The University of Texas Press ended the previous decade (2001–2009) with a Texas barbecue book topping our trade list and a study of the Mexican American civil rights
movement topping our scholarly list. In 2009, Wyatt McSpadden's Texas BBQ showed the photographer's odyssey into the world of traditional barbecue. The book sold so well that we asked Wyatt to expand on it to reflect the changing landscape of barbecue in Texas. Texas BBQ, Small Town to Downtown was published in August 2018 and captures the new urban BBQ scene, epitomized by Franklin Barbecue, as well as small-town favorites such as Snow’s in Lexington.
The end of the last decade also featured a wonderful work in Latinx history: Cynthia E. Orozco's No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed: The Rise of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement. The first fully comprehensive study of the origins of the League of United Latin-American Citizens (LULAC) and its precursors, it shows how the organization incorporated race, class, gender, and citizenship to create bold new understandings of a pivotal period of activism. Ten years later, Cynthia E. Orozco's newest book, Agent of Change: Adela Sloss-Vento, Mexican American Civil Rights Activist and Texas Feminist, is publishing January 10, 2020.
To close the current decade, we have gathered the best-selling trade and scholarly titles from the last ten years below. Here's to the next decade of excellent reading and research!
The Decade's Bestselling Books
2010
With words by Charles Bowden and artwork by Alice Leora Briggs, Dreamland: The Way Out of Juárez is a striking work of graphic journalism that pairs previously unpublished creative nonfiction by Charles Bowden with provocative scratchboard drawings by Alice Leora Briggs to create a vignette of daily life in Juárez, Mexico. Winner of the Border Regional Library Association's Southwest Book Award, Dreamland has the feel of a graphic novel, the look of an illuminated medieval manuscript, and the harshness of a police blotter. Bowden and Briggs capture the routine brutality, resilient courage, and rapacious daily commerce along the U.S.-Mexico border.
In 2010, the regularly updated Educator's Guide to Texas School Law had sold more than 70,000 copies and the new seventh edition was the standard legal resource for Texas educators. Attorneys and educators Jim Walsh, Frank Kemerer, and Laurie Maniotis streamline the law and provide the authoritative source on all major dimensions of Texas school law, one that is both well integrated and easy to read. Now in its ninth edition, The Educator's Guide to Texas School Law has sold nearly 95,000 copies since the first edition was published in 1986. In 2018, much had changed in the area of school law since the first edition. The ninth edition covers all major dimensions of Texas school law through the 2017 legislative session.
2011
Photographer Michael O’Brien's Hard Ground reveals our common humanity by depicting the men, women, and children who survive on the streets. O'Brien got out of his car one day in 1975 and sought the acquaintance of a man named John Madden who lived under an overpass. Their initial contact grew into a friendship that O'Brien chronicled for the Miami News, where he began his career as a staff photographer. O'Brien's photo-essays conveyed empathy for the homeless and the disenfranchised and won two Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards. In Hard Ground, O'Brien joins with renowned singer-songwriter Tom Waits, described by the New York Times as "the poet of outcasts," to create a portrait of homelessness that impels us to look into the eyes of people who live "on the hard ground."
Drawing on a wealth of oral histories from pioneering Chicana activists, as well as the vibrant print culture through which they articulated their agenda and built community, Maylei Blackwell's ¡Chicana Power! Contested Histories of Feminism in the Chicano Movement presents the first full-scale investigation of the social and political factors that led to the development of Chicana feminism. Maylei Blackwell also co-edited a newer volume, Chicana Movidas: New Narratives of Activism and Feminism in the Movement Era, alongside Dionne Espinoza and María Eugenia Cotera. This groundbreaking anthology brings together generations of Chicana scholars and activists to offer the first wide-ranging account of women’s organizing, activism, and leadership in the Chicano Movement.
2012
The award-winning biography of Ann Richards by Jan Reid offers a nuanced, fully realized portrait of the first feminist elected to high office in America and one of the most fascinating women in our political history. Drawing on more than one hundred interviews with Ann Richards’s friends and associates and her private correspondence, Let the People In: The Life and Times of Ann Richards won the following distinctions: the Carr P. Collins Award for Best Book of Non-Fiction from the Texas Institute of Letters, the Coral Horton Tullis Memorial Prize, and the Liz Carpenter Award for Research in the History of Women from the Texas State Historical Association.
The first book in our series The Katrina Bookshelf, Displaced: Life in the Katrina Diaspora, edited by Lynn Weber and Lori Peek, reached readers with a moving ethnographic account of Hurricane Katrina survivors rebuilding their lives away from the Gulf Coast. The Katrina Bookshelf is the result of a national effort to bring experts together in a collaborative program of research on the human costs of the disaster. Supported by the Ford, Gates, MacArthur, Rockefeller, and Russell Sage Foundations and sponsored by the Social Science Research Council, the Katrina Bookshelf is the most comprehensive social science coverage of a disaster to be found anywhere in the literature.
2013
Former president George W. Bush temporarily brought down our website in 2013 after sharing his Chief White House Photographer Eric Draper's book Front Row Seat on his Facebook page. Our website had never before had so many visitors at one time! An extraordinary collection of images, many never before published, Front Row Seat presents a compelling, behind-the-scenes view of the entire presidency of George W. Bush, from dramatic events such as 9/11 to relaxed, intimate moments within the Bush family.
Another book with roots in Texas politics to make a splash in 2013 was historian James L. Haley's The Texas Supreme Court: A Narrative History, 1836–1986. Haley, the award-winning author of Sam Houston, Passionate Nation, and Wolf: The Lives of Jack London, offers a lively narrative of Texas’s highest court and how it helped to shape the Lone Star State during its first 150 years. H. W. Brands, whose history haikus will be published in 2020, called The Texas Supreme Court “important and entertaining—a potent combination!”
2014
In 2014, the Ransom Center featured their Gone With The Wind holdings from the David O. Selznick archive in a major exhibition to celebrate the film's seventy-fifth anniversary. In the book The Making of Gone With The Wind, Steve Wilson collects more than 600 rarely seen items from the David O. Selznick archive—including on-set photographs, storyboards, correspondence and fan mail, production records, audition footage, restored costumes, and Selznick’s infamous memos. The volume offers fans and film historians alike a must-have behind-the-camera view of the production of this classic movie.
Another book that draws on classic Hollywood is Judith E. Smith's Becoming Belafonte: Black Artist, Public Radical. Spotlighting a vibrant episode in the evolution of African American culture and consciousness in America, this book illuminates how multitalented performer Harry Belafonte became a civil rights icon, internationalist, and proponent of black pride and power. From his first national successes as a singer of Calypso-inflected songs to the dedication he brought to producing challenging material on television and film regardless of its commercial potential, Harry Belafonte stands as a singular figure in American cultural history—a performer who never shied away from the dangerous crossroads where art and politics meet.
2015
In 2015, we published Don’t Suck, Don’t Die: Giving Up Vic Chesnutt by musician and author Kristin Hersh, founding member of the bands Throwing Muses and 50 Foot Wave. A haunting ode to a lost friend, this memoir by the acclaimed author of Rat Girl offers the most personal, empathetic look at the creative genius and often-tormented life of singer-songwriter Vic Chesnutt that is ever likely to be written. NPR's Michael Schaub called the book "not only one of the best books of the year, [but] one of the most beautiful rock memoirs ever written.”
An important work focused on our hometown of Austin, Texas, was published in 2015, Invisible in Austin: Life and Labor in an American City, edited by Javier Auyero with an afterword by Loïc Wacquant. In Invisible in Austin, the award-winning sociologist Auyero and a team of graduate students explore the lives of those working at the bottom of the social order: house cleaners, office-machine repairers, cab drivers, restaurant cooks and dishwashers, exotic dancers, musicians, and roofers, among others. Recounting their subjects’ life stories with empathy and sociological insight, the authors show us how these lives are driven by a complex mix of individual and social forces.
2016
With authentic recipes, behind-the-scenes stories, and recommendations of where the locals eat, The Tacos of Texas is the indispensable guide to Texas’s appetizingly diverse tacos and taco culture by the authors of Austin Breakfast Tacos. Now full-fledged television stars, Mando Rayo and Jarod Neece have two series under their belts: United Tacos of America on the El Rey Network and PBS's Tacos of Texas docuseries!
The award-winning Another Year Finds Me in Texas: The Civil War Diary of Lucy Pier Stevens, from Vicki Adams Tongate, is one of few women’s diaries from Civil War–era Texas and the only one written by a Northerner. This previously unpublished journal offers a unique perspective on daily life and the ties that transcended sectional loyalties during America’s most divisive conflict. Another Year Finds Me in Texas received a Publication Award from the San Antonio Conservation Society.
2017
Created across thirteen years, forty-eight states, and eighty thousand miles, photographer Jack Spencer's This Land: An American Portrait is a startlingly fresh photographic portrait of the American landscape that shares artistic affinities with the works of such American masters as Edward Hopper, Grant Wood, Mark Rothko, and Albert Bierstadt. Jarred by the 9/11 attacks, Spencer set out in 2003 “in hopes of making a few ‘sketches’ of America in order to gain some clarity on what it meant to be living in this nation at this moment in time.” The result is a vast, encompassing portrait of the American landscape that is both contemporary and timeless.
Frank Denius was not yet twenty-one when he fought his way across Europe and was awarded four Silver Stars, a Presidential Unit Citation, and two Purple Hearts. His autobiography On the Way: My Life and Times describes Denius’s formative experiences during World War II in gripping detail and will cause any reader to wonder how he or she might have held up under similar pressure.
2018
A New York Times Editor's Choice, The Street Philosophy of Garry Winogrand, by award-winning author Geoff Dyer, features one hundred essays about one hundred photographs, including previously unpublished color work, by renowned street photographer Garry Winogrand.
Expansively researched and illustrated, Adam Arenson's lively history Banking on Beauty recounts how the extraordinary partnership of financier Howard Ahmanson and artist Millard Sheets produced outstanding mid-century modern architecture and art for Home Savings and Loan.
2019
And finally, the year we are bidding adieu to is 2019, which brought the absolute treasure of Hanif Abdurraqib's Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest. Hanif's third book rose as high as #8 on the New York Times bestseller list, earning some of the most gorgeous book reviews we've ever read. The book was named A Most Anticipated Book of 2019 by Buzzfeed, Nylon, the A.V. Club, CBC Books, and the Rumpus, and was chosen as Winter's Most Anticipated Book by Vanity Fair and The Week. Go Ahead in the Rain received starred reviews in Kirkus and Booklist and was called "warm, immediate and intensely personal" by the New York Times.
The late Norman D. Brown's Biscuits, the Dole, and Nodding Donkeys: Texas Politics, 1929–1932, edited and with an introduction by Rachel Ozanne, is a deeply researched sequel to Hood, Bonnet, and Little Brown Jug, published in 1984. In Biscuits, the Dole, and Nodding Donkeys, a master storyteller of Texas politics brings to life pivotal moments of backroom wrangling, economic crashes, and aftershocks still felt nearly a century later. Taking readers to an era when a self-serving group of Texas politicians operated in a system that was closed to anyone outside of the state’s white, wealthy upper echelons, Brown unearths riveting, little-known stories whose impacts continue to ripple today at the Capitol.
