Publisher's Weekly :: Border Junkies

Border Junkies

By Scott Comar
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Review:

In this eye-opening account, former heroin addict and current doctoral student Comar chronicles his five years as a junkie, during which he panhandled to support his drug habit and repeatedly completed rehabilitation only to quickly fall back into drug use. Readers will continue waiting for the announcement of the low point of his life: is it the withdrawal pain, going to jail, learning a friend has died from overdose, or lying to his family to get money for drugs? While following Comar's trail between Juárez, Mexico, where he lived for most of these years, and El Paso, Tex., where he was often able to find employment or panhandle, readers will learn about the facilities available for detoxification and where Comar finds them lacking; life on the streets; and survival with, and without, the bare necessities. As Comar writes, "The food was good, and the showers had hot water. I had a small pocket radio and a bottom bunk. What more could someone want out of life?" Clean since 2003, Comar uses these pages to reflect on the processes of addiction, detoxification, and recovery, while questioning how drug treatment centers could better assist recovering addicts. (Oct.)

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St. Louis Times-Dispatch :: Stirring It Up With Molly Ivins

Stirring It Up with Molly Ivins

By Ellen Sweets
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St. Louis-born writer remembers friend and fellow food-lover Molly Ivins
By Joe Bonwich

The body of Ellen Sweets' new memoir about Texas icon Molly Ivins is set in the Lone Star state, but its soul is grounded in St. Louis.

The University of Texas Press approached Sweets, a St. Louis native, to write a biography shortly after Ivins died from breast cancer in 2007. Sweets declined the commission because she felt too close to Ivins, who had built a national reputation through a syndicated column that alternately interpreted Texas culture and skewered politicians she didn't agree with.

"Molly and I were friends for many years," Sweets says. "I didn't think of her as famous — to me she was just plain Molly. We had conversations about things I know she wouldn't have wanted to see in print."

A biography, "Molly Ivins: A Rebel Life," was ultimately written by Bill Minutaglio and W. Michael Smith. Minutaglio interviewed Sweets as part of his research, and Sweets had an epiphany. "It occurred to me that almost every story I told was about cooking, going to the grocery store or eating in restaurants," Sweets recalls. "I thought, 'Oh, my God, Molly and food. People don't know just how good of a cook she was.'"

That was the genesis of "Stirring It Up With Molly Ivins: A Memoir With Recipes" (University of Texas Press, $29.95). As Sweets spread the word among Ivins' friends and former colleagues that she was writing a memoir with its foundations in food and cooking, stories began to pour in.

And as she wove the stories together, Sweets stitched many of her own experiences growing up and starting her career in St. Louis into the fabric of her relationship with Ivins.

One common thread was their mutual passion for journalism, which dated almost to birth for Sweets. Her parents, Nathaniel and Melba Sweets, owned and wrote for the St. Louis American, a weekly newspaper that still serves the black community. That pioneering role made the couple, now deceased, two of this year's inductees this into the Missouri Press Association Newspaper Hall of Fame. Ellen Sweets, 70, wrote for the American before working at the Post-Dispatch for most of the 1970s, then worked for the Dallas Morning News and the Denver Post. After moving to Dallas, she focused on food journalism.

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Huffington Post :: Stirring It Up with Molly Ivins

Stirring It Up with Molly Ivins

By Ellen Sweets
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Easy Reader: Ellen Sweets's Stirring It Up With Molly Ivins a Five-Star Feast
by David Finkle

Sometimes when dreams don't come true, they come partially true. On Rick Perry's entering the presidential race, I dreamed (that's to say, daydreamed) that superb Austin, Texas-based political commentator and first-rate reporter Molly Ivins, who died in 2007, was still here. She'd know everything -- good and bad (mostly woundingly comic, I figured) -- about the publicly God-fearing, evolution-theory-questioning, job-creating(?) candidate. I could almost hear her passing along everything worth passing along, and she'd sure as shootin' do it in her inimitable thigh-slapping fashion.

Well, don't you know that within days after fixing on this unsatisfied need, I become aware of Stirring It Up With Molly Ivins: A Memoir With Recipes by Ellen Sweets (University of Texas Press, 272 pp., illustrations, $29.95) Turns out that the author, a writer and often food editor, had been friendly with the late, great Molly for several decades during which they shared a love of cooking and eating.

Turns out further that knowing Miz Molly -- as the well-named Sweets sometimes refers to her -- in the kitchen, at the supermarket and grocery store, and around the dining-room and restaurant table is a great way to reflect on who Molly Ivins was, how profoundly and amusingly she thought and the enormous amount she had to contribute to our understanding of Texas and national politics. Not the least of her contributions, it so happens, are the recipes for her favorite foods, which ranged along the wide spectrum between extremely elegant to hilariously inelegant.

"Beer-in-the-Butt Chicken" is only one example of the latter sort but -- as Molly adapted them -- that'un gives an idea of the humor with which she embraced life, right up to and including her death from cancer. A woman who scoured stores and the Internet for every type of classy and less classy utensil, Molly was unflaggingly eager to gather friends around her not only in order to feed them but -- as the devoted Sweets emphasizes -- because they would feed her with their wit and knowledge of the world. A list of the people with whom she broke the bread she often baked isn't exactly endless but it sure is long and includes, not surprisingly, many of the leading liberal thinkers (often Yellow Dog Democrats) of the last half century.

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Austin American-Statesman :: Texas State Cemetery

Texas State Cemetery

By Jason Walker and Will Erwin,
with Helen Thompson
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2 new books serve as memorials, each in its own way

There are a million ways to remember.

We keep photos on walls and in our wallets; we hang on to childhood artwork and filled-up diaries; we honor people and moments with rituals and recipes.

Two books landed on my desk recently that approach this idea in very different yet interrelated ways. One, "Texas State Cemetery,"by Jason Walker and Will Erwin (UT Press, 200 pp., $39.95),is about, as one might guess, the Texas State Cemetery. The other, "Visual Vitriol: The Street Art and Subcultures of the Punk and Hardcore Generation,"by David A. Ensminger(University Press of Mississippi, 334 pp., $35), is about, as you also might guess, punk rock.

Both are coffee-table books, with "Texas State Cemetery" fully embracing its coffee-table-ness — heavy paper, vellum cover, gorgeous photos. Coffee-table books are like CD box sets: a deluxe package to celebrate something significant. They are memorials.

"Texas State Cemetery" is about history as much as gorgeous photos of gravestones; its authors are the director of research and the senior historian at the cemetery, respectively. As Bob Bullock, quoted on the "In Remembrance" page notes, "Kids can come out here and in one day learn more about Texas history than a whole semester in class."

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Salon.com :: The Unexamined Orwell

The Unexamined Orwell

By John Rodden
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The enduring myth of George Orwell
A new book examines the legendary status the "1984" author has achieved since his death
BY ADAM KIRSCH

If you were to make a list of all the adjectives that have been used to describe George Orwell, the most popular would be ethical ones: words like honest, decent, trustworthy. These are the qualities that have guaranteed Orwell, who died in 1950 at the age of forty-six, such an extraordinary intellectual afterlife. More than a novelist or journalist or essayist or literary critic, Orwell has become an icon of intellectual integrity -- one of the few writers to live through the 1930s, Auden's "low, dishonest decade," and emerge with his political and moral instincts uncorrupted. On the left, he's admired for his genuine socialist principles and personal egalitarianism; on the right, he's admired for the instinctive patriotism and love of English tradition that made him one of the best commentators on the World War II years. And to everyone who writes and thinks about politics, Orwell is the writer who most elegantly exposed the horror of totalitarianism and the degradation of language under the pressure of ideology. No wonder that, as John Rodden writes in "The Unexamined Orwell" (University of Texas Press), " scarcely a major Anglo-American issue has gone by since his death in January 1950 that has not moved someone to muse, 'If Orwell Were Alive Today,'" -- or, more reverently still, "W.W.G.O.D.?"

For that very reason, however, just about the last word you could apply to the man born Eric Blair is "unexamined." He is the subject of numerous biographies and studies, and one of the rare twentieth-century authors to have been honored with a full-dress Collected Works -- a twenty-two-volume set. Of course, Rodden, who is the author of several books about Orwell's work and influence, knows this perfectly well. What he objects to is the way Orwell is too often replaced in the public imagination by " 'Orwell,' the myth, not the man or the writer" -- the image Rodden also refers to as "St. George." The purpose of this collection of essays is not so much to debunk the Orwell legend as to offer "fresh perspectives on him and his work, either by challenging broadly accepted appraisals of his achievement or pursuing new lines of inquiry about it."

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Texas Observer :: Hard Ground

Hard Ground

Photographs by Michael O’Brien

Poems by Tom Waits

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by Dave Mann

In 2006, Michael O’Brien, a veteran photojournalist who’s shot for Life, National Geographic, Texas Monthly and many other publications, took on a different kind of assignment.

An Austin-based ministry called Mobile Loaves and Fishes, which aids the homeless, was looking for a photographer to document the people it served. O’Brien was looking for something to do. The changing media landscape had made life as a freelance photographer increasingly difficult. As O’Brien writes in the introduction to the new book Hard Ground (University of Texas Press, $40, 184 pages), “Newspapers were dying, magazines struggling in earnest. There were fewer assignments. My career was changing. I was looking for a way to stay busy.”

He began going to the Mission: Possible! Community Center in East Austin every Tuesday to photograph the homeless people who came in for a free meal and a place to sleep. What started as an effort to stay busy quickly grew into much more. O’Brien spent the next three years photographing and documenting the stories of homeless people in Austin.

In Hard Ground, O’Brien’s haunting photographs of the homeless are paired with poetry by musician Tom Waits. To make his photographs, O’Brien used an old view camera. “This is a large, bulky camera that sits atop a tripod … a view camera is slow and deliberate,” he writes in the book’s introduction. With a view camera, the subject must remain completely still or the photo will be out of focus. O’Brien also employed a black-and-white Polaroid film called Type 55, which produces a negative and print at the same time. When O’Brien took his photos, he kept the negative and handed the print to his subject.

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New York Times :: Mark Bittman Blog :: Oaxaca al Gusto

Oaxaca al Gusto:
An Infinite Gastronomy

By Diana Kennedy
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Mark Bittman Blog
Sobras de la Mesa (Table Scraps)
by Peter Catapano

A Belly Full of Mole

The devotion to moles in Oaxaca — and the pride in them — borders on the religious. At a food stall at the Mercado 20 de Noviembre near the town’s main plaza (zócalo), I was practically forced to order the pollo con mole negro (chicken in black mole sauce) by a stout woman in an apron who told me in detail in Spanish how she made it in the kitchen of her very own house, though she knew I could barely understand her. (She was right, it was excellent, and I left fortified.) There are said to be seven basic types — negro, colorado, coloradito, amarillo, verde, chíchilo negro and mancha manteles — but I’ve been assured that variations on these themes are endless. (I tasted versions of all of them as part of a meal at Los Pacos, where each table is given a sampler.) For a definitive, and visually gorgeous, exploration of moles and other Oaxacan foods and dishes, lose yourself in “Oaxaca al Gusto,” by the distinguished and revered food writer Diana Kennedy, who has spent decades in the region.

They Eat Bugs, Don’t They?

Yes, grasshoppers (chapulines) and worms (chinicuiles) are everyday foods in many parts of Mexico. The former, dried and chile-flavored, are sold as snacks in large baskets on streets and in markets in Oaxaca (yes, I did. And, no, they do not taste like chicken). They are also found in many sauces and recipes. The worms are, too; they’re not just found in mezcal bottles. Dana Goodyear’s article in The New Yorker earlier this month exploring the culture of insect eating and its possible role in feeding the world’s population sustainably discusses Oaxacan food. (If you’ve read the piece, please note that the magazine’s photo is an artistic exaggeration: chapulines in Oaxaca are tiny critters.)

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