Fans of the place where “anybody who’s a little different runs…as fast as they can” will find much to like here.

AUSTIN TO ATX

THE HIPPIES, PICKERS, SLACKERS, AND GEEKS WHO TRANSFORMED THE CAPITAL OF TEXAS

A searching character study of the lively Texas capital city.

Patoski (The Dallas Cowboys: The Outrageous History of the Biggest, Loudest, Most Hated, Best Loved Football Team in America, 2012, etc.) arrived in Austin in the shiniest days of its golden era, a time when every bar hosted live music and the city was “loose, easy, and cheap.” As a former music journalist–turned–alt-Texas enthusiast, he writes about everything that makes Austin what it is, from the paradise of Barton Springs to the moon towers and Austin City Limits. His approach is celebratory without being cloying, albeit with an elegiac closing that laments the sad fact that with economic and demographic growth, “Austin had arrived at the maturation/saturation point of a Manhattan or a San Francisco. Limits had been reached.” Anyone who’s tried to drive I-35 or find an affordable home in the city will appreciate the author’s appeal to the good old days. Along the way from then until now, Patoski hits all the bases, including the city’s culinary culture, a blend of the trendy and the new with reverence for the old and hand-rolled (especially when it comes to barbecued meats); Austin’s underappreciated literary culture (Patoski ranks this magazine among the city’s lights, along with writers such as Gary Cartwright and James Michener); the movie scene, dominated by Richard Linklater and Robert Rodriguez; and, of course, the music, with legendary places like Antone’s and the Armadillo World Headquarters giving hippies and rednecks a place to party together. Patoski works with a wealth of material that sometimes overpowers the narrative; the long sections on Whole Foods could have been cut in half without harm, and there’s a touch too much repetition of the idea of Austin’s uniqueness and the tragedy that it couldn’t have been kept weird. Still, if there’s excess, it’s appropriately Texas-sized and easily forgivable.

Fans of the place where “anybody who’s a little different runs…as fast as they can” will find much to like here.

Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-62349-703-3

Page Count: 376

Publisher: Texas A&M Univ.

Review Posted Online: Dec. 31, 2018

Did you like this book?

No Comments Yet

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

NIGHT

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. 

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Hill & Wang

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

Did you like this book?

Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.

1776

A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.

Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.

Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.

Pub Date: June 1, 2005

ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2

Page Count: 656

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005

Did you like this book?

more