{"title":"Double Mountain Books Series","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"texas-panhandle-frontier-book-frederick-w-rathjen-9780896723993","title":"The Texas Panhandle Frontier","description":"'An outstanding contribution to the historiography of the American West and likely will remain for a long time the definitive work on the Texas Panhandle' - Ernest Wallace. 'As one born in the region, Rathjen is sympathetic to it, but he is also understanding of it; there is little Chamber of Commerce stuff in his story' - Robert G. Athearn. The Texas Panhandleits eastern edge descending sharply from the plains into the canyons of Palo Duro, Tule, Quitaque, Casa Blanca, and Yellow House is as rich in history as it is in natural beauty. Long considered a crossroads of ancient civilizations, the twenty-six northernmost Texas counties lie on the southern reaches of the Great Plains, where numerous dry creek beds and the Canadian River have carved the region appropriately named the High Plains. Through these plains and their canyons, ancient peoples trailed game for the hunt. The Panhandle provided choice grazing lands for bison, and as the region became more familiar to ancient tribes, semipermanent camps marked the landscape. Yet when Coronado's conquistadores crossed the High Plains in search of fabled wealth and found sun-baked adobe instead of gold, they declared the region a wasteland. Likewise, the Republic of Texas found little use for their vast plains land considering settlement of the frontier far too dangerous. Not until the late-nineteenth century, as the U.S. Army waged war on the Comanches, Kiowas, and Cheyennes who lived there, did Panhandle tracts of frontier open to hard-bitten settlers who had to prove themselves as indomitable as they were land hungry. Departing from the premise that the Panhandle frontier 'is but a brush stroke on...[the] much larger canvas' of previous frontier histories, Rathjen challenges the work of Frederick Jackson Turner and Walter Prescott Webb, and proves that regional is by no means synonymous with provincial.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49662487232785,"sku":"GOR013514894","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51009532690705,"sku":"NIN9780896723993","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53044387545361,"sku":"CIN0896723992G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53460626866449,"sku":"CIN0896723992VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0896723992.jpg?v=1761386377"},{"product_id":"quirt-and-the-spur-book-edgar-rye-9780896724419","title":"The Quirt and the Spur","description":"In 1909, former frontier judge and editor Edgar Rye introduced The Quirt and the Spur: Vanishing Shadows of the Texas Frontier to a reading public hungry for stories of this vanishing world. Drawing upon his experiences during the frontier?s heyday, Rye focused on the area around old Fort Griffin during the 1870s, a time and place that was fast fading from memory. At the heart of the narrative stood The Flat, a wild yet vibrant frontier village attached to the fort. Peopled by the desperate and the hopeful, the adventurous and the opportunistic, The Flat was a place in the tradition of Dodge City and Tombstone, towns that became synonymous with western violence and lawlessness.More than any other single work of western Texas historiography, The Quirt and the Spur helped shape the perception of Old Northwest Texas as a wild and woolly frontier. Rye, who intended the work to bring pleasure to old friends, never anticipated that it would be taken as history. Indeed, he anticipated that his more exacting reader would find his yarns to be ?all wool and a yard wide.? Nevertheless, in The Quirt and the Spur Rye successfully grasped at those ?vanishing shadows? of the frontier past and set them down for posterity. Over the years, historians and writers have drawn upon the mythical Fort Griffin in their own works, and today Rye?s opus is a staple in collectors? libraries.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49879905566993,"sku":"CIN0896724417G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0896724417.jpg?v=1761391341"},{"product_id":"bone-pickers-book-al-dewlen-9780896724792","title":"The Bone Pickers","description":"Against the flamboyant background of the ?Golden Spread,? the oil-rich Panhandle of the late 1950s, Al Dewlen has poised a full-scale and truly original novel of one Texas family?the Mungers of Amarillo. The six Munger siblings are the heirs of hard-drinking, hardscrabble farmer Cecil Munger, who in one generation brought his family from Dust Bowl poverty to unfathomable wealth. Sitting as directors of the several corporations in which their wealth resides, five of the siblings?Spain, Texas, Laska, China, and Bethel?struggle to balance their past with their present, their place in society, and their obligations to community, to themselves, and to their damaged and dependent brother June, confined to the old homestead.Wayward humor, warmth and passion, vigorous and imaginative revelation silhouette their individual rebelliousness against the debilitating restrictions of the family empire. Lon Tinkle called Dewlen a born storyteller and praised The Bone Pickers for having ?the kind of novelistic vision that makes the reader press on to the end without stopping.?This drama of human need, hidden dreams, and battered aspirations occurs in characters of such depth they may well become the most vivid people you know. . . .The ambience and essence of matters uniquely Texan is a pervasive underscore to gripping themes and raw, rending conflicts.?W.U. McCoy, from his new introduction","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50103898734865,"sku":"CIN0896724794G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53180790931729,"sku":"CIN0896724794VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/B00KIJUCX8.jpg?v=1761389936"},{"product_id":"tuneful-tales-book-bernice-love-wiggins-9780896724853","title":"Tuneful Tales","description":"As enigmatic and contradictory as far West Texas has always been, it is nevertheless surprising to learn that in 1925 its desert germinated a slender but vibrant shoot of the Harlem Renaissance. Isolated on the U.S.?Mexico border, far from any metropolitan African-American community or literary influences, Bernice Love Wiggins, a perceptive young poet, self-published her first, apparently only, book of poetry. One of only a handful of black writers in Texas in the 1920s and 1930s, Wiggins was contemporary with Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Zora Neale Hurston and was among the first female African-American poets published in the United States. Just as the Harlem movement focused on experiences of black Americans who sought relief from racism and endeavored to build communities, Tuneful Tales gives voice to the many-sided black experience in remote El Paso.Whatever Wiggins may have known of her contemporaries more than half a continent away or of the movement itself may never be clear. Disappointingly, after her move to California in the early 1930s , the trail grows cold. Yet the composed young woman who gazes so wisely, if dreamily, from her high school photographs evoked her personae so compellingly in both timbre and substance that great folklorist and critic J. Mason Brewer proclaimed her the female Paul Laurence Dunbar.Ethiopia SpeaksLynched!Somewhere in the South, the ?Land of the Free,?To a very strong branch of a dogwood tree.Lynched! One of my sons,?When the flag was in danger they answered the callI gave them black sons, ah! yes, gave them allWhen you came to me. And Now GoodnightI have told you tuneful tales,Gathered from the hills and vales, Wheresoever mine own people chanced to dwell.If the tales have brought you mirth, Brought more laughter to the earth, It is well. Maceo Dailey is the director of the African American Studies Program of the University of Texas El Paso and a governor?s appointee to the Texas Council For The Humanities and Juneteenth Commission.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":50371837427985,"sku":"CIN0896724859A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50371838509329,"sku":"CIN0896724859G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50371839623441,"sku":"CIN0896724859VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51009447624977,"sku":"NIN9780896724853","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0896724859.jpg?v=1761386896"},{"product_id":"i-and-claudie-book-dillon-anderson-9780896724297","title":"I and Claudie","description":"I and Claudie is a delightful and captivating novel about a couple of bungling but good-hearted con men who (barely) make their way across Texas over a two-year period in the 1930s. Their adventures, Anderson said, were in no sense autobiographical, but sometimes I am sorry they are not. The charming con men outwit lumbermen, oil men, and others, but are sometimes the victims themselves. Clint Hightower (the I in the title) is a smooth- talking maker of deals; Claudie Hughes, all 6'6\"\" of him, is his slower-of-mind sidekick who does all the real work and, often unwittingly, saves the day. The reader is both entertained and informed by the book. We learn much about Texas and Texans of the period. We learn about hurricanes along the coast, oil leasing and lumbering in East Texas, buried treasure in West Texas, the state fair in Dallas, the stockyards in Forth Worth, farming along the Brazos River, and more. The stories that make up the novel have been compared in style to O. Henrys classic tales. Several of them appeared in the venerable \"\"Atlantic Monthly\"\" before the book was published in 1951. It is one of A.C. Greens all time top 50. \"\"I and Claudie\"\" is a delightful book. One or two latter-day critics have termed it too ingenuous for our sophisticated age. Don't believe them. 'Clint Hightower would be right at home today in many an executive suite, with Claudie...waiting to take the fall for him' - A. C. Greene, \"\"The Fifty Best Books on Texas\"\".","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51009403191569,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51009406370065,"sku":"NIN9780896724297","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0896724298.jpg?v=1761389493"},{"product_id":"through-the-shadows-with-o-henry-book-al-jennings-9780896724808","title":"Through the Shadows with O.Henry","description":"Al Jennings, if we are to believe him, was for several years a close friend of O. Henry (William Sydney Porter), perhaps America?s favorite short-story writer. They met, Jennings claims, as outlaws on the run in Honduras, served time together in the Columbus, Ohio, Penitentiary at the turn of the century, and later met up in New York. Jennings, erstwhile lawyer, bank robber, and Hollywood consultant, was the subject of the 1951 movie Al Jennings of Oklahoma, starring Dan Duryea. Although a suspect narrator at best, Jennings is a masterful storyteller in this 1921 classic. Jennings describes the horrors of prison life so compellingly that the book might have served as a call for prison reform. Yet he also tells how he, O. Henry, and their friends managed to cope. They secured jobs in the prison post office and pharmacy and managed to find a secret room near the kitchen where on Sunday evenings they retired for a fine meal?complete with wine secured from corrupt prison contractors?and good talk. As Jennings recaps their long, philosophical discussions, readers may wish to have joined them in the fancy New York restaurants they were later able to frequent.Anyone reading Through the Shadows with O. Henry will agree that both of the author and his subject were characters worthy of any O. Henry tale.?Mike Cox","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51009514570001,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51009518731537,"sku":"NIN9780896724808","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0896724808.jpg?v=1761389892"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/de-de\/collections\/double-mountain-books-series-buchreihe.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}