Grace & Gumption: The Women of El Paso, edited by Marcia Hatfield Daudistel    
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In Grace & Gumption: The Women of El Paso, fourteen contributors trace the history of El Paso from the distaff side. The women who settled El Paso faced an unusual reality. In 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo changed the border, and people who were previously citizens of Mexico—living in their native country, speaking their native language—were suddenly citizens of the United States, forced to speak a foreign language.
Editor Marcia Hatfield Daudistel gathers together authoritative voices who examine the bi-cultural identity of this city through the various roles the women assumed: artist and muse, philanthropist, healer, writer; historian, nun, suffragette, and businesswoman. The result is a new look at this city nestled between rivers, mountains, a military base, and Mexico.
The women in this volume are just a few who left a legacy in El Paso. Their stories are kept alive through the memories of their families, the oral history of the Comadres, and in the history books. Their accomplishments were hard-won and required courage, persistence, inspiration, and especially grace and gumption.
Contributors include Adair Margo, Mimi R. Gladstein, Yolanda Leyva, Nancy Miller Hamilton, Irasema Coronado, Lois Marchino, Deane Mansfield-Kelley, Meredith Abarca, Susan Goodman Novick, Lucy Fischer-West, Brenda Risch, Kirstin J. Perez, Evelyn Posey, and Daudistel.

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MARCIA HATFIELD DAUDISTEL is the editor, most recently of Literary El Paso, published by TCU Press in 2009. As the former associate director of Texas Western Press, she helped publish over seventy books and established the bilingual imprint Frontera Books. Daudistel is the recently appointed West Texas/Trans Pecos editor of Texas Books in Review. She is on the advisory committee of the Made in Texas: Cultivating Teachers to Engage Mexican American Literature in Middle and High School Classrooms project. She was a presenter at the 2009 Texas Book Festival and was also a member of the first Texas Book Festival on the Road committee. Daudistel is a member of the Friends of the University of Texas at El Paso Library Board and a 2009 Hertzog Award committee judge. She was chosen as a presenter at the March 2010 convention of the Texas State Historical Association. Daudistel has lived in El Paso for twenty-seven years.

Home Truths , by Gerald Duff

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Novelist Gerald Duff grew up both in Polk County, in Deep East Texas, and in Nederland, near the Gulf Coast, two drastically different areas in terms of social and economic status, and the way they interact. These communities shaped the way Duff thought and lived, causing him to build up certain false personae to fit in with the crowd. These changes and more are described within the pages of Duff’s new memoir, Home Truths: A Deep East Texas Memory.
From dealing with intrusive family members to judgmental classmates to marital bliss and misery, Duff’s memoir describes situations familiar to anyone who has ever lived in a small town. Experiences unfamiliar to the youths of today include growing up during World War II and the descriptions of propaganda tactics, hunting for your own meals, and dealing with the social mores of the 1950s and 1960s. Other occurrences however, such as working a summer job and the awkwardness of first dates, speak to people of every generation, young and old.
Early in life Duff learned to tell lies as a survival mechanism against his meddling family and occasionally cruel classmates. He describes the ordeal of hiding both his domestic situation and his talent for the written word. Duff’s talents for lies and half-truths helped him not only to discover a hidden talent within himself, but also a future career.

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In addition to writing fiction, poetry, and scholarly works, GERALD DUFF has taught literature and writing at Vanderbilt University, Kenyon College, Rhodes College, and Johns Hopkins University. He has published eleven books, including Indian Giver and Fire Ants, which were finalists for both the Great Lakes Colleges Association First Novel Award and the Texas Institute of Letters Jesse Jones Award for the 2007 Best Book of Fiction. His other books of fiction and poetry have won the St. Andrews Prize for Poetry and the Cohen Award for Fiction, and have been nominated for the Edgar Allan Poe Award, the Texas Institute for Letters Award, the University of Michigan Literary Fiction Award, and the PEN/Faulkner Prize. Home Truths is his first book with TCU Press.

Steplings, by C.W. Smith
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Nineteen-year-old Jason is lost. The rush of graduation parties has subsided, the ubiquitous discussion of college departures dimmed to a dull roar. His former classmates have made elaborate plans, but the only date on Jason’s calendar is a court appearance next Monday. Jason, who dropped out of high school just two months shy of graduation, finds himself stuck in the well-worn grooves of his hometown. But when his over-achieving girlfriend Lisa departs for UT Austin to study medicine, Jason finds Mesquite a place he can hardly recognize.
Jason’s family can offer him little direction. After his mother Sue’s unexpected death a few years back, his father Burl, fifteen years sober, slipped into old drinking habits. Jason watched the once clockwork-perfect routine of his family life descend into chaos. When Burl marries Lily, a high-strung, high-powered attorney, she brings a daughter into the house: Emily, eleven years old and a self-described know-it-all whose very existence is enough to irritate Jason.
Three days before Jason must appear in court, he receives a “Dear John” letter from Lisa. Heartbroken and determined to convince Lisa of his worth, Jason decides to hitchhike to Lisa’s dorm in Austin—but Emily, desperate to return to her father, a UT professor, overhears Jason’s plans and demands to accompany him. When Burl and Lily return home to find their children missing, Lily puts out an Amber Alert for Emily, accusing Jason of abducting her daughter. The frantic search effort that ensues threatens to destroy the tentative household that Burl and Lily have just begun to establish.
Smith’s gift for creating three-dimensional characters, abundantly demonstrated in his previous TCU Press titles including Understanding Women and Purple Hearts, lends this coming-of-age tale an unexpected quality of honesty and sophisticated narrative rarely seen in contemporary young adult fiction. Mary Powell, author of the TCU Press books Auslander and Galveston Rose, describes Smith’s prose as “rich and sophisticated, yet accessible, and the dialogue is right on.” Steplings doesn’t romanticize the misadventures of its protagonists. Though Jason and Emily grapple with universal teen issues—Emily searches for acceptance in her new middle school, while Jason balks when confronted with new adult responsibilities—their troubles feel like uncharted territory when expressed through pitch-perfect narrative voices. “Watching Jason self-destruct,” according to Powell, “is akin to watching someone in a horror film go down into the basement.”
The authentic quality of Smith’s prose extends to the Texas setting; readers will recognize their neighbors in the characters that populate Mesquite and Austin. Kate Lehrer observed that Smith also “draws subtle distinctions among social classes.” Smith invokes tension between Jason’s no-frills lifestyle and Lisa’s country-club upbringing, and paints a widening gulf between Burl’s small-town mannerisms and Lily’s cosmopolitan tastes.
Powell called Steplings “a friendly, hopeful, humorous, and thoughtful book about growing up.” Growing up, however, doesn’t belong exclusively to the young, and Steplings is a story that can’t be shelved neatly in the young adult category. Both teen and adult readers will see themselves in this multifaceted narrative of self-discovery.

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C.W. SMITH'S novels are Thin Men of Haddam, Country Music, The Vestal Virgin Room, Buffalo Nickel, Hunter’s Trap, Understanding Women, Gabriel’s Eye, and Purple Hearts. He has also authored a memoir, Uncle Dad. Smith was a Dedman Family Distinguished Professor at Southern Methodist University. He belongs to PEN American Center, The Author's Guild, and the Texas Institute of Letters. He was a Dobie-Paisano Fellow at the University of Texas and has received two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Slow Moving Dreams, by Tom Hardy
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Tom Hardy’s new novel, Slow Moving Dreams, tells the story of Tom Carter, a city man who is forced by the death of a cousin to return to his rural roots in West Texas. Hardy takes his readers along two journeys in this novel: the first is the physical journey that Tom takes as he drives to the funeral in Alpine, and the second is an exploration of Tom’s life as a child growing up in the country that the adult Tom is now passing through. But not all of those memories are happy ones, as Tom and his cousins soon find out. The funeral starts to unravel a dark secret that could change everything Tom thought he knew about his family.
Hardy breathes life into all of his characters with witty dialogue and nostalgic memory sequences. Slow Moving Dreams is a story of homecoming and family bonds that, in this age of consumerism and technology, is a refreshing change of pace. For those familiar with the lifestyle of the modern cowboy, the life Tom Carter remembers is a reminder of the old days, when nature provided everything one could ever need. But all readers, new to the cowboy’s world or not, are in for a fun, heart-warming tale as they follow Tom’s exploration of his past and realizations about his future.

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TOM HARDY is a native Texan, the son of a father who left home at thirteen to become a working cowboy and a mother of Cherokee lineage. He was born and raised in Fort Stockton and Alpine in far West Texas. He attended Sam Houston State University on an athletic scholarship and majored in business administration. After ten years as a teacher and coach at the high school and college levels, he returned to school and received a master’s degree in health care administration from Trinity University in San Antonio and moved into hospital administration.
As he was making the transition to health care, he wrote his first novel, Unsportsmanlike Conduct, an unflattering view of college football, published in 1983. He and his wife Patricia have raised three children. Retirement from the corporate world has allowed him time to return to writing. Slow Moving Dreams is his second novel, and he is working on his third. All of his books are set in West Texas where he was raised and continues to enjoy a love of the land and people who make West Texas special.

Texas at Sea, by Mark Lardas
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Perhaps your average fourth grader can recite the pivotal stories of Texas’s fight for independence on land—we all remember the Alamo, of course—but how many of us can recall battles waged over the sea? In Texas at Sea, the latest in TCU Press’s popular Texas Small Books series, Mark Lardas illuminates a little-known dimension of Texas history.
All too often, we “forget that the history of the United States is a story told from the sea,” reader Gene Smith, director of The Center for Texas Studies observed, and Texas is no exception. “When people think of Texas they think of cattle, cotton, and oil,” he explained. And with its vast terrain ranging from desert to grasslands to thick forests, it is no wonder Texas’s coastline is often overlooked.
With in-depth military history and well-researched maritime data, Texas at Sea will capture the interest of local history aficionados, military enthusiasts and readers who love to settle down with a good Texan tall tale. Lardas has peppered the storyline with little known maritime facts sure to impress even the most knowledgeable history buffs. He also pays tribute to the unsung heroes of the Texas Navy, along with prominent military men and women such as Chester Nimitz.
Though Texas at Sea packs a wealth of information that could fill a small encyclopedia, you’ll want to devour this Texas Small Book in one sitting. An engaging maritime adventure, Texas at Sea challenges preconceived notions about Texas and introduces us to the cowboys who went to sea.

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MARK LARDAS, an engineer, freelance writer, amateur historian, and model-maker lives in League City, Texas. His interest in maritime history dates to his childhood, when he listened to his grandfather's stories about growing up on a family-owned commercial sailing ship in the 1890s. Lardas is the author of eight books on military and naval history and several hundred articles, many of which are focused on history and model-making.

Institutional Change in Theological Education: A History of Brite Divinity School , edited by Mark G. Toulouse, Jeffrey Williams, and Dyan M. Dietz
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The first complete history book for the Brite Divinity School at TCU showcases a set of essays almost all student written or co-student written exploring the foundations that led to TCU’s theological school. Today Brite Divinity is one of the premier teaching and research institutions in the Southwest. Accredited by the Association of Theological Schools and the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, Brite Divinity School is one of four seminaries related to the Christian Church and the denomination’s only seminary related to a university.
These essays document just how well Brite met the various challenges over the course of its history. With hallmark events such as Darwin’s Origin of the Species and the huge leaps in the scientific world, Brite Divinity was caught in a crossroads of science and religion. Facts long associated with the hard sciences gave way to new methodologies emphasizing human experience in philosophy, natural science and the emerging social sciences. The new scientific mantra became “everything changes” leading to the very question “would scientific understanding lead Christians to a better knowledge with matters dealing with both creation and God?” This was both a boon towards the school’s development as an educational institute and a hindrance as people began to question the very foundations of religion and religious doctrine. Through the good times and the bad, these student authors show us how Brite overcame those very challenges to become what it is today.
These essays shed light on what it took for Brite to become one of the Southwest’s leading schools in theological education. Rich in historical perspective, Institutional Change in Theological Education shows where Brite came from, how it got there and where it’s going. This comprehensive history goes back to the very beginning of TCU’s own history, with Randolph Clark, Addison Clark and L.C. Brite. On their journey through these pages, readers will come to appreciate the dynamic changes that have affected theological education during the past century.

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DR. MARK G. TOULOUSE is principal and professor of the History of Christianity at Emmanuel College of Victoria University in the University of Toronto. From 1986 to 2008, he taught American Religious History at Brite Divinity School.

DR. JEFFREY WILLIAMS arrived at Brite Divinity School in 2005. He is associate dean for Academic Affairs and teaches American Religious History.

DYAN M. DIETZ is a commissioned elder in the North Texas Conference of the United Methodist Church, serving as associate pastor at Lake Cities United Methodist Church in Lake Dallas, Texas. She is currently enrolled in the PhD program in Biblical Interpretation at Brite Divinity School.