John Hubner
Last Chance in Texas: The Redemption of Criminal Youth
Random House
The Giddings State School is home and high school to 325 boys and 65 girls who have been convicted of heinous crimes—rape, murder, arson, and the like. But these hard-luck kids caught a break when they were sentenced to this rare youth correctional facility, which genuinely seeks to rehabilitate, not just warehouse, its charges. JOHN HUBNER’s LAST CHANCE IN TEXAS: THE REDEMPTION OF CRIMINAL YOUTH (Random House) argues that Giddings is winning the battles, if not the war. Through individual students’ stories, Hubner offers chilling insight into the brutalities these teens have both inflicted and suffered, making their crimes seem tragically inevitable. Last Chance in Texas shines a well-deserved light on this singular program and its success in curbing recidivism, and, by implication, it indicts America’s juvenile criminal justice system for its wretched failures. Reviewed by Mike Shea
Carlton Stowers
Where Dreams Die Hard: A Small American Town and Its Six-Man Football Team
Da Capo
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In the wake of 9/11, veteran Texas true-crime writer CARLTON STOWERS was consciously seeking out a story that might recharge his flagging faith in humanity and restore, in his words, “some degree of comfort and innocence.” He stumbled across the Wolverines of Penelope High School (town population: 211), whose recently revived six-man-football program was struggling to notch only its second win in four years. The result, WHERE DREAMS DIE HARD: A SMALL AMERICAN TOWN AND ITS SIX-MAN FOOTBALL TEAM (Da Capo), is a moving, if occasionally mawkish, look at the hard-nosed sport played by schools too small to field traditional squads. Stowers finds the solace he was seeking in Penelope, a place where neighbors enter unlocked doors to deliver unexpected kindnesses, and his account is like spending a weekend with your country cousin. Reviewed by Mike Shea
PANIC (Dutton), Austinite JEFF ABBOTT’s first stand-alone thriller after seven serial detective offerings, is chock-full of the bold twists that make for a tell-your-friends page-turner. The plot is not groundbreaking: Young Houston documentarian Evan Casher finds his mother murdered in her Austin home; he learns that both his parents were operatives for the Deep, a big-time freelance espionage outfit; and he and his girlfriend, Carrie (oops, seems she’s a spy too), get caught between Deep honcho Steven Jargo and the CIA, who both want top-secret documents that Casher’s mother stole. But Panic’s relentless action and to-the-point prose might just win Abbott the blockbuster status that has always seemed to be waiting for him just around the bend. Reviewed by Mike Shea
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