roots to a slave plantation that bears their name. A masterpiece of authentic American history, Tomlinson Hill traces the true and very revealing story of these two families. From the beginning in 1854—when the first Tomlinson, a white woman, arrived—to 2007, when the last Tomlinson left, the book unflinchingly explores the history of race and bigotry in Texas. Along the way it also manages to disclose a great many untruths that are latent in the unsettling and complex story of America.

Chris Tomlinson, Tomlinson Hill: The Remarkable Story of Two Families Who Share the Tomlinson Name—One White, One Black (Thomas Dunne Books, 2014).

La Belle, the Ship That Changed History

James E. Bruseth

After two decades of searching for La Salle's lost ship La Belle, Texas Historical Commission (THC) divers in 1995 located a shipwreck containing historic artifacts of European origin in the silty bottom of Matagorda Bay, off the coast of Texas. The first cannon lifted from the waters bore late seventeenth-century French insignias. The ill-fated La Belle had been found. Under the direction of then-THC Archeology Division Director James Bruseth, the THC conducted a full excavation of the water-logged La Belle. The conservation was subsequently completed at Texas A&M University’s Conservation Research Laboratory, resulting in preservation of more than one million artifacts from the wreck. James E. Bruseth, guest curator and catalog editor, is the former director of the archeology division at the Texas Historical Commission, which sponsored the excavation of La Belle. Bruseth directed the excavation and serves as the project’s principal investigator.

James E. Bruseth. La Belle, the Ship That Changed History (Texas A&M University Press, 2014).

Into the Field: A Foreign Correspondent's Notebook

Tracy Dahlby

Tracy Dahlby is an award-winning journalist who has reported internationally as a contributor to National Geographic magazine and served as a staff correspondent for Newsweek and the Washington Post. In this memoir of covering a far-flung swath of Asia, he takes readers behind the scenes to reveal "the stories behind the stories"—the legwork and (mis)adventures of a foreign correspondent on a mission to be the eyes and ears of people back home, helping them understand the forces and events that shape our world.

Tracy Dahlby, Into the Field: A Foreign Correspondent's Notebook (University of Texas Press, 2014).

The Making of Gone With the Wind

Steve Wilson

More than six hundred rarely-seen items from the David O. Selznick archive—including on-set photographs, storyboards, correspondence and fan mail, production records, audition footage, restored costumes, and Selznick's infamous memos—offer fans and film historians alike a must-have behind-the-camera view of the production of this classic movie on its seventy-fifth anniversary.

Steve Wilson, The Making of Gone With the Wind (University of Texas Press, 2014).

Oveta Culp Hobby: Colonel, Cabinet Member, Philanthropist

Debra L. Winegarten

Oveta Culp Hobby (1905–1995) had a lifetime of achievement. Hobby became Director of the Women’s Army Corps and the first Army woman to earn the rank of colonel. President Eisenhower chose her as Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, making her the second woman in history to be appointed to a president’s cabinet. When she wasn’t serving in the government, Hobby worked with her husband, former Texas governor William P. Hobby, to lead a media empire that included the Houston Post newspaper and radio and TV stations. She also supported the Houston community in many ways.

Oveta Culp Hobby is the first biography of this important woman. Written for middle school readers, it traces her life from her childhood in Killeen to her remarkable achievements in Washington, DC, and Houston. Debra Winegarten provides the background to help young adult readers understand the times in which Hobby lived and the challenges she faced as a woman in nontraditional jobs. Oveta Culp Hobby will inspire young adults to follow their own dreams and turn them into tangible reality.

Debra L. Winegarten, Oveta Culp Hobby: Colonel, Cabinet Member, Philanthropist (University of Texas Press, 2014).