Part Four: Nicholas Lemann -- Part One: Where Is My Home? Morning Light ; On the Edge ; The Secret Life of the Beach ; Going into the Desert ; Isla del Padre ; "The Tiger Is God" ; The Bay ; Swamp Thing. -- Part Two: Highways and Jungle Paths. The Roof of Eden ; Feeling Flush ; The Anger of Achilles ; Rock and Sky ; The Little Man's Road ; My Igloo ; A Secret Door. -- Part Three: The Shadow of History. The Temple of Destiny ; The Man Nobody Knows ; Comanche Midnight ; Wolf House ; The Last Days of David Crockett ; Taking Care of Lonesome Dove ; His Fostering Hand ; The Eye of the Mammoth ; A Troublous Life. -- Part Four: Where Is My Home? What Texas Means to Me ; The Soul of Treaty Oak ; Wish I Were There ; The Eyesore ; The Golden Age of Austin ; Texanic! ; Fade In, Fade Out ; Where Is My Home?
Summary:
"In four decades of writing for magazines ranging from Texas Monthly to the Atlantic, American History, and Travel Holiday, Stephen Harrigan has established himself as one of America's most thoughtful writers. In this career-spanning anthology, which gathers together essays from two previous books--A Natural State and Comanche Midnight--as well as previously uncollected work, readers finally have a comprehensive collection of Harrigan's best nonfiction. History--natural history, human history, and personal history--and place are the cornerstones of The Eye of the Mammoth. But the specific history or place varies considerably from essay to essay. Harrigan's career has taken him from the Alaska Highway to the Chihuahuan Desert, from the casinos of Monaco to his ancestors' village in the Czech Republic. Texas is the subject of a number of essays, and a force in shaping others, as in "The Anger of Achilles," in which a nineteenth-century painting moves the author despite his possessing a "Texan's suspicion of serious culture." Harrigan's deceptively straightforward voice, however, belies an intense curiosity about things that, by his own admission, may be "unknowable." Certainly, we are limited in what we can know about the inner life of George Washington, the last days of Davy Crockett, or the motives of a caged tiger, but Harrigan's gift--a gift that has also made him an award-winning novelist--is to bring readers closer to such things, to make them less remote, just as a cave painting in the title essay eerily transmits the living stare of a long-extinct mammoth."--Publisher's website.
Series:
Jack and Doris Smothers series in Texas history, life, and culture ; no. 38
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.