Musical magic hit Austin, Texas, in the early 1970s. At now-legendary venues such as Threadgill's, Vulcan Gas Company, and the Armadillo World Headquarters, a host of country, rock-and-roll, blues, and folk musicians came together and created a sound and a scene that Jan Reid vividly detailed in his 1974 book, The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock. The breadth of talent still astounds—Willie Nelson, Janis Joplin, Jerry Jeff Walker, Doug Sahm, Delbert McClinton, Michael Martin Murphey, Willis Alan Ramsey, Kinky Friedman, Steve Fromholz, Bobby Bridger, Billy Joe Shaver, Marcia Ball, and Townes Van Zandt. Reid's book even inspired the nationally popular and long-running PBS series Austin City Limits, which focused attention on the trends that fed the music scene—progressive country, country rock, western swing, blues, and bluegrass among them. In this new edition, Jan Reid revitalizes his classic look at the Austin music scene. He has substantially reworked the early chapters to include musicians and musical currents from other parts of Texas that significantly contributed to the delightful convergence of popular cultures in Austin. Four new chapters and an epilogue show how the creative burst of the seventies directly spawned a new generation of talents who carry on the tradition—Lyle Lovett, Stevie Ray Vaughan, The Fabulous Thunderbirds, Robert Earl Keen, Steve Earle, Jimmy LaFave, Kelly Willis, Joe Ely, Bruce and Charlie Robison, and The Dixie Chicks.

The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock: New Edition (Jack and Doris Smothers Series in Texas History, Life, and Culture, No. 12)

Arts & Photography

Reid, Jan

Music

University of Texas Press

On April 20, 1998, Jan Reid was shot during a robbery in Mexico City, where he had gone to watch his friend, the boxer Jesus Chavez, fight. In The Bullet Meant for Me, Reid powerfully recounts his ordeal, the long chain of life events that brought him to that fateful attack, and his struggle to regain the ability to walk and to be a full partner in a deeply satisfying marriage. Re-examining the whole trajectory of his life, Reid questions how much the Texan ideal of manhood shaped his identity, including his love for boxing and participation in the sport. He meditates on male friendship as he tells the story of his close relationship with Chavez, whose career and personal travails Reid details with empathy and insight. And he describes his long months in physical therapy, during which he drew on the unwavering love of his wife and daughter, as well as the courage and strength he had learned from boxing, to heal his body and spirit. A moving, intimate portrait of a man, a friendship, and a marriage, The Bullet Meant for Me is Jan Reid's most personal book.

The Bullet Meant for Me

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

Winner, Coral Horton Tullis Memorial Prize, Texas State Historical Association, 2012 Liz Carpenter Award for Research in the History of Women, Texas State Historical Association, 2012
When Ann Richards delivered the keynote of the 1988 Democratic National Convention and mocked President George H. W. Bush—"Poor George, he can't help it. He was born with a silver foot in his mouth"—she instantly became a media celebrity and triggered a rivalry that would alter the course of American history. In 1990, Richards won the governorship of Texas, upsetting the GOP's colorful rancher and oilman Clayton Williams. The first ardent feminist elected to high office in America, she opened up public service to women, blacks, Hispanics, Asian Americans, gays, and the disabled. Her progressive achievements and the force of her personality created a lasting legacy that far transcends her rise and fall as governor of Texas.
In Let the People In, Jan Reid draws on his long friendship with Richards, interviews with her family and many of her closest associates, her unpublished correspondence with longtime companion Bud Shrake, and extensive research to tell a very personal, human story of Ann Richards's remarkable rise to power as a liberal Democrat in a conservative Republican state. Reid traces the whole arc of Richards's life, beginning with her youth in Waco, her marriage to attorney David Richards, her frustration and boredom with being a young housewife and mother in Dallas, and her shocking encounters with Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter. He follows Richards to Austin and the wild 1970s scene and describes her painful but successful struggle against alcoholism. He tells the full, inside story of Richards's rise from county office and the state treasurer's office to the governorship, where she championed gun control, prison reform, environmental protection, and school finance reform, and he explains why she lost her reelection bid to George W. Bush, which evened his family's score and launched him toward the presidency. Reid describes Richards's final years as a world traveler, lobbyist, public speaker, and mentor and inspiration to office holders, including Hillary Clinton. His nuanced portrait reveals a complex woman who battled her own frailties and a good-old-boy establishment to claim a place on the national political stage and prove "what can happen in government if we simply open the doors and let the people in."

Let the People In: The Life and Times of Ann Richards

Doug Sahm was a singer, songwriter, and guitarist of legendary range and reputation. The first American musician to capitalize on the 1960s British invasion, Sahm vaulted to international fame leading a faux-British band called the Sir Douglas Quintet, whose hits included "She's About a Mover," "The Rains Came," and "Mendocino." He made the cover of Rolling Stone magazine in 1968 and 1971 and performed with the Grateful Dead, Dr. John, Willie Nelson, Boz Scaggs, and Bob Dylan.
Texas Tornado is the first biography of this national music legend. Jan Reid traces the whole arc of Sahm's incredibly versatile musical career, as well as the manic energy that drove his sometimes turbulent personal life and loves. Reid follows Sahm from his youth in San Antonio as a prodigy steel guitar player through his breakout success with the Sir Douglas Quintet and his move to California, where, with an inventive take on blues, rock, country, and jazz, he became a star in San Francisco and invented the "cosmic cowboy" vogue. Reid also chronicles Sahm's later return to Texas and to chart success with the Grammy Award–winning Texas Tornados, a rowdy "conjunto rock and roll band" that he modeled on the Beatles and which included Sir Douglas alum Augie Meyers and Tejano icons Freddy Fender and Flaco Jimenez.
With his exceptional talent and a career that bridged five decades, Doug Sahm was a rock and roll innovator whose influence can only be matched among his fellow Texas musicians by Buddy Holly, Roy Orbison, Janis Joplin, and Stevie Ray Vaughan. Texas Tornado vividly captures the energy and intensity of this musician whose life burned out too soon, but whose music continues to rock.

Texas Tornado: The Times and Music of Doug Sahm (Brad and Michele Moore Roots Music Series)

Sahm, Shawn

Humor & Entertainment

Jared Ramey returns to his small hometown in Texas, becomes deputy sheriff, and is caught up in a feud between his father and the sheriff

Deerinwater

Literature & Fiction

Ballantine Books

Texas Wildflowers

Meier, Leo

Gramercy

Abducted at gunpoint and fearing for his life, Jan Reid took a swing at the gunman and missed. A muzzle flashed, and the bullet that struck his spine would send his life careening out of control–until he looked within himself, and to his family and friends, and found healing. When Reid’s friends talk him into coming along to an Austin boxing gym for a workout, he has no idea it will send him down a path that will completely change his life. Inside, in a ring held together with duct tape and the blood and sweat of a group of gritty boxers, Reid falls under the spell of the sport. As his skills develop, his relationships with his fellow boxers deepen, especially with the talented young Mexican immigrant, Jesus Chavez. Through Chavez’s promising career, and his own informal sparring, Reid plunges into the culture of competition among men. But then, just when Chavez achieves a number-one world ranking, he is deported to Mexico. Heartbroken, Reid travels to Mexico City to watch Chavez begin his comeback, when a bombshell of a different sort blows open Reid’s own life: One night, after celebrating Chavez’s victory in a shadowy part of Mexico City, pistoleros carjack the taxi he is sharing with his friends. In the ensuing scuffle, a bandit fires a bullet that pierces Reid’s left arm, rips through his abdomen, and lodges itself in his spine, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down. Reid then confronts new kinds of struggles in which the rules are no longer clear–the battle to regain the ability to walk, to bolster his marriage, to untangle his newly complicated relationship with Mexico, a country he once loved, and to live with dignity. Inspired by the love and valor of his wife, Dorothy, and daughter, Lila, Reid also draws on lessons from the boxing ring–physical conditioning, discipline, controlling frustration, and overcoming fear. Thus begins Reid’s physical and emotional journey to recover his strength, his masculinity, and his sense of self. Reid not only examines the effects of his physical disability but also offers a revealing portrait of the testosterone-driven worlds that collided on that fateful night. With the observational prowess of a journalist and the raw power of a fighter, Reid shares in these pages his discovery of the value of other kinds of strength–and his new perspective on the evolution of Western male culture and machismo alike. Rich with insight and vividly told, this is the remarkable story of a true survivor.

The Bullet Meant for Me: A Memoir

Arts & Literature

Broadway

Comanche Sundown is the story of the great war chief Quanah Parker, a freed slave and cowboy named Bose Ikard, and the women they love. In 1869 Quanah and Bose do their best to kill each other in a brutal fight on horseback in West Texas. But over several years, through the flash and chaos of war and killing they discover that they are friends, not enemies. They change from violent unformed youths into men of courage and decency. The son of the ferocious warrior Nocona and the tragic captive Texan Cynthia Ann Parker, Quanah suffers the wound of being slurred and rejected by many Comanches as someone of impure blood and certain bad luck. When told he cannot marry his youthful love Weckeah, he rides off and joins another band of his people in the canyonlands and plains of the Texas Panhandle. Later, when Quanah has just emerged as a war chief in a daring rout of army cavalry, in defiance of elders and tradition he elopes with Weckeah and leads a following of the wildest Comanche bunch of all. The enslaved son of a white physician, Bose is freed by the Civil War and rides on trail drives of longhorns into New Mexico Territory that are led by the pioneering Charles Goodnight. Bose winds up captured, utilized, and eventually valued by Quanah and his people. That period in young Bose’s life brings him into intoxicating friendship with Quanah’s other wife, To-ha-yea, a Mescalero Apache and born heart-breaker. Comanche Sundown lays out a sprawling and plausible recast of Southwestern history that brings Pat Garrett, Billy the Kid, Bat Masterson, Colonel Ranald “Bad Hand” Mackenzie, and General William T. Sherman into one fray. In the tradition of Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man, William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner, Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, and Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, Jan Reid’s novel offers a rich blend of historical detail, exquisite eye for the terrain and the animals, and insight into the culture, customs, poetry, and dignity of Native Americans caught up in a desperate fight to survive.

Comanche Sundown: A Novel

United States

TCU Press

Luke Burgoa is an ex-Marine on a solitary covert mission to infiltrate the Basque separatist organization ETA in Spain and help bring down its military commander, Peru Madariaga. Luke hails from a Basque ancestry that came with the Spanish empire to Cuba, Argentina, Mexico, and, seventy-five years ago, to a Texas ranch. Neighbors consider the Burgoas Mexican immigrants and exiles of that nation’s revolution, but the matriarch of the family speaks the ancient language Euskera and honors traditions of the old country. Luke’s orders are to sell guns to the ETA and lure Peru into a trap. Instead he falls in love with Peru’s estranged wife, Ysolina, who lives in Paris and pursues a doctorate about an Inquisition-driven witchcraft frenzy in her native land. From the day they cross the border into the Basque Pyrenees, their love affair on the run conveys the beauty, sensuality, exoticism, and violence of an ancient homeland cut in two by Spain and France. Their trajectory puts Luke, Ysolina, and Peru on a collision course with each other and the famed American architect Frank Gehry, whose construction of a Guggenheim art museum seeks to transform the Basque city of Bilbao, a decrepit industrial backwater haunted by the Spanish Civil War—and a hotbed of ETA extremism. Ranging from the Amazon rain forest to a deadly prison in Madrid, Sins of the Younger Sons is a love story exposed to dire risk at every turn.

Sins of the Younger Sons

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Thrillers & Suspense

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Reid, Jan. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Reid, Jan

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Reid, Jan. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock: New Edition (Jack and Doris Smothers Series in Texas History, Life, and Culture, No. 12)

The Bullet Meant for Me

Let the People In: The Life and Times of Ann Richards

Texas Tornado: The Times and Music of Doug Sahm (Brad and Michele Moore Roots Music Series)

Let the People In: The Life and Times of Ann Richards

Deerinwater

Texas Wildflowers

The Bullet Meant for Me: A Memoir

Comanche Sundown: A Novel

Sins of the Younger Sons