Houston Chronicle Maggie Galehouse column

Source: Houston ChronicleAug.self storage 24--It's a project as sprawling, surprising and entrepreneurial as ... Texas.Starting in 2017, the University of Texas Press will publish 16 books about the Lone Star State, from pre-Columbian days right up through Rick Perry. Each book will address a solitary subject -- from food, sports and politics to what the rest of the world thinks of Texas.UT-Austin faculty will write the books.To the university's credit, the series doesn't come saddled with a wonky, academic title. Rather, the project has been christened with a fresh (and colon-free) name, The Texas Bookshelf.Dave Hamrick, director of UT Press, hopes it will replace T.R. Fehrenbach's classic 1968 tome, "Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans." After all, a lot has happened since then.The Texas Bookshelf was Hamrick's idea."I began to think about a big, long panoramic history," he said. "I started making lists and maps about what a book that covered Texas would look like. And all of a sudden these big fields of study began to coalesce. It's shocking that nothing like this has ever been done."The picture in Hamrick's head was a constellation of books with Texas history in the center and dotted lines radiating out to other subjects. It occurred to him that he had experts in each of these subjects at his fingertips."We intentionally selected people on the faculty that had either written trade books or that we were confident could write a general interest book," he said.Beyond the books, a website will link to archives and collections on the campus, and public programming will be built around each topic. (A film festival featuring the greatest Texas films? Yes, please.)The "very loose budget" is $1.2 million, Hamrick said. "We'll be fundraising."Stephen Harrigan will write the first (and fattest) book, about Texas history. Harrigan writes historical novels, nonfiction and screenplays. A longtime contributor to Texas Monthly -- his recent goodbye to late Texas writer John Graves will make you cry -- he is perhaps best known for his books "The Gates of the Alamo" and "Remember Ben Clayton." He teaches one class a year for the master's program at UT's Michener Center for Writers.A "racing metabolism," Harrigan said, is what his Texas history book really needs."It just has to be fun to read, that's priority No. 1 for me," said the author, who's finishing up a book about Abraham Lincoln's early life for Knopf. "I don't want to write a textbook.迷你倉It's not that I plan to leave out the boring parts, but I want to make the boring parts exciting."The raw material for exciting stories is abundant, he said."The narrative of Cabeza de Vaca has been told and retold," Harrigan said, "but it is such an astounding story. The idea that you have this huge expedition, with all the might of Spain at its disposal. Four hundred on this fleet, of which four survive -- Cabeza de Vaca, Estevanico and two other guys. They live among the coastal Indians of Texas and end up being rescued eight years later by a slave-hunting expedition. ... It's an incredible arc that's been stewing around in my head for a long time."The 15 titles following Harrigan's will be released over a five-year period, offering general interest histories of Texas politics, art, film, music, food, architecture, photography, sports, business, books and writers, and theater, as well as perceptions of Texas outside the state, the African-American experience, a history of the Texas borderlands, and the Tejano and Tejana experience.Hardcover and e-book editions will publish simultaneously, Hamrick said, and the hardcovers will be old-school lush, with heavy paper, book jackets, the works. The titles on art, architecture and photography will be printed as large-format coffee-table books."We really want to look outward and put Texas in a national/international context," Hamrick said. "Southwest Airlines is one of the top air carriers. Whole Foods is a leader in the organic food movement. Austin is a leader in independent film. We've had three Texas presidents in the last 50 years. So many things intersect through Texas. In an odd kind of way, when we're done my hope is there will be a portrait of America in the 21st century."Odder still is the realization that if you want your books to resonate with a large audience, you must also think small."I know from being a novelist how crucially important details are," Harrigan said. "You can't make something come alive unless you can give the reader a sense of the texture -- the smells, sights, sounds of an event. I'm going to be focusing on what it felt like to be there. To be on a lunar module heading to the moon. To see everything fall apart when you're working at Enron. It's these intimate experiences that can help the history of Texas feel alive."Copyright: ___ (c)2013 the Houston Chronicle Visit the Houston Chronicle at .chron.com Distributed by MCT Information Services文件倉