"They have a staying quality, these Hookses, that I can only describe as haunting. They have inhabited my imagination all my life, inexplicable ghosts, to be exorcised only by that bit of magic that created them in the first place, the turn of a phrase."
Thus Callie Coe Wilson introduces us to her family of inveterate tale tellers, the expansive and eccentric Hooks clan of Hardin County, Texas. Wilson and her cousin Ellen Walker Rienstra capture in this unusual family saga the essence of why families take such delight in the stories of their ancestors.
We see William "Pap" Hooks,...

Rick Bass's deer pasture is centered in the rustic beauty of the Texas Hill Country--a land of ravines and hallows, dark and shady, with near-vertical bluffs. In the fall there the hickories turn gold and drop a ton of leaves into the creeks; the water is clear and cold and still.
Also in the fall the Bass men come there for a week of camping and hunting, for the deer pasture is in the heart of white-tailed deer country, and the Basses have leased that same 956 acres for hunting each November for the past forty-nine years.
In these seventeen delightful essays, handsomely illustrated...

In 1923 a little train ran from Guadalajara, Mexico, to Chapala, but only twice a week. One of those excursions carried two young Americans, trained at the Art Institute of Chicago, to the small village to paint. Red-tiled roofs on pale pastel houses bordering a great silvery lake greeted the two.
In the next four years the lives of the artists--and the bride one lured south from California--pulsated to the beat of a Mexico few Americans knew. This sprightly memoir by one of those young painters captures the tone and spirit of their adventures. Everett Gee Jackson's keen eye and...

When artist Everett Jackson and his young wife, Eileen, crossed the border from Mexico in 1927 after he had painted there for four years, they realized that Mexico had bewitched them. Never again would they see life quite the same way as the Americans around them, and never would they be able to stay out of Mexico for more than a few months at a time.
Almost immediately upon settling in San Diego, where he would teach art and she would write a newspaper column, they began making painting trips back into Mexico. At first they explored the remote, unsettled areas in the border state of...

Picture a tiny building in the middle of a Texassized pasture in the years before World War II, before oneroom schools were abolished in favor of consolidated town schools. Picture children of all ages, all manner of backgrounds, all gathered in that room to learn their three R's, but best of all, to learn something of the world beyond the ranchland's horizons. Orchestrating the harmony of the classroom was the teacher, who was frequently younger than some of her pupils, and sometimes a skillful ball player, social worker, dramatist, friend, and lifesaver.
Stella Gipson Polk was all of...

"I want to hear about such folks as my father and how he knows how to make cement, not by recipe, but by something in his bones. I want to hear how my grandfather learned to plow a straight furrow and why even older men always called him Mister. I want to know all of the reasons why, those years ago, my mother cried when the tomatoes in her garden twisted and died."
Trying to find out such things, Jim Corder leads us through the ravines of the Croton Breaks, around to the back side of the Double Mountains, and through the streets of Jayton and Spur, as they are and as they used to be. He...

On the southern edge of America a diverse group of people lead ordinary lives in rather extraordinary circumstances. Mexican Americans, Anglos, and Mexican nationals meet there, in the subtropical beauty of the Rio Grande Valley and amid conditions of extreme poverty and social inequality, and create a distinctive blend of cultures, languages, and attitudes toward life. The stories that emerge are stories of individual victories, daily standoffs, and brutalizing defeats.
Writer-sociologist Robert Lee Maril tells some of these stories, observed and absorbed during the thirteen years he...

"There is a universality of humankind," writes one of the authors of the lines within this book. "A little town in South Texas is the same as a little town in John Donne's England. . . ." And so it is that these stories of moments and scenes and events in the state of Texas transcend the state lines and represent a state of mind.
Colorful characters and ordinary folk alike fill the small towns and city streets of these fifty-two vignettes, which unfold with humor, poignance, understatement, or stark relief. The elements of real life emerge in the stories of childhood and growing up, of...

"There is a universality of humankind," writes one of the authors of the lines within this book. "A little town in South Texas is the same as a little town in John Donne's England. . . ." And so it is that these stories of moments and scenes and events in the state of Texas transcend the state lines and represent a state of mind.
Colorful characters and ordinary folk alike fill the small towns and city streets of these fifty-two vignettes, which unfold with humor, poignance, understatement, or stark relief. The elements of real life emerge in the stories of childhood and growing up, of...

Bigmama didn't shop at Woolworth's. It wasn't because Woolworth's charged more for things than the hawker who drove through the neighborhood; it was because black shoppers were not welcome in stores on the Main Streets of towns like Bryan, Texas.

Bigmama was Sunny Nash's grandmother, and when Sunny was growing up in the 1950s, she learned from her elders what life was and should be. Through her own young eyes, she saw not only the indignities and economic hardships her family and friends suffered--unpaved roads, mosquito-infested ditches and outdoor toilets, back stairs to balcony...