Great Texas Chefs, by Judy Alter

In Texas, “chef” covers a wide range of cooking styles. Included here are chefs who are heavily influenced by classical training, but there are also chefs who take Southwestern cuisine to a state of high art, chefs who specialize in Tex-Mex and others who cook the traditional dishes of the interior of Mexico and who bring new innovative touches to Mexican cuisine. There are even winery owners who combine their passion for fine wine with a passion for fine food. And what picture of Texas cooking would be complete without chuck-wagon cooking? This small book is not a comprehensive study of Texas chefs. Because of size limitations, many of the state's best have been omitted with regret. The chefs on these pages were chosen to represent the styles of food available to the discriminating diner. Most but not all have cookbooks available. All but two have restaurants that beckon the discriminating diner.

JUDY ALTER loves to cook and once dreamed of being a chef until life took her in other directions. Her memoir/cookbook, Cooking My Way Through Life: Kids and Books in the Kitchen, is due out in the fall. She lives in Fort Worth and eats at good restaurants a lot!

 

True West: An Illustrated Guide to the Heyday of the Western, by Michael Barson

Return with us to yesteryear, when cowboys were cowboys and gunslingers lurked around every corner. Today that colorful period continues to resonate in the collective imagination of red-blooded Americans everywhere-and now we have True West, which illustrates, in hundreds of full-color illustrations, how America's mass media stamped that vision so indelibly on our collective unconscious over the past century, into today. Boasting hundreds of rare and colorful movie posters, pulp magazines, television memorabilia, advertisements, paperback books, record album jackets, toys, and clothing, True West covers such hugely popular television series as Gunsmoke, The Lone Ranger, and Bonanza, along with classic Western novels, including Shane, The Searchers, Welcome to Hard Times, and that epic of all epics, Lonesome Dove. True West bows to the icons who ruled the silver screen-Tom Mix, Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, John Wayne, and Clint Eastwood, to name a few, while offering up such indelible movie triumphs as Red River, The Searchers, Hud, The Wild Bunch, and Unforgiven. It also showcases the great Western comic books and comic strips-Colt, Red Ryder, Straight Arrow, and Jonah Hex-along with all those nifty toys and other ephemera that helped link kids to celluloid heroes like Hopalong Cassidy, Roy and Dale, and the ubiquitous Gene Autry. And what would the Wild West be without an accompanying soundtrack? True West reproduces the sublime album covers and sheet music that served up classic odes like “Streets of Laredo” and “Cool Water,” narrative ballads like “El Paso” (with Marty Robbins bedecked in his black gunfighter togs on the cover!), and “High Noon.”

MICHAEL BARSON has a Ph.D. in American Culture, and is the author of more than a dozen celebrations of American popular culture, including Better Dead Than Red!, Teenage Confidential, and Lost, Lonely & Vicious. He has contributed articles to Entertainment Weekly and American Film, and to such NPR shows as Morning Edition and Fresh Air. Barson grew up in Eisenhower-era Massachusetts, but despite that is well aware how good a Shiner Bock on ice can taste.

 

Dictionary of the American West, by Win Blevins

Did you ever need to spell “dogie” (as in, get-along-little), or need to know what a “sakey” is? This is the book that can tell you how to spell, pronounce, and define over 5,000 terms relative to the American West. Want to know what a “breachy” cow is? Turn to page 43 to learn that it's an adjective used to describe a cow that has a tendency to find her way through fences where she isn't supposed to be. Describes some teenagers we know… Spend hours perusing the dictionary at random, or read straight through to give you a flavor of the West from its beginnings to contemporary days. Laced with photographs and maps, the Dictionary of the American West will make you sound like an expert on all things Western, even if you don't know your dingus from a dinner plate. Compiled of words brought into English from Native Americans, emigrants, Mormons, Hispanics, migrant workers, loggers, and fur trappers, the dictionary opens up history and culture in an enchanting way. From “Aarigaa!” to “zopilote,” the Dictionary of the American West is a “valuable book, a treasure for any literate American's library.” (Tony Hillerman)

WIN BLEVINS in an award-winning author of thirteen books, including Give Your Heart to the Hawks, Stone Song, and RavenShadow. He lives in Utah's Canyonlands.

Dinosaur Highway: A History of Dinosaur Valley State Park, by Laurie E. Jasinski

Where the Paluxy River now winds through the North Texas Hill Country, the great lizards of prehistory once roamed, leaving their impressive footprints deep in the limy sludge of what would become the earth's Cretaceous layer. It wouldn't be until a summer day in1909, however, when young George Adams went splashing along the creekbed, that chance and shifting sediments would reveal these stony traces of an ancient past. Young Adams's first discovery of dinosaur tracks in the Paluxy River Valley, near the small community of Glen Rose, Texas, came more than one hundred million years after the reign of the dinosaurs. During this prehistoric era, herds of lumbering “sauropods” and tri-toed, carnivorous “theropods” made their way along what was then an ancient “dinosaur highway.” Today, their long-ago footsteps are immortalized in the limestone of the riverbed, arousing the curiosity of picnickers and paleontologists alike. Indeed, nearly a century after their first discovery, the “stony oddities” of Somervell County continue to draw Saturday-afternoon tourists, renowned scholars, and dinosaur enthusiasts from across the nation and around the globe. In her careful, and colorful, history of Dinosaur Valley State Park, Jasinski deftly interweaves millennia of geological time with local legend, old photographs, and quirky anecdotes of the people who have called the valley home. Beginning with the valley's “first visitors”-the dinosaurs-Jasinski traces the area's history through to the decades of the twentieth century, when new track sites continued to be discovered, and visitors and locals continued to leave their own material imprint upon the changing landscape. The book reaches its culmination in the account of the hard-won battle fought by Somervell residents and officials during the latter decades of the century to secure Dinosaur Valley's preservation as a state park.

LAURIE E. JASINSKI, a native of New Braunfels, Texas, is the author of Hill Country Backroads: Showing the Way in Comal County (TCU Press, 2001). She has written park histories for the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department and numerous features for popular Texas magazines. Jasinski also worked on The New Handbook of Texas and, recently, researched the Handbook Online edition and the Handbook of Texas Music for the Texas State Historical Association in Austin. She and husband Gary S. Hickinbotham live in New Braunfels.

Slaughter, by Elmer Kelton

In the 1870s, buffalo hunters moved onto the High Plains of Texas. The Plains Indians watched hunters slaughter the animals that gave them shelter and clothing, food and weapons. The battles at and near the ruins of a trading fort, Adobe Walls, became symbolic of the struggles between hunters and the Comanche. In this aptly titled novel, Texas novelist Elmer Kelton shows his uncanny ability to present both sides of a clash between cultures. With a firm grasp of Comanche life, Kelton presents The People as very human and very threatened. Equally clear is the picture of Anglos found on the high plains in those days-Jeff Layne, a Confederate veteran and now a fugitive; Nigel Smithwick, an English “second son” and gambler, Arletta, the lone woman among these men (one woman was at Adobe Walls).

ELMER KELTON was voted All-Time Greatest Western Author by Western Writers of America, Inc. He has received seven Spur Awards for fiction from WWA, including one for Slaughter, four Western Heritage (Wrangler) Awards from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame and Western Heritage Museum, and lifetime achievement awards from WWA, the Western American Literature Association, and the Texas Institute of Letters. A former agricultural journalist, he is the author of about fifty novels. He and his wife, Ann, live in San Angelo. .

Dancing Naked: Memorable Encounters with Unforgettable Texans, by Mary Rogers

Almost every journalist asks the subjects of profiles to tell the truth. Only Mary Rogers requires them to “dance naked.” To Rogers, an award-winning columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, that term signifies a pact between the writer, the subject and the reader: only when stories eliminate artifice and express honest beliefs and emotions can they merit attention and trust. It's a phrase and philosophy unique to Rogers, and as a result the stories in Dancing Naked: Memorable Encounters with Unforgettable Texans are unique, too. You've never read anything like them, and besides making you think, Rogers' lyrical writing style and memorable insights into the traumas and triumphs of the human spirit will make you feel. Published in the Star-Telegram from 1991 through 2007, Dancing Naked presents the compelling stories of a variety of Texans (a few famous, and all unforgettable) and adds a half-dozen essays from Rogers about her own colorful life. It's a collection that will touch and inspire every reader, which is what fine writing is supposed to accomplish.

MARY ROGERS grew up in West Texas and has spent the last two decades as a lifestyle columnist and feature writer for the Star-Telegram. She lives in Fort Worth with her husband and two dogs, Mad Jack and Tiny Truman the Fighting Bichon Brothers.

 

Texas Football Legends: Greats of the Game, by Carlton Stowers

Heisman Trophy winners, All-Americans, All-Pros, MVPs and record-setters have, throughout the glamorous history of football in Texas, been all but commonplace. For decades, one set of superstars routinely replaces another, constantly adding to the proud legacy of the state's favorite sport. In Texas Football Greats you'll meet the cream of a rich and talented crop, reliving those days when they climbed to stardom from high school stadiums in out-of-the-way places to the Saturday afternoon cheers as collegians, and finally in the celebrated ranks of professional football. As you read of their individual deeds, you'll hear the cherished echoes of championship games won and lost, high goals achieved and adversities overcome. Borrowing from a long-used cliché, in Texas, football has been elevated to a form of religion. That said, this collection of biographies of the greatest of the great serves as the game's Sunday Best. Award-winning author CARLTON STOWERS has spent a lengthy career in press boxes throughout the nation. In addition to writing on Texas high school and college football, he covered the NFL Dallas Cowboys for the Dallas Morning News. He's also written numerous books on sports.

Literary Dallas, edited by Frances Brannen Vick

Known as “The Emerald City,” Dallas has its own rich heritage peculiar to its founding on the prairies and the Trinity River, and editor Frances Brannen Vick has collected a cornucopia of all things Big D in Literary Dallas, the third in TCU Press' “literary cities” series. When Vick came here almost thirty years ago, she discovered a city of contrasts-Southern roots mixed with the entrepreneurial spirit, refined by all manner of the arts. Vick draws on her long publishing career to assemble the work of Dallas' finest writers who look at the city's history, its arts, commerce and personalities. There is C. C. Slaughter who helped make Dallas a banking center; John Rosenfield, who made his city a haven for performing arts; Evelyn Oppenheimer, who made her career reviewing books; not to mention Frank X. Tolbert, both Chili King and writer. Natalie Ornish writes of the merchants who made Dallas a city where haute couture is comme il faut, but, where, as Prudence Macintosh avers, it is also possible to live a perfectly happy life and never wear a ball gown. The purveyors of culture supported a new university-Southern Methodist-and the library, museums, opera, and theater at the same time that Spencer Williams was making movies for African-American audiences in South Dallas and Deep Ellum was singing the blues, exploring the beginnings of jazz and Big Bands. The city even had its share of gunslingers, two of them legendary women-Belle Starr and Bonnie Parker-as well as other unsavory characters, like Toy Woolley who shot his wife with the gun later used in the ambush of Bonnie and Clyde. Historians and journalists have interpreted the city for generations, and you will find A. C. Greene, Bob Compton, Stanley Walker, Bryan Woolley, Kent Biffle, Paul Crume and Jay Milner, among others. The pivotal event in Dallas was the Kennedy assassination, and Vick researched the journalists, writers, poets and observers who tackled this subject, including Hugh Aynesworth, Jim Lehrer, Stephen Michaud, Darwin Payne, Bud Shrake, Wes Wise, Bryan Woolley, and Lawrence Wright, to name a few. Fiction set in Dallas has been wide and deep. Authors, like Tracy Daughtry, Ed Garcia, Caroline Rose Hunt, Clay Reynolds, C.W. Smith, Pat Ellis Taylor, Marsh Terry, and Jane Roberts Wood, explore various backdrops, and from a Catholic church to an English manor to local bars-and all the places in between-Dallas is covered.

FRANCES B. VICK holds B.A. and M.A. degrees in English from the University of Texas at Austin and Stephen F. Austin State University, respectively, and a Doctor of Humane Letters (honoris causa) from the University of North Texas. She began publishing with E-Heart Press, then became director of the University of North Texas Press. She contributed to Texas Women on the Cattle Trails, Texas Women Writers and Notes from Texas: On Writing in the Lone Star State. She co-authored Petra's Legacy: The South Texas Ranching Empire of Petra Vela and Mifflin Kenedy with Jane Monday. She has been president of the TIL, and the TSHA.

 

Fort Worth: A Personal View, by Phil Vinson

Phil Vinson grew up in Fort Worth, fascinated by the city's visual icons-Mrs. Baird's Bakery on Summit Avenue, historic Thistle Hill, the tower at the Will Rogers Complex, the Tarrant County Courthouse, the Texas Electric smokestacks, the art-deco design of the Texas & Pacific depot, the Paddock Viaduct. He started making photographs while still in his teens but says it was as an adult that he rediscovered the visual richness of his hometown. Once he started photographing, he couldn't stop. For the past four decades, through careers as a journalist, photographer, and teacher, he has spent the weekends driving around taking pictures. Vinson has particular respect for subjects that have been around for enough years to acquire a certain dignity and nobility. Aware that the days of many of these old structures may be numbered, he has tried to document such buildings as the Seventh Street Theater before they disappeared to the wrecking ball. Fort Worth is well documented in photographs, but in many photographs Vinson has moved beyond documentation to a more intimate, personal view of the city, looking for dramatic light and compelling visual design, focusing on architectural details and graphic possibilities not obvious at a casual glance. He used to tell students that you can't get too close to a subject. While most of the photographs in this collection focus on Fort Worth, Vinson, who lived in Childress as a small child, is also drawn to rural or small-town subjects and includes here pictures taken on weekend drives to small communities in North and West Texas.

PHIL VINSON was a reporter/photographer for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram for several years before opening his own photography business. In the 1990s he joined the faculty at the University of Texas at Arlington. Now retired and living on Fort Worth's East Side, he and his wife still spend weekends driving around the city and surrounding countryside so he can continue making photographs.