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Rio Grande
The liquid lifeline of an arid land, the Rio Grande has always been a vital presence in the American Southwest and Northern Mexico. A source of human sustenance for at least 15,000 years, the river has also been a site of conflict ever since exploring Spaniards first crossed its channel to colonize the Native Americans. Today, it is one of the frontiers in the war against terrorism in the Middle East. Yet the Rio Grande has a life independent of the people who use it as a border, or a hiding place, or an ever-diminishing source of irrigation water. This autonomous life of the river is what the writers and photographers included in this book seek to capture. Rio Grande explores the ecology, history, culture, and politicization of the river. Jan Reid has assembled writings by an astonishing array of leading authors—Larry McMurtry, Tony Hillerman, Paul Horgan, Charles Bowden, John Graves, Woody Guthrie, John Reed, John Nichols, Robert Boswell, James Carlos Blake, Elena Poniatowska, William Langewiesche, Molly Ivins, Dagoberto Gilb, and Gloria Anzaldúa, to name but a few—who ponder the river's historical and contemporary meanings through short stories, essays, newspaper and magazine articles, and excerpts from novels, histories, memoirs, and nonfiction reporting. Reid also adds his own reflections on the river, drawn from years of traveling the Rio Grande, talking to its people, and conducting archival research. In addition to the fine writing, historical and contemporary photographs by such well-known photographers as Laura Gilpin, Russell Lee, Robert Runyon, Bill Wittliff, W. D. Smithers, James Evans, Frank Armstrong, Ave Bonar, Earl Nottingham, and Alan Pogue create a stunning visual record of the stark beauty and elemental lifeways of the Rio Grande. As a whole, these voices and visions confirm the river's significance, not only as a real place, but even more as an object of the mythic imagination.
- GenresNonfiction
361 pages, Hardcover
First published October 1, 2004
1 person is currently reading
12 people want to read
About the author
Jan Reid
32Ìýbooks9ÌýfollowersJan Reid has written for Texas Monthly, Esquire, GQ, Slate, Men’s Journal, Garden & Gun, and the New York Times. Reid received the Lon Tinkle career achievement award from the Texas Institute of Letters in 2014. His twelve books include The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock, The Bullet Meant for Me, Rio Grande, Comanche Sundown, and Let the People In: The Life and Times of Ann Richards. The biography of the late Texas governor won praise from Bill Clinton to the Washington Post to the Economist, and the Houston Chronicle cited it as one of the ten best nonfiction books of 2012. Let the People In won two awards from the Texas State Historical Association, for 2012 book of the year and co-winner of the award for best book on women in Texas history. It also received a nonfiction book of the year award from the Philosophical Society of Texas. His prior book, the novel Comanche Sundown, was awarded best fiction 2011 by the Texas Institute of Letters, an award that has previously gone to Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove and Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses. Reid's Texas Tornado: The Times and Music of Doug Sahm, was an Oxford Magazine Music Book of the Year in 2010. Reid’s fiction and non-fiction have also won awards and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, PEN Southwest, and the Dobie-Paisano Fellowship; his short fiction has appeared in Northern Liberties Review and the anthologies On the Brink and Texas Short Stories, his nonfiction in The Best of Texas Monthly, The Slate Diaries, twice in Best American Sportswriting, and most recently in Curiosity's Cats: Writers and Research. He is at work on a new novel titled Sins of the Younger Sons and a novella, The Song Leader, that is related in one of its settings to his first novel, Deerinwater. Reid grew up in Wichita Falls, Texas, and has lived in or near Austin since 1970.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
April 30, 2012
This is a really fine book, immensely informative and also entertaining, handsomely designed and generously conceived. Jan Reid, himself a fine writer, has brought together a collection of fine writing on the subject of a big river, the Rio Grande. He follows the river from its source in the mountains of Colorado, through fertile valleys, desert, and roaring canyons to its turgid mouth on the Gulf of Mexico. While there are many words devoted to the many miles of landscape, Reid's primary interest is the social and political history that makes up the borderlands from El Paso to Brownsville. A region divided by a national border still contested by those who have lived and worked here for countless generations, Rio Grande country as it is characterized in Reid's book is both Texan and Mexican, with all the extremes that combination implies - no country for old men, you could say.
Given the world we live in, drugs and guns figure prominently along the river. Robert Draper tells of U.S. Marines stationed there to apprehend drug runners and the shooting of an 18-year-old boy herding goats. Don Ford recounts his experience as a cowboy smuggler of Mexican marijuana. Reid's own contribution (besides the lengthy and fascinating introductions to each section of the book) is an account of three armed Americans busting prisoners from a jail on the Mexican side of the border. And the Border Patrol is a constant dark presence, as in Elmer Kelton's "The Time It Never Rained."
There is humor, dry and otherwise, in Molly Ivins' report of a drunken mishap involving the mayor of Lajitas, who happens to be a goat. John Spong describes a loopy effort to build an exclusive resort with a luxurious golf course in the Big Bend. Gary Cartwright provides a sadly comic tour of his favorite haunts in Mexican border towns. Tom Miller describes the life of a parrot smuggler. We get an excerpt from John Nichol's humorous "Milagro Beanfield War." There's also a surprising visit by the young John Reed waiting in Presidio for the revolutionary army of Pancho Villa to reach Ojinaga, still in the hands of the federal army.
Meanwhile, the entire book is richly illustrated with period photographs, all of them in glorious black and white. This is a terrific book with hours of good reading for anyone interested in rivers and the mix of cultures and history that make up the borderlands between Texas and Mexico.
Given the world we live in, drugs and guns figure prominently along the river. Robert Draper tells of U.S. Marines stationed there to apprehend drug runners and the shooting of an 18-year-old boy herding goats. Don Ford recounts his experience as a cowboy smuggler of Mexican marijuana. Reid's own contribution (besides the lengthy and fascinating introductions to each section of the book) is an account of three armed Americans busting prisoners from a jail on the Mexican side of the border. And the Border Patrol is a constant dark presence, as in Elmer Kelton's "The Time It Never Rained."
There is humor, dry and otherwise, in Molly Ivins' report of a drunken mishap involving the mayor of Lajitas, who happens to be a goat. John Spong describes a loopy effort to build an exclusive resort with a luxurious golf course in the Big Bend. Gary Cartwright provides a sadly comic tour of his favorite haunts in Mexican border towns. Tom Miller describes the life of a parrot smuggler. We get an excerpt from John Nichol's humorous "Milagro Beanfield War." There's also a surprising visit by the young John Reed waiting in Presidio for the revolutionary army of Pancho Villa to reach Ojinaga, still in the hands of the federal army.
Meanwhile, the entire book is richly illustrated with period photographs, all of them in glorious black and white. This is a terrific book with hours of good reading for anyone interested in rivers and the mix of cultures and history that make up the borderlands between Texas and Mexico.
August 28, 2016
Beautiful....
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
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