January|February Good Reads
New books of interest to the Longhorn Universe
Texas on the Table: People, Places, and Recipes
Celebrating the Lone Star State
By Terry Thompson-Anderson; Photos by Sandy Wilson, BA ’75
Crispy heirloom tomato with wild boar rilletes, herb salad, and gazpacho sorbet. Texas farmhouse pot roast with ancho chile pan sauce. Forget King Ranch casserole and Frito pie: Texas on the Table hails the booming Texas foodie culture, celebrating the chefs, producers, and the dishes that make Texan cuisine so idiosyncratic. Thompson-Anderson includes vignettes about her favorite food suppliers and restaurants, with background information about everything from wineries to cheesemakers, and Wilson’s photos are deliciously crisp. Don’t read this on an empty stomach.
Tyrannicide: Forging an American Law of Slavery
in Revolutionary South Carolina and Massachusetts
By Emily Blanck, BA ’93
In 1779, 34 slaves fled South Carolina by boarding a British ship. They endured several Revolutionary War battles at sea before the American ship Tyrannicide led them to Massachusetts—where their unfortunate trial had only just begun. In the years that followed, landowners and politicians in South Carolina and Massachusetts bickered over whose property the slaves were. Historian Emily Blanck argues that this mostly forgotten incident sheds light on how the states defined the concepts of tyranny and freedom, and that those varying definitions even foreshadowed the Civil War.
The Myth of Black Anti-Intellectualism:
A True Psychology of African-American Students
By Kevin O. Cokley, Professor, Department of Educational Psychology
Not long after Kevin Cokley started kindergarten, he was assigned to a remedial speech therapy program. He was puzzled to notice that most of other kids in the program were African-American like him, although the school was mostly white. Cokley went on to become an expert in African-American psychology and academic identity, and he opens this book with compelling personal anecdotes. In The Myth of Black Anti-Intellectualism, he draws on decades of research to argue that there is a deeply damaging, pervasive belief in schools that black students fall behind because they inherently lack academic motivation. To the contrary, Cokley says that many black students find that school simply isn’t relevant to their lives—and changing that is the first step to fixing a very broken system.
Barefoot Dogs
By Antonio Ruiz-Camacho, MFA ’12
Antonio Ruiz-Camacho has only been writing in English professionally since 2008, but since then has accrued such accolades as a Knight Fellowship and a Dobie Paisano Fellowship, and he now teaches creative writing at UT. His debut short story collection, Barefoot Dogs captures the fictional account of a Mexican family that struggles to retain its identity in the aftermath of the disappearance of the family’s wealthy and illustrious patriarch. The short story format allows Ruiz-Camacho to capture the perspectives of various family members and employees who have fled to Madrid, New York, Austin, and Palo Alto. Written from the perspective of Mexico’s elite, Barefoot Dogs shows how the violent culture of drug cartels pervades and damages every layer of Mexican society.
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