At last, the rest of the story. 
Epilogue: A concluding part added to a literary work. 
There was something about this man that was out of the ordinary, something almost familiar about him. 
Sunlight angled down and caught the right side of his face, caught the long gray hair parted in the middle and brushed back along the top and sides. The sea wind came up and blew his hair, and he reached to push it back from his face, pulled an orange suspender higher on his shoulder, adjusted the leather Swiss Army knife case on his belt. The sun passed behind a cloud, and he fell into shadow for a few seconds before sunlight again came on him. She experienced an involuntary shudder and had a powerful urge to walk outside and talk with the man. 
And later: 
He was glad he had come. It had not been a mistake. Here, in the old bridge, he felt a kind of serenity, and he bathed in the feeling and came quiet within himself. At that moment, he knew this place would be his home ground, the place where his ashes would someday drift out over Middle River. He hoped some of his dust would become one with the bridge and the land, and that some might wash far downstream and into larger rivers and then into all the seas he had crossed on crowded troop ships or night jets to somewhere. 
--From A Thousand Country Roads 
Ten years and twelve million copies after the first printing of The Bridges of Madison County, Robert James Waller brings to a poignant conclusion his story of the love affair between a wandering photographer and the conventional wife of an Iowa farmer. This stirring conclusion is for everyone who loved The Bridges of Madison County. 
In A Thousand Country Roads, Robert Kincaid initially finds himself with little but memories; memories of a lonely existence lived mostly on the road and memories of Francesca Johnson, the woman whose passion he stirred so briefly and with such power. 
So, with his memories pushing him, searching for something undefined, something to give meaning to the rest of his life, Kincaid takes to the road again in what becomes a journey of discovery and surprise. 
With his dog Highway beside him in an old truck named Harry, Kincaid begins a long winding run back to Roseman Bridge in Madison County, Iowa, returning to the place of his great love affair. 
Living her own solitary life, Francesca still visits Roseman Bridge and reflects on her days with Robert Kincaid. Cherishing the memory of the strange, wandering man who changed her world, she vows to search for him. 
On the expedition he calls Last Time, Kincaid wanders through Oregon, northern California eastward to the Dakotas, and on to Iowa. Along the way, a chance encounter with a woman from his distant past reveals another dimension of his life that he could not have imagined. 
Finally, in a Seattle bar called Shortys, where saxophonist Nighthawk Cummings still plays on Tuesday nights, Kincaid turns in his chair, looking inward and outward at the same time, and smiles at what he sees sitting before him. 
And so it comes, the ultimate loner finds he is not as alone as he once believed.

A Thousand Country Roads: An Epilogue to The Bridges of Madison County

Literature & Fiction

WALLER, Robert James

Contemporary

John m Hardy Pub Co

An autobiography of a naval aviator who flew over 100 combat missions in the Korean War. Tex Atkinson flew F4U Corsairs and AD Skyraiders. He served on the USS Princeton and USS Boxer. 
An important contribution to the history of naval aviation with detailed and often chilling accounts of combat flying during the Korean War and of straight-deck carrier operations during that time. Includes excellent descriptions of the flying characteristics (and hazards) of the Corsair and Skyraider. 
Also a very human story with accounts of the author's growing up years in Hillsboro, Texas and his attendance at Southwestern University. There is an interesting account of a Willie Nelson concert to benefit the restoration of the Hill County courthouse which burned to the ground and was completely rebuilt to look like the original. 
Book includes two photo sections (32 pages total) of excellent personal and naval aviation photography. 
This is a much expanded and much higher quality edition than the paperback edition published by Publish America. DO NOT CONFUSE THE TWO. There is little comparison.

From The Cockpit: Coming Of Age In The Korean War

History

Atkinson, Tex

Military

In the character Balaam Gimble, Mike Nichols has created a knight-errant of contemporary rural Texas: a Joe Don Quixote. Granted, Balaam's trusty steed may be only a rusty Frankenford-a twenty-three-year-old Ford pickup, reanimated time and again by the transplantation of parts from pickup cadavers, but the giants that Balaam tilts against are real enough to him-a ruthless businessman, a masseur-turned-dirty trickster, a money-mad hometown, and, most of all, plain old change. 
For months the mayor and city council of the small town of Willoughby have been seeking a way to revitalize their town, to return it to the oil-and-cotton prosperity that it had enjoyed during the 1920s. They need an angle, something to put Willoughby on the map. When Balaam discovers a spring of health-giving mineral water on his two hundred acres of "woods and weeds," the town leaders suddenly see their angle. 
As Willoughby's merchants begin selling Mason jars of Balaam's wonder water, the town's economic future looks much greener: Howard J. Liggett, the millionaire developer of a chain of upscale mineral spring resorts, offers to buy Balaam's land at many times its market value and build a resort on it, bringing even more people and prosperity to Willoughby. Residents soon forget how much they had cherished the "in our own sweet time" pace of their languishing little town. 
Only Balaam sees that the town is beginning to change for the worse and is determined to save Willoughby from itself. Balaam is adamant-he won't sell the land that has been in his family five generations. But Liggett is just as adamant-he will acquire Balaam's land by hook or crook. 
That crook is Ernie Ruiz, a young masseur with a criminal record. Liggett dispatches Ruiz to Willoughby to "persuade" Balaam to sell. Balaam remains serenely nonviolent in the face of Ruiz's campaign of terror. 
When Ruiz cannot coerce Balaam to sell, Liggett stoops even lower: He resorts to perfectly legal means, informing Balaam that he has bought the mineral rights. Now the people of Willoughby know that even fool-headed Balaam, bless his heart, can't keep Willoughby off the map. Desperate, Balaam the knight-errant saddles up his Frankenford to make one final head-down, neck-bowed, full-gallop, Lone Star-spangled tilt at the windmills that threaten his hometown.

Balaam Gimble's Gumption

Nichols, Mike

Humor & Satire

The Vinegaroon Murders (Dos Cruces Trilogy)

Mangum, James A.

A young Confederate captain with a grisly past as a cavalry raider in Tennessee is on his way home to his family plantation north of Houston in the last days of the Civil War. In Austin, Capt. Jerod Robin is accused of murder and is thrown into the stockade by U.S. Army Capt. Santana Leatherwood, a Texan whose family has feuded bitterly for decades with the Robin family. In the stockade Robin meets British novelist and adventurer Edmund Varney, in Austin to write the life story of Lt. Tom Custer, heroic younger brother of famous General George Armstrong Custer. Varney is charged with attempting to steal Tom Custer's legendary warhorse, Athena, upon whose back Custer recently won two Congressional Medals of Honor. The two prisoners stand trial beside a 16-year-old mulatto girl, Flora Bowprie, who has come from New Orleans searching for her father but has been arrested as a runaway slave. Homicidal events cause the rebel captain, the British author and the young fortuneteller to flee from a Cavalry squad led by Santana Leatherwood and Tom Custer, mounted on his great Arabian horse. The story races to the inevitable showdown between the Robins and Leatherwoods, two families on opposite sides in the Civil War. But, before the final confrontation Jerod Robin hears a dark accusation about his birth and his mother that lends a special ferocity to the showdown. Then the story of "Custer's Brother's Horse" takes a surprising twist. This is a horse for the ages.

Custer's Brother's Horse

Shrake, Edwin

A tale of high adventure of the first order, with some of the most memorable characters to be found in the literature of the Old West. Selected by A.C. Greene as on of THE 50 BEST BOOKS ON TEXAS.

Blessed McGill (Texas Literary Classics)

A TV western star quits his successful series and returns to Dallas to make a documentary film that reveals the truth about his home town. His quest forces him to learn if he is capable of using his six-gun for real as he moves from booze and radical politics in oil men's palaces into the infamous Carousel Club and the underworld of arms and dope smuggling in a city ripe for the murder of a President.

Strange Peaches

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