Texas Pages

Here's what you'll find Sunday on the books pages of GuideLive (and on dallasnews.com):

Next week is the 50th anniversary of Jack Kerouac's "On the Road." Essayist Bill Marvel will take a look at what the book meant to the generation that discovered it, and discuss “On the Road: The Original Scroll” and "Why Kerouac Matters: The Lessons of On the Road," by John Leland.

Off the road and onto the field: “Twelve Mighty Orphans,” by Jim Dent, looks at "The Inspiring True Story of the Mighty Mites Who Ruled Texas Football."

For the band geeks, as well as the serious musicians and anybody else who loves music, there's the delightful “Music Lover’s Poetry Anthology.”

“Legacy of Ashes,” by Tim Weiner, offers a scathing history of the CIA.

There's more dark history in "The Immortalists: Charles Lindbergh, Dr. Alexis Carrel, and Their Daring Quest to Live Forever," by David M. Friedman.

Columnist Judy Alter compiles thought-provoking Top 10 lists of Texas literature.

And finally, enjoy "The Bright Side of Disaster," a fiction debut by Houston's Katherine Center. Look for an excerpt with that one on the blog Sunday.

Friends of mine, Lennie and Harold Stan, are former residents of the socialist commune in New New York known as "The Coops." It has been a long time since they flew the Coops but they will tell you without apology that they are still "Coopniks."

The brothers Stan inherited their hardy natures from their Russian father. In Odessa, on the Black Sea, he killed a man in self-defense and was sentenced to life in prison. He escaped from the gulag and walked part-way across Siberia to Hong Kong, where he caught a steamer to Australia. Later, he made his way to New York, met a Jewish girl and they got married. During the worst part of the Depression they survived by moving into the United Workers Cooperative Colony, or the “Coops.”

The six buildings of the Coops covered two city blocks and were located across the street from Bronx Park East. They were five storeys high and contained 750 apartments and 2,000 rooms. The buildings were designed so that each apartment had at least one window overlooking immaculate gardens of flowers, trees, and hedge wheedled out of New York’s Botanical Gardens by a resident gardener who worked there. Each apartment also had one window that faced the sun. Workers might have to work all day in windowless environments but at least they could have some sunshine at home.

Though the tenants were mostly Jewish or eastern European immigrants, all races and nationalities were welcome so long as they were workers or small-business owners. Many were in the needle trades but just about all the trades were represented. During the Depression, unemployed tenants who could not pay their rent were allowed to borrow from the emergency fund. Each working tenant contributed a minimum of a dollar a year, though some contributed as much as eight hundred dollars. These loans were repaid with no interest. Some shared their apartments with boarders for extra money and others opened them up free to strikers who had nowhere else to go.

What are your ten favorite books on Texas? Something by Larry McMurtry? Cormac McCarthy? Or does your taste run to Elmer Kelton?See the book pages today for a column that tells you what two experts--and one johnny-come-lately--chose. Then post your favorites here. I'll work the results into a column in the near future.

Headed out for the long weekend? Technology columnist Jim Rossman takes a look at the $299 Sony Reader and deems it "a perfect solution for travelers who like to read."

Hope you're all off to a happy weekend of reading and relaxing. Before you go, I'm looking for your thoughts on books and authors that celebrate those of us who work for a living.

I imagine Studs Terkel would come to mind. ("A Studs Terkel Reader" was released earlier this summer; watch for his memoir, "Touch and Go," this fall.)

Upton Sinclair exposed working conditions that helped create many a vegetarian, and possibly a union or two.

More recently, "Then We Came to the End" by Joshua Ferris was well-received as a scathing look at life in a modern office.

What else?

Mark your calendars--on September 19, poet Ron Moore and musicians Jose Feghali and Curt Thompson will present an evening of of words and music at The McKinney Avenue Contemporary (The MAC), 3120 McKinney Ave., in Uptown Dallas. Moore is the author of the new collection, Alterity. Also a musician, he is a composer (new CD "Last Light") and owner of Baskerville Publishers, specializing in biographies of opera stars. Feghali is a Van Cliburn winner who has performed around the world. And Thompson is the founder of the Mimir Chamber Music Festival at TCU, rated one of the top ten musical events of the year by the Dallas Morning News and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. For more information, call 817-923-1064 or go to www.alterityonline.com. WRR arts commentator Sharon Benge will host the free event. Sounds like quite an evening.

From The Associated Press:

BOSTON — A family that claimed they were defamed in the best-selling book “Running with Scissors” has settled a lawsuit against the writer and his publisher.
Author Augusten Burroughs and publisher St. Martin’s Press agreed to call the work a “book” instead of “memoirs,” in the author’s note — though it still will be described as a memoir on the cover and elsewhere — and to change the acknowledgments page in future editions to say that the Turcotte family’s memories of events he describes “are different than my own.” It will also express regret for “any unintentional harm” to them.

Over on the The Screening Room, our movies blog, Chris Vognar wants to know: What book you love became a movie you hate? Or what book you didn't care for took on bold new life in the movies?

The Writers Garret has released its full schedule for The Writers Studio:

In addition to the previously announced appearances of Bobbie Ann Mason (Sept. 11), Ann Patchett (Oct. 17) and Mary Gordon (Nov. 19), the studio says it will feature:

Louis Begley, Feb. 19
Kimberla Lawson Roby, March 5
Charles Baxter, April 8
Louise Erdrich, May 12

The Garret's author bios are below.

"Those fingers in my hair
That sly come-hither stare
That strips my conscience bare, it's ..."

Sorry, that's an entirely inappropriate way to celebrate a serious scholarly award. But then again, I'll bet Richard M. Golden of the University of North Texas has heard a lot of cheap jokes since he started editing "Encyclopedia of Witchcraft: The Western Tradition."

He gets the last laugh, though. UNT announced that he has received the Roland H. Bainton Prize from the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference, "a scholarly society open to those who are interested in studying the early modern era of approximately 1450 to 1660." The prize honors the best reference book on the early modern period, approximately 1450 to 1660.

UNT says the encyclopedia includes 757 entries and was written by 172 scholars from 28 nations.

In addition to "Encyclopedia of Witchcraft: The Western Tradition," Mr. Golden is the author or editor of five other books. He is on the editorial board of the journal "Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft."

The prize is named for the late Roland H. Bainton, a professor of church history at the seminary of Yale University for many years.

Mark your calendars for a couple of worthwhile -- and free -- events from The Writers Garret.

At 7:30 p.m. Wednesday (Sept. 5,) the group will have it's open house. Its a great chance to meet other writers and to figure out whether their courses are worth your while.

The following Sunday (Sept. 9) at 3 p.m., George Getschow, Writer-In- Residence at the Mayborn Institute, will review the works of Bobbie Ann Mason Recommended reading is Shiloh, In Country, Lila + Spence some of her other stories.

(Ms. Mason, you'll recall, will be speaking at The Writers Studio Sept. 11.)

Events take place at Upstairs in Paperbacks Plus, 6115 La Vista Drive.

"Poetry in the Vinyard" is scheduled for 7 tonight at Mia Vino, 116 N. Main St. Mansfield.

Hosts Zandra Mink Fuller and Robert A. Bussey invite everyone "to share their work, or just listen, in a peaceful and charming atmosphere."

(Thanks to Susan Vogel Taylor for the tip.)

Tina Brown’s version of the life of the Princess of Wales -- The Diana Chronicles (Random House Audio, abridged, 5 1/2 hours, $29.25) -- seems less gossip than eminently plausible. By marrying Prince Charles, Diana made her long-held fairy tale come true. It took her husband’s unswerving infidelity and the demands of her ceremonial life to wake her from her romantic dream.
Brown, the former editor-in-chief of the English gossip magazine Tatler, plumbs the princess’ psyche and finds a young woman of inadequate education, great emotional complexity and an unnerving brew of sweetness and meanness.
The author doesn’t just repeat the events of Diana's life and death (and in the abridgement, Brown spares us the bloody details of the fatal crash). Instead, she sheds light on what drove the young woman the world envied while Diana herself floundered in unhappiness.
A decade after her death, Diana still fascinates. Brown helps us understand why.

On Broadway, it's the producer grabbing someone out of the chorus line on opening night and saying, "The lead is sick! You'll have to take her place! You're gonna be a star!"

On Wall Street, it's the CEO saying to the hard-working mailroom clerk, "Son, I like your style. It's time we made you a vice president."

And the publishing world's version of that how-I-got-discovered cliche might be the newsroom assistant who suggests a story about her family, and ends up with a book and potential movie deal.

Except that last one really happened.

It's important to run stories such as the one in my previous post. It gives those of us who value literary freedom the chance to roll our eyes and give thanks that we aren't like Those People, the ones in the Unthinking Classes.

But secretly, you know we're jealous. Because it is human nature to want to tell the rest of the world how to behave.

So having previously bashed our English teachers, let's take on the rest of the literary world and confess -- what book or books would you like to see smitten from the earth, banned from the eyes of your fellow Man and Woman?

I'll start off by nominating an entire genre: Call it the "Spiritual Guide to Getting Rich Quick" category. People just can't seem to resist schemes that cover up greed with a veneer of holiness. I suspect that the only people getting rich this way are the publishers.

Oh, and any diet book by a celebrity who has more plastic parts than my car.

And that hideous "Rugrats" book that my daughter got as a gift and made me read nightly for a month until I accidentally "lost" it.

Stop me before things get out of hand ...

Penguins are hot. Or maybe they just make people hot.

“And Tango Makes Three,” about two male penguins who raised a baby penguin, leads the American Library Association’s annual list of works attracting the most complaints.

Overall, though, the association reports 546 complaints for 2006. That's up from 405 the year before, but down quite a bit from last decade.

Here are all the details:

The Tycher Library, 7900 Northaven Road, is sponsoring “One Community, One Book: Reading Together."

That book is: Markus Zusak "The Book Thief."

A discussion is planned for 7 p.m. Nov. 29 7:00 PM at the Jewish Community Center.

After running our review of Laura Moriarity's "The Rest of Her Life," I came across a couple of articles about her in her hometown paper.

Here she is discussing "The Rest of Her Life."

And here she is talking about her previous work, "The Center of Everything."

Texas-rooted Cormac McCarthy has been awarded one of Britain's highest honors, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

Past winners include D.H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster, Evelyn Waugh, Iris Murdoch, Graham Greene, Beryl Bainbridge and Zadie Smith.

To my recollection, none was a Texan, but I hear they were OK writers despite this handicap.

Details below.

Our Potterhead friends at Mugglenet.com say to "put this in the 'very, very big rumor' category for now."

The Sunday Mirror's story quotes an unnamed London "theatre insider" as saying:

"The difficulty is condensing the seven books into a manageable show. They are exploring various ideas. One possibility is to tell the whole story. Another is to just take a single plot. The plan is for spectacular flying scenes, live Quidditch and big showdowns with Voldemort."

Surprisingly, that headline is not about your humble books editor.

It's about James Wood, the New Republic literary critic who is joining The New Yorker as a staff writer. (The link will lead you to an interesting Boston Globe story about him.)

Austin writer Beverly Lowry took an interesting approach in her biography of Harriet Tubman: She imagined parts of it.

In this interview, she explains:

"I would like people to take away a sense of Harriet Tubman as a remarkable woman and someone who acted on her best instincts, beyond courage. There's no way I could understand that kind of courage except to imagine it."

A noble goal. And the book has won some critical praise. She declares that her well-researched work is not scholarly. But is "Harriet Tubman: Imagining a Life" nonfiction? Without having read the book myself, I respect what she's attempting but am still vaguely ill at ease with the concept.

The KERA program has several notable authors on tap:

Monday noon: Tim Weiner, "Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA." (Watch for our review coming soon.)

1 p.m. Julia Alvarez, "Once Upon a Quinceañera: Coming of Age in the USA." (Links to our interview and review, respectively.)

Tuesday 1 p.m.: Tina Brown, "The Diana Chronicles."

Thursday noon: Vince Poscente, "The Age of Speed: Learning to Thrive in a More-Faster-Now World."

1 p.m. Dr. Richard Corfield, "Lives of the Planets: A Natural History of the Universe."

I was in Wichita Falls with my spouse this weekend for the Hotter Than Hell bicycle rally. (He rides; I read.)

Since we were only about 20 miles from Booked Up, Larry McMurtry's bookstore, I had to visit, even if it was near closing time on Saturday. (They're closed on Sunday.)

Booked Up is more than a bookstore. It is a complex. There are four buildings that cover different subject areas. I wanted to visit Building 2 (fiction), but it was 4:45 p.m., and the only building still open was Building 1.

I browsed Psychology and Sociology shelves. At two minutes until closing, I found the Texas Writers shelves. There was a $50 Bryan Woolley novel, which was beyond my budget. I settled for two Shelby Hearon hardbacks, Hug Dancing ($20) and Painted Dresses ($15).

On the eve of second anniversary of the Hurricane Katrina disaster on Wednesday comes Chris Rose's shattering, eloquent new book, 1 Dead in Attic: After Katrina (Simon & Schuster, $15). Mr. Rose, a writer for The Times-Picayune in New Orleans, has collected his columns about "The Thing," as he calls it, into one of the best books on Katrina and its victims you're likely to see this year, or any year, for that matter.

Mr. Rose left the city the night before the hurricane and returned a week later, so he lived through the horror; the title refers to a scrawled message on a home on St. Roch Avenue in the 8th Ward. He wondered how long that message was true -- when, if ever, did someone come retrieve that body?

For those of us outside the city, the book's gift is that it goes way beyond what the regional/national media were able to report. We all saw pictures of that sign on someone's business right after the storm: "Don't try: I am sleeping inside with a big dog, an ugly woman, two shotguns and a claw hammer." Mr. Rose gives us the addendum, posted a week later: "Still here. Woman left. Cooking a pot of dog gumbo."

If you're up for truly getting a feel for what it's like to live in a town "with a permanent brown bathtub ring around it," a place where six months after the storm they have the humor to proclaim, "If we don't have Mardi Gras, the terrorists win," then look no further. But keep some tissues handy as you're reading ... and be prepared to get Very, Very Angry, all over again, at what did -- and didn't -- happen in the days following The Thing.

Here's an excerpt from "Loving Frank," by Nancy Horan. Excerpted by permission of Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved.

You can learn more about the book at its Web site.

1907

CHAPTER 1

Mamah Cheney sidled up to the Studebaker and put her hand sideways on the crank. She had started the thing a hundred times before, but she still heard Edwin’s words whenever she grabbed on to the handle. Leave your thumb out. If you don’t, the crank can fly back and take your thumb right off. She churned with a fury now, but no sputter came from beneath the car’s hood. Crunching across old snow to the driver’s side, she checked the throttle and ignition, then returned to the handle and cranked again. Still nothing. A few teasing snowflakes floated under her hat rim and onto her face. She studied the sky, then set out from her house on foot toward the library.

It was a bitterly cold end-of-March day, and Chicago Avenue was a river of frozen slush. Mamah navigated her way through steaming horse droppings, the hem of her black coat lifted high. Three blocks west, at Oak Park Avenue, she leaped onto the wooden sidewalk and hurried south as the wet snow grew dense.

By the time she reached the library, her toes were frozen stumps, and her coat was nearly white. She raced up the steps, then stopped at the door of the lecture hall to catch her breath. Inside, a crowd of women listened intently as the president of the Nineteenth Century Woman’s Club read her introduction.

"Is there a woman among us who is not confronted—almost daily—by some choice regarding how to ornament her home?" The president looked over her spectacles at the audience. "Or, dare I say, herself?" Still panting, Mamah slipped into a seat in the last row and flung off her coat. All around her, the faint smell of camphor fumes wafted from wet furs slung across chair backs. "Our guest speaker today needs no introduction . . ."

For the literate Cowboys fan, here's a review of “War Without Death: A Year of Extreme Competition in Pro Football's NFC East.”

Here's what's coming up Sunday in GuideLive.

“Away” by Amy Bloom. Reviewer John Freeman calls this "the first must-read novel of the fall."

For Frank Ll