Getty Oil dropped into the market like raw steak into a bay full of sharks: Oil and Honor clarifies the waters. Beverly Lowry keeps the pages turning in her deft and racy roman à clef. The Perfect Sonya.
In Larry McMurtry’s Texasville, the teenagers from The Last Picture Show await their thirtieth high school reunion amid the hard times in Thalia and, as always, the war between the sexes.
Boone, T. Boone Pickens’ autobiography, is most interesting when it names names and tells tales, but such moments surface only occasionally and sink quickly.
In the novel Paradise, Donald Barthelme offers a cereal box of current events and social observations; Laura Furman challenges the dogged ideal of family in Tuxedo Park; Karleen Koen’s Through a Glass is a crash-bang publishing event.
George Bernard Shaw wrote a quarter of a million pieces of correspondence and never mailed one to San Antonio. So where does his editor choose to live?
The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor is more than just journalistic ghostwriting; I the Supreme is robbed of its punch; Bird of Life, Bird of Death peeks behind Central America’s dictators and dominoes.
Charles Portis’ Masters of Atlantis is anything but believable and nothing if not enjoyable. A Small Town, Shelby Hearon’s ninth novel, is a hit-and-miss proposition.
Larry McMurtry’s grand epic, Lonesome Dove, opens with blue snake-eating pigs and goes on to describe unflinchingly the settlement of the American West. Mark Singer’s Funny Money examines the biggest bank failure in U.S. history.
Max Crawford’s Lords of the Plain is a convincing tale of cavalry and Indians; Thomas McGuane’s Something to Be Desired is an insightful cowtown comedy.
Dan Jenkins’ new football novel, Life Its Ownself, picks up where Semi-Tough left off; Heat from Another Sun, a dark detective novel, turns on the gore.
William Humphrey’s Hostages to Fortune tells a sodden fishing story; C.W. Smith’s The Vestal Virgin Room tells of an empty quest for fame; Rosemary Catacalos’ Again for the First Time is an outstanding collection of verse.
A new study of sociologist C. Wright Mills is adequate but uninspired; this year’s Texas Institute of Letters fiction prize has gone to a fine first novel.
Civil Wars is armed with first-rate writing; Free Agents is a grab bag of Max Apple’s short fiction; Edisto is a precocious first novel; Group Therapy doesn’t probe deeply enough; Lords of the Earth is yet another Texas oil saga.
Robert Sherrill’s Oil Follies of 1979-1980 leaves no detail unremarked in its effort to pin the blame on Big Oil; in Ronnie Dugger’s On Reagan the author is as unbending an ideologue as his subject is.
You too can be an author-if you’re willing to publish the book yourself. All you have to have is a stack of paper, a tale to tell, and a couple of thousand bucks.
Frederick Barthelme’s Moon Deluxe is a collection of cockeyed tales about stucco camels, supermarket sec and other modern curiosities. In Short Circuit Michael Mewshaw finds fault with the nasty world of professional tennis. The urban vignettes of Laura Furman’s Watch Time Fly range from skillful to so-so.
An Abilene man recalls the pluck and pain of his stricken son in This Is the Child. An El Paso professor creates a lovably uncool detective in Dancing Bear. An Austin meteorologist blows hot on Texas Weather.
The Great Energy Scam purports to uncover the collusion of the feds and the oil companies, but the real scandal is what the author overlooks. Yet another book on killer Ted Bundy sheds no light on his crimes. Roughneck is a rousing look at America’s most radical labor union.
Texas women write about crop dusters and frozen custard and the Dallas-Forth Worth International Airport in the encouraging new anthology Her Work. Life Sentences, though, is a flimsy feminist exercise.
In The Path to Power Robert Caro brings the Texas of the twenties and thirties to hot, scrubby life, but tries to fit the young Lyndon Johnson into a prefabricated and constricting mold.
The footloose scout in Larry McMurtry's Cadillac Jack travels on and off the beaten track in omnivorous pursuit of women and objects d'art. In The Shadow Line, New-Yorker-turned-Texan Laura Furman captures the atmosphere of Inner Loop Houston.
Beyond Greed is the tale of the Hunts’ journey from silver spoon to silver lust. In Sing Me Back Home Merle Haggard takes a quick look at his life (too quick). Billy Clayton has Gavels, Grit & Glory--or so says his biographer.
Celebrity is Thomas Thompson’s flawed venture into fiction; The Last Texas Hero deserves a twenty-yard penalty; Peeper is to be read only to find out who the real Tom is.
In With No Fear of Failure you’ll learn how you, too, can turn rags into riches. Daddy’s Girl knows Southern discomfort. Petroleum Politics and the Texas Railroad Commission is the history of our own little OPEC.
Southwest Fiction might make you think that the region is mostly metropolis and no mesquite. The Guadalupe Mountains of Texas hits a lot of high spots.
Aztec is gripping buts so gory you may have to read it with you eyes closed; Darlin’ Billadds patina to the Wild Bill Hickok legend; as a major American writer, Thomas McGuane has An Outside Chance; Louise Gluck again proves her power as a poet.
Laura Furman handles The Glass House with a little too much care; Elmer Kelton’s novels take you way out West; a new filed guide digs into Texas’ past; Hearts will win yours.
In Music for Chameleons it’s hard to tell whether Truman Capote is telling the whole truth or nothing at all of the truth; Conspiracy ferrets out much of the truth about John F. Kennedy’s murder.
