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The Tacos of Texas
By Mando Rayo and Jarod Neece
University of Texas Press, 2016

Rooted in tradición mexicana and infused with Texas food culture, tacos are some of Texans’ all-time favorite foods. In The Tacos of Texas, the taco journalists Mando Rayo and Jarod Neece take us on a muy sabroso taco tour around the state as they discover the traditions, recipes, stories, and personalities behind puffy tacos in San Antonio, trompo tacos in Dallas, breakfast tacos in Austin, carnitas tacos in El Paso, fish tacos in Corpus Christi, barbacoa in the Rio Grande Valley, and much more.

Starting with the basics—tortillas, fillings, and salsas—and how to make, order, and eat tacos, the authors highlight ten taco cities/regions of Texas. For each place, they describe what makes the tacos distinctive, name their top five places to eat, and listen to the locals tell their taco stories. They hear from restaurant owners, taqueros, abuelitas, chefs, and patrons—both well-known and everyday folks—who talk about their local taco history and culture while sharing authentic recipes and recommendations for the best taco purveyors.

Whether you can’t imagine a day without tacos or you’re just learning your way around the trailers, trucks, and taqueros that make tacos happen, The Tacos of Texas is the indispensable guidebook, cookbook, and testimonio.

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Take Down Flag & Feed Horses
Bill Everhart
University of Illinois Press, 1998
Part memoir, part reportage, and all good reading, Take Down Flag & Feed Horses is the first volume devoted to the daily work of staff members at Yellowstone National Park. Written by a retired National Park Service historian, the book is divided into two parts, the first chronicling daily life at Yellowstone and the second detailing the savage fires that hit the park during the summer of 1988 and their aftermath. Bill Everhart lived at the park during the summer of 1978, accompanying the superintendent and his staff of rangers, naturalists, and scientists on daily rounds. His lively anecdotes and observations will lure readers farther and farther into the book and perhaps into the park as well. He gives a gripping account of the unstoppable fires of 1988 and shows how fire, a presence in the Yellowstone ecosystem for thousands of years,
ensures biological diversity.
    
 One of an elite cadre of Park Service employees who served in the system for many years, Everhart would smile knowingly at a comrade's recollection of an old-timer who left often unnecessary instructions that regularly concluded with, "Take down flag & feed horses (TDF &; FH)." His book, a gentle excursion through places and among people, will be attractive to a wide range of readers.
 
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Tales and Trails of Illinois
Stu Fliege
University of Illinois Press, 2002
Based on a collection of fifty-two vignettes of Illinois history originally published as weekly columns in newspapers and revised for publication in book form, Tales and Trails of Illinois presents little-known episodes and adds perspective to tales of the state’s varied past. Pairing readable commentary with striking description and detail, the book is a useful compendium of Illinois heritage in an accessible and entertaining format.
Stu Fliege highlights historical events, such as the Herrin Massacre and Chicago’s Iroquois Theatre fire, and covers the diverse terrain of Illinois’s natural and constructed wonders, from Lusk Creek Canyon to Robert Allerton Park. Readers will meet a colorful cast of characters including pioneers, squatters, miners, gangsters, and utopian leaders. They’ll travel back in time to when salt production was the state’s main industry and learn of the Illinois ingenuity that spawned inventions including barbed wire, the steel plow, and the Ferris wheel. From Oquawka’s elephant memorial to Murphysboro’s mysterious mud monster, the book also offers quirky facts and spooky stories that aren’t found in the average history book.
Liberally illustrated and clearly written, Tales and Trails of Illinois is a helpful learning tool for Illinoisans of all ages, perfect for families, history buffs, libraries, and the classroom.
 
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Tales from the Big Thicket
Francis Edward Abernethy
University of North Texas Press, 2002
Abernethy presents the history and folklore of the Big Thicket and its people, including a collection of Alabama-Coushatta tales, a search for hidden Jayhawkers during the Civil War, a nineteenth-century travel account, and a family history of the legendary Hooks.
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Tales of Forgotten Chicago
Richard C. Lindberg
Southern Illinois University Press, 2020
Hidden gems from Chicago’s past

Tales of Forgotten Chicago contains twenty-one fascinating, little-known stories about a great city and its people. Richard C. Lindberg has dug deeply to reveal lost historical events and hidden gems from Chicago’s past.  

Spanning the Civil War through the 1960s, the volume showcases forgotten crimes, punishments, and consequences: poisoned soup that nearly killed three hundred leading citizens, politicians, and business and religious leaders; a woman in showbiz and her street-thug husband whose checkered lives inspired a 1955 James Cagney movie; and the first police woman in Chicago, hired as a result of the senseless killing of a young factory girl in a racially tinged case of the 1880s.

Also included are tales of industry and invention, such as America’s first automobile race, the haunting of a wealthy Gilded Age manufacturer’s mansion, and the identity of the telephone’s rightful inventor. Chapters on the history of early city landmarks spotlight the fight to save Lakefront Park and how “Lucky” Charlie Weeghman’s north side baseball park became Wrigley Field. Other chapters explore civic, cultural, and political happenings: the great Railroad Fairs of 1948 and 1949; Richard J. Daley’s revival of the St. Patrick’s Day parade; political disrupter Lar “America First” Daly; and the founding of the Special Olympics in Chicago by Anne Burke and others. Finally, some are just wonderful tales, such asa  touching story about the sinking of Chicago's beloved Christmas tree ship.

Engrossing and imaginative, this collection opens new windows into the past of the Windy City.
 
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Tales of South Jersey
Profiles and Personalities
Waltzer, Jim
Rutgers University Press, 2001

There's much more to southern New Jersey than the Pine Barrens and the Jersey Devil, and this collection by journalists Jim Waltzer and Tom Wilk tells readers all about it. Oceanside and bayside towns offer a box seat from which to observe the regions rich history and the summery lore of the wonders of nature. Landlocked towns boast their own homespun and hell-raising traditions and idiosyncrasies.

Waltzer and Wilk have compiled almost fifty stories about the state's southernmost counties. Although the focus is on Atlantic City and its remarkable people, outsize structures, and quirky events, the storytelling ranges across the wider region to provide an insiders look at history as it was being made. You'll encounter gangsters and gamblers, baseball hitters and hurricanes, famous piers and hotels, landmark theaters and eateries, splashy events and unheralded oddities ¾ in sum, a cross-section of the regions character and characters.

The authors divide their book into six sections: entertainment, famous and infamous events, innovations and innovators, leisure and recreation, room and board, and sports legends. Within each section are the rich and varied stories Waltzer and Wilk have collected for New Jerseyans reading pleasure.

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Tall Tale America
A Legendary History of our Humorous Heroes
Walter Blair
University of Chicago Press, 1987
"Johnny Appleseed, Davy Crockett, Pecos Bill, Paul Bunyan and John Henry have all become heroes of American folklore. Some of them, like Crokett, were real, but all have become the subject of tall tales. This is a folksy history of the United States, told as if the characters were all real. This panoramic (if completely untrue) history begins with Columbus. . . . En route to its end in the 1940s (where traditional American heroes are enlisted to fight in World War II), it covers the great and small events of our national history, including the overlooked, but important ones, such as the invention of the prairie dog."—Washington Post Book World
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Tall Walls and High Fences
Bob Alexander
University of North Texas Press, 2020

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Tattered Kimonos in Japan
Remaking Lives from Memories of World War II
Robert Rand
University of Alabama Press, 2024
Examines Japan’s war generation—Japanese men and women who survived World War Two and rebuilt their lives, into the 21st century, from memories of that conflict
 
Since John Hersey’s Hiroshima—the classic account, published in 1946, of the aftermath of the atomic bombing of that city—very few books have examined the meaning and impact of World War II through the eyes of Japanese men and women who survived that conflict. Tattered Kimonos in Japan does just that: It is an intimate journey into contemporary Japan from the perspective of the generation of Japanese soldiers and civilians who survived World War II, by a writer whose American father and Japanese father-in-law fought on opposite sides of the conflict.

The author, a former NPR senior editor, is Jewish, and he approaches the subject with the sensibilities of having grown up in a community of Holocaust survivors. Mindful of the power of victimhood, memory, and shared suffering, he travels across Japan, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki, meeting a compelling group of men and women whose lives, even now, are defined by the trauma of war, and by lingering questions of responsibility and repentance for Japan’s wartime aggression.

The image of a tattered kimono from Hiroshima is the thread that drives the narrative arc of this emotional story about a writer’s encounter with history, inside the Japan of his father’s generation, on the other side of his father’s war. This is a book about history with elements of family memoir. It offers a fresh and truly unique perspective for readers interested in World War II, Japan, or Judaica; readers seeking cross-cultural journeys; and readers intrigued by Japanese culture, particularly the kimono.
 
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Teaching Black History to White People
By Leonard N. Moore
University of Texas Press, 2021

Leonard Moore has been teaching Black history for twenty-five years, mostly to white people. Drawing on decades of experience in the classroom and on college campuses throughout the South, as well as on his own personal history, Moore illustrates how an understanding of Black history is necessary for everyone.

With Teaching Black History to White People, which is “part memoir, part Black history, part pedagogy, and part how-to guide,” Moore delivers an accessible and engaging primer on the Black experience in America. He poses provocative questions, such as “Why is the teaching of Black history so controversial?” and “What came first: slavery or racism?” These questions don’t have easy answers, and Moore insists that embracing discomfort is necessary for engaging in open and honest conversations about race. Moore includes a syllabus and other tools for actionable steps that white people can take to move beyond performative justice and toward racial reparations, healing, and reconciliation.

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Tell Us a Story
An African American Family in the Heartland
Shirley Motley Portwood
Southern Illinois University Press, 2000

Illinois State Historical Society's Certificate of Excellence (2002)

Supplemented by recollections from the present era, Tell Us a Story is a colorful mosaic of African American autobiography and family history set in Springfield, Illinois, and in rural southern Illinois, Missouri, and Arkansas from the 1920s through the 1950s.

           

Shirley Motley Portwood shares rural, African American family and community history through a collection of vignettes about the Motley family. Initially transcribed accounts of the Motleys’ rich oral history, these stories have been passed among family members for nearly fifty years. In addition to her personal memories, Portwood presents interviews with her father, three brothers, and two sisters plus notes and recollections from their annual family reunions. The result is a composite view of the Motley family.

           

A historian, Portwood enhances the Motley family story by investigating primary data such as census, marriage, school, and land records, newspaper accounts, city directories, and other sources. The backbone of this saga, however, is oral history gathered from five generations, extending back to Portwood's grandparents, born more than one hundred years ago. Information regarding two earlier generations—her great- grandfather and great-great-grandparents, who were slaves—is based on historical research into state archives, county and local records, plantation records, and manuscript censuses.

           

A rich source for this material—the Motley family reunions—are week-long retreats where four generations gather at the John Motley house in Burlington, Connecticut, the Portwood home in Godfrey, Illinois, or other locations. Here the Motleys, all natural storytellers, pass on the family traditions. The stories, ranging from humorous to poignant, reveal much about the culture and history of African Americans, especially those from nonurban areas. Like many rural African Americans, the Motleys have a rich and often joyful family history with traditions reaching back to the slave past. They have known the harsh poverty that made even the necessities difficult to obtain and the racial prejudice that divided whites and blacks during the era of Jim Crow segregation and inequality; yet they have kept a tremendous faith in self-improvement through hard work and education.

           

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Telling to Live
Latina Feminist Testimonios
Latina Feminist Group
Duke University Press, 2001
Telling to Live embodies the vision that compelled Latina feminists to engage their differences and find common ground. Its contributors reflect varied class, religious, ethnic, racial, linguistic, sexual, and national backgrounds. Yet in one way or another they are all professional producers of testimonios—or life stories—whether as poets, oral historians, literary scholars, ethnographers, or psychologists. Through coalitional politics, these women have forged feminist political stances about generating knowledge through experience. Reclaiming testimonio as a tool for understanding the complexities of Latina identity, they compare how each made the journey to become credentialed creative thinkers and writers. Telling to Live unleashes the clarifying power of sharing these stories.
The complex and rich tapestry of narratives that comprises this book introduces us to an intergenerational group of Latina women who negotiate their place in U.S. society at the cusp of the twenty-first century. These are the stories of women who struggled to reach the echelons of higher education, often against great odds, and constructed relationships of sustenance and creativity along the way. The stories, poetry, memoirs, and reflections of this diverse group of Puerto Rican, Chicana, Native American, Mexican, Cuban, Dominican, Sephardic, mixed-heritage, and Central American women provide new perspectives on feminist theorizing, perspectives located in the borderlands of Latino cultures.
This often heart wrenching, sometimes playful, yet always insightful collection will interest those who wish to understand the challenges U.S. society poses for women of complex cultural heritages who strive to carve out their own spaces in the ivory tower.

Contributors. Luz del Alba Acevedo, Norma Alarcón, Celia Alvarez, Ruth Behar, Rina Benmayor, Norma E. Cantú, Daisy Cocco De Filippis, Gloria Holguín Cuádraz, Liza Fiol-Matta, Yvette Flores-Ortiz, Inés Hernández-Avila, Aurora Levins Morales, Clara Lomas, Iris Ofelia López, Mirtha N. Quintanales, Eliana Rivero, Caridad Souza, Patricia Zavella

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The The Battle to Stay in America
Immigration's Hidden Front Line
Michael Kagan
University of Nevada Press, 2020
2020 Foreword INDIE awards winner

"Day-to-day life in immigrant communities is described with refreshing clarity and heart... an unusually accessible primer on immigration law and a valuable guide to the ways it currently works to perpetuate an excluded immigrant underclass with diminished rights."

The New York Review of Books

The national debate over American immigration policy has obsessed politicians and disrupted the lives of millions of people for decades. The Battle to Stay in America focuses on Las Vegas, Nevada–a city where more than one in five residents was born in a foreign country, and where the community is struggling to defend itself against the federal government’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants. Told through the eyes of an immigration lawyer on the front lines of that battle, this book offers an accessible, intensely personal introduction to a broken legal system. It is also a raw, honest story of exhaustion, perseverance, and solidarity. Michael Kagan describes how current immigration law affects real people’s lives and introduces us to some remarkable individuals—immigrants and activists—who grapple with its complications every day. He explains how American immigration law often gives good people no recourse. He shows how under President Trump the complex bureaucracies that administer immigration law have been re-engineered to carry out a relentless but often invisible attack against people and families who are integral to American communities.

Kagan tells the stories of people desperate to escape unspeakable violence in their homeland, children separated from their families and trapped in a tangle of administrative regulations, and hardworking long-time residents suddenly ripped from their productive lives when they fall unwittingly into the clutches of the immigration enforcement system. He considers how the crackdown on immigrants negatively impacts the national economy and offers a deeply considered assessment of the future of immigration policy in the United States. Kagan also captures the psychological costs exacted by fear of deportation and by increasingly overt expressions of hatred against immigrants.  
 
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Things You Need to Hear
Collected Memories of Growing Up in Arkansas, 1890–1980
Margaret Jones Bolsterli
University of Arkansas Press, 2016
Things You Need to Hear gathers memories of Arkansans from all over the state with widely different backgrounds. In their own words, these people tell of the things they did growing up in the early twentieth century to get an education, what they ate, how they managed to get by during difficult times, how they amused themselves and earned a living, and much more. Some of Margaret Bolsterli's "informants," as she calls them, are famous (Johnny Cash, Maya Angelou, Levon Helm, Joycelyn Elders), but many more are not. Their vivid personal stories have been taken from published works and from original interviews conducted by Bolsterli. All together, these tales preserve memories of ways of life that are compelling, entertaining, and certainly well worth remembering.
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This Land Was Mexican Once
Histories of Resistance from Northern California
By Linda Heidenreich
University of Texas Press, 2007

The territory of Napa County, California, contains more than grapevines. The deepest roots belong to Wappo-speaking peoples, a group whose history has since been buried by the stories of Spanish colonizers, Californios (today's Latinos), African Americans, Chinese immigrants, and Euro Americans. Napa's history clearly is one of co-existence; yet, its schoolbooks tell a linear story that climaxes with the arrival of Euro Americans. In "This Land was Mexican Once," Linda Heidenreich excavates Napa's subaltern voices and histories to tell a complex, textured local history with important implications for the larger American West, as well.

Heidenreich is part of a new generation of scholars who are challenging not only the old, Euro-American depiction of California, but also the linear method of historical storytelling—a method that inevitably favors the last man writing. She first maps the overlapping histories that comprise Napa's past, then examines how the current version came to dominate—or even erase—earlier events. So while history, in Heidenreich's words, may be "the stuff of nation-building," it can also be "the stuff of resistance." Chapters are interspersed with "source breaks"—raw primary sources that speak for themselves and interrupt the linear, Euro-American telling of Napa's history. Such an inclusive approach inherently acknowledges the connections Napa's peoples have to the rest of the region, for the linear history that marginalizes minorities is not unique to Napa. Latinos, for instance, have populated the American West for centuries, and are still shaping its future. In the end, "This Land was Mexican Once" is more than the story of Napa, it is a multidimensional model for reflecting a multicultural past.

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This Storied River
Legend & Lore of the Upper Mississippi
Dennis McCann
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2017
In This Storied River, longtime journalist Dennis McCann takes us on an intimate tour of the Upper Mississippi—from Dubuque, Iowa, to the Minnesota headwaters, and dozens of places in between. Far more than a travel guide, This Storied River celebrates the Upper Mississippi’s colorful history and the unique role the river has played in shaping the Midwest.
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This Superior Place
Stories of Bayfield and the Apostle Islands
Dennis McCann
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2013

Picturesque little Bayfield on Lake Superior is Wisconsin’s smallest city by population but one of its most popular visitor destinations. This book captures those unique qualities that keep tourists coming back year after year and offers a historically reliable look at the community as it is today and how it came to be. Abundantly illustrated with both historical and contemporary images, This Superior Place showcases, as author Dennis McCann writes, “a community where the past was layered with good times and down times, where natural beauty was the one resource that could not be exhausted by the hand of man, and where history is ever present.”

Because Bayfield serves as “the gateway to the Apostle Islands,” the book also includes chapters on the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, Madeline Island, and the nearby Red Cliff Ojibwe community. It also covers the significant eras in the city’s history: lumbering, quarrying, commercial fishing, and the advent of the orchards visitors see today. It is not a guidebook as such but more of a visual and written tour of the city and the major elements that came together to make it what it is. Colorful stories from the past, written in Dennis McCann’s casual, humorous style, give a sense of the unique characters and events that have shaped this charming city on the lake.

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This Tender Place
The Story of a Wetland Year
Laurie Lawlor
University of Wisconsin Press, 2007

    After the deaths of her father and father-in-law, Laurie Lawlor discovers an unlikely place for healing and transformation in a wetland in southeastern Wisconsin—a landscape of abundant and sometimes inaccessible beauty that has often been ignored, misunderstood, and threatened by human destruction. In her decade-long personal wetland journey, she examines the sky, delves underwater, and peers between sedges in all seasons and all times of day.
    This Tender Place is a celebration of nature, the elements, and humanity. From the wetland’s genesis during the ice age to its survival in the twenty-first century, Lawlor chronicles the universal ties among people, wild places, and healthy wetlands.

    An engaging and deeply intimate record, This Tender Place is at its heart a story of refuge and renewal refracted through the lens of life within the wetlands—one of the most productive, yet most endangered, ecosystems in the world.

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A Thousand Deer
Four Generations of Hunting and the Hill Country
By Rick Bass
University of Texas Press, 2012

In November, countless families across Texas head out for the annual deer hunt, a ritual that spans generations, ethnicities, socioeconomics, and gender as perhaps no other cultural experience in the state. Rick Bass’s family has returned to the same hardscrabble piece of land in the Hill Country—“the Deer Pasture”—for more than seventy-five years. In A Thousand Deer, Bass walks the Deer Pasture again in memory and stories, tallying up what hunting there has taught him about our need for wildness and wilderness, about cycles in nature and in the life of a family, and particularly about how important it is for children to live in the natural world.

The arc of A Thousand Deer spans from Bass’s boyhood in the suburbs of Houston, where he searched for anything rank or fecund in the little oxbow swamps and pockets of woods along Buffalo Bayou, to his commitment to providing his children in Montana the same opportunity—a life afield—that his parents gave him in Texas. Inevitably this brings him back to the Deer Pasture and the passing of seasons and generations he has experienced there. Bass lyrically describes his own passage from young manhood, when the urge to hunt was something primal, to mature adulthood and the waning of the urge to take an animal, his commitment to the hunt evolving into a commitment to family and to the last wild places.

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Through Animals' Eyes, Again
Stories of Wildlife Rescue
Lynn Marie Cuny
University of North Texas Press, 2006

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Through Animals' Eyes
True Stories from a Wildlife Sanctuary
Lynn Marie Cuny
University of North Texas Press, 1998

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Thundering Sneakers
By Prudence Mackintosh
University of Texas Press, 2002
Thundering Sneakers begins the story of the Mackintosh boys. In these essays, Prudence Mackintosh describes the delights and terrors of living with little boys who are determined to be boys, despite the carefully nonsexist childrearing practices of the 1970s. With telling vignettes of boyish disasters that drive her to despair, as well as the rare quiet moments of hugs and confidences that make it all worthwhile, she perfectly captures the early years when a young mother still looks for "the real mother" to come and bail her out.
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A Tiger Remembers
The Way We Were in Singapore
Ann Wee
National University of Singapore Press, 2017
Born in the Year of the Fire Tiger, Ann Wee moved to Singapore in 1950 to marry into a Singaporean Chinese family, entering into a new world of cultural expectations and domestic rituals. She went on to become a pioneer in Singapore’s fledging social welfare department and is often described as the founding mother of social work in Singapore. In A Tiger Remembers, she draws on her decades of experience getting to know the many shapes and forms of the Singapore family and witnessing how they transformed since the ’50s.
 
Wee’s talent is for remembering and paying homage to the things history books often deem insignificant—things that can contain some of the most illuminating details about the day to day inner workings of families from many backgrounds, such as terms of endearment; the emotional nuance in social relations; questions of hygiene; the stories of convicts; tales of ghost wives and changeling babies; anecdotes from rural clan settlements and migrant dormitories; and the migration of families from squatter settlements into public housing. Affectionately observed and wittily narrated, with a deep appreciation of how far Singapore has come, this book brings to life generations of social change through a focus on the institution of the family.
 
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Transit Talk
New York's Bus and Subway Workers Tell Their Stories
Robert W. Snyder
Rutgers University Press, 1998
New York City may seem to be a place where everyone is a stranger, yet transit workers provide a human presence on a late-night bus or an empty subway platform. Few of us give any thought to these invisible workers-until something goes wrong. Transit Talk takes readers into the world of MTA New York City transit employees, as they describe their lives and work, from the most visible subway conductor to the seemingly invisible mechanic.

There are nearly 44,000 transit workers like those you will meet in Transit Talk , and every day they help five million of us travel to work, to school, to weddings, to funerals, to hospitals, to vacations. These workers labor daily on subway tracks inches from high-voltage powerlines, risking their lives for passengers they'U never know. The city can feel large and fragmented, but the transportation system and its workers create common threads in the lives of all New Yorkers, threads we take for granted.

Together, their stories create a human tableau of life and labor in the city within a city that is the MTA New York City Transit. Transit workers find satisfaction in fixing a damaged subway car, gain wisdom from mastering a dangerous workplace, nurse emotional wounds from tending to someone injured in an accident, battle frustration from difficulties with management, and express satisfaction when reflecting on a productive career. They tell of how years spent in the same shop create bonds between workers. They talk of the burden of laboring in a twenty-four-hour system with night shifts and weekend workdays that take them away from families. You'U hear painful tales of informing next-of-kin of a death on the tracks as well as joyous anecdotes of workers delivering a baby in a subway car.
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Turn Out the Lights
Chronicles of Texas during the 80s and 90s
By Gary Cartwright
University of Texas Press, 2000

Whether the subject is Jack Ruby, Willie Nelson, or his own leukemia-stricken son Mark, when it comes to looking at the world through another person's eyes, nobody does it better than Gary Cartwright. For over twenty-five years, readers of Texas Monthly have relied on Cartwright to tell the stories behind the headlines with pull-no-punches honesty and wry humor. His reporting has told us not just what's happened over three decades in Texas, but, more importantly, what we've become as a result.

This book collects seventeen of Cartwright's best Texas Monthly articles from the 1980s and 1990s, along with a new essay, "My Most Unforgettable Year," about the lasting legacy of the Kennedy assassination. He ranges widely in these pieces, from the reasons for his return to Texas after a New Mexican exile to profiles of Kris Kristofferson and Willie Nelson. Along the way, he strolls through San Antonio's historic King William District; attends a Dallas Cowboys old-timers reunion and the Holyfield vs. Foreman fight; visits the front lines of Texas' new range wars; gets inside the heads of murderers, gamblers, and revolutionaries; and debunks Viagra miracles, psychic surgery, and Kennedy conspiracy theories. In Cartwright's words, these pieces all record "the renewal of my Texas-ness, a rediscovery of Texas after returning home."

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