The story of Sam Bass, both outlaw and romantic figure, has become a familiar part of Texas folklore and is well documented in nonfiction. But in this novel, Bryan Woolley creates a compelling story by giving the antihero fictional life. Woolley brings Bass alive through six alternating voices--Maude, the whore who was Bass's lover; Mary Matson, the African American who took him in and tended him as he lay dying; Dad Egan, the lawman who was once a father-figure to young Sam Bass but feels compelled to capture the outlaw; Frank Johnson, who rode with Bass but left the outlaw life to reappear...

A compilation of author and journalist Bryan Woolley's "T""he Dallas Morning News" columns from 1999 through 2003, "Texas Road Trip" explores back roads, small towns, and Texas originals. Follow him on his road trips across the Great State as he meets interesting people and hears fascinating, even bizarre, tales. As Woolley says, "Texas Road Trip" takes us beyond the "super highways spewing diesel smoke and danger to the sparsely traveled farm-to-market roads and the old highways that used to connect the little towns before the interstates bypassed them."
Tinged with nostalgia for a...

Sometimes the only way home is through the family scrapbook. June Van Cleef gives us another way: through her dramatic, poignant, and time-capturing photographs. In her sometimes bold, sometimes subtle images she finds the universal home of her rural upbringing--the farm and ranch scenes, the small town shops and churches, the family reunions, and the character-lined faces that formed us.
With a fine photographer's eye, she frames for us the everyday life that made a place Home. The seventy pictures were taken in and around Hamilton, the county seat of Hamilton County in the gentle hills...

Fort Appleby, Texas, 1952--the small West Texas mountain town to which the people of Houston, El Paso and San Antonio flee to escape the dreaded polio epidemic. And then polio hits Fort Appleby, a frightening four cases in a town of 800. School is closed, and the people spend their time fighting fear and attending funerals.
For senior football star Kevin Adams, 1952 is the year when his life is turned upside down by the epidemic and by the uncertainties that come of being seventeen and eager for all of life, from girls to football to great literature. Kevin struggles to sort out the many...

Fort Appleby, Texas, 1952--the small West Texas mountain town to which the people of Houston, El Paso and San Antonio flee to escape the dreaded polio epidemic. And then polio hits Fort Appleby, a frightening four cases in a town of 800. School is closed, and the people spend their time fighting fear and attending funerals.
For senior football star Kevin Adams, 1952 is the year when his life is turned upside down by the epidemic and by the uncertainties that come of being seventeen and eager for all of life, from girls to football to great literature. Kevin struggles to sort out the many...

In 1999 Bryan Woolley of the The Dallas Morning News set out to record the stories of ordinary people in North Texas, to tell about their lives, especially their past, and how they became who they became. These stories were published in a column entitled "Where I Come From," which ran in the Sunday newspaper from May 1999 to December 2000, to great reader acclaim. Now, for the first time in book form, the best of those stories is gathered herein with photos of each storyteller.

Among the people featured are a refugee who traveled a long road to Texas after the fall of...

Beautifully illustrated with 75 duotone images.
"El ""Charro," or man on horseback, has represented the spirit of independent Mexico since he played an important role in the 1821 revolution. He is the Mexican version of the American cowboy, only much older, arising from the ranch culture first brought to Mexico by the Spanish. The Charreada is his rodeo, his opportunity to show off both his skills with rope and horse and his decorative, elegant costume. It is at the center of Mexican heritage and self-image, a source of mythology and genuine heroes that has been brought to Texas by...