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Peter Brown (10) (1948–)

Forfatter af On the Plains

For andre forfattere med navnet Peter Brown, se skeln forfatterne siden.

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Image credit: Peter Brown, Houston’s Biggest Photo Party Brings a High-Stakes Auction, 02.23/18

Værker af Peter Brown

On the Plains (1830) 27 eksemplarer
Seasons of Light (1988) 8 eksemplarer
Hometown Texas (2017) 8 eksemplarer

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ESSAYS/PHOTOGRAPHY
Joe Holley, with photographs by Peter Brown
Hometown Texas
Maverick Books
Hardcover, 978-1-5953-4807-7 (also available as an e-book), 304 pgs., $32.50
November 7, 2017

The datelines are Mobeetie and the Boquillas Crossing, Cotulla and Paducah, Comfort and Aurora (the Roswell of Texas), Bigfoot (named for Bigfoot Wallace) and Indianola, Canton and Hawkins. The subjects are as disparate as Temple Lea Houston, Italian prisoners of World War II, water witches, and aliens. There is cowboy poetry in Alpine, Chataqua in Waxahachie, the Sanctified Sisters of Belton (a commune whose book collection became the Belton Public Library), the world’s only beauty salon/bookstore (Beauty and the Book), man-heads buried in Malakoff, Port Arthur trying to talk Hollywood into blowing up its downtown, and that time the Marx brothers were arrested for playing cards on Sunday in Nacogdoches.

Hometown Texas is a handsome new volume of essays and photography from Trinity University Press’s Maverick Books. The essays are reproduced from the Houston Chronicle’s “Native Texan” column written by Pulitzer Prize finalist Joe Holley, an author, a former editor, a former staff writer for the Washington Post and a regular contributor to Texas Monthly and the Columbia Journalism Review, among other outlets. The photography is courtesy of Peter Brown, an award-winning photographer who teaches at the Glasscock School at Rice University, whose work has been collected by the Menil Collection, MoMA New York, and the Getty Museum, among others.

The Texas Holley wants us to appreciate is “rural, small-town, and slower-paced … intimately connected to [our] frontier heritage … beyond the metropolitan areas spreading amoeba-like into the surrounding countryside.” Three things draw Holley to these places: “intriguing people, the pervasive influence of place, and the enduring significance of the past on present-day lives.” Holley knows that “towns, like people, are intelligible. They have distinctive personalities.” Muleshoe is not like Valentine, which is not like Llano, which is not like Smithville, which is not like Gladewater.

Brown states in his introduction that he didn’t try to summarize the whole of Texas in a documentary style, but rather uses “lyric documentary style,” defined by Brown as “descriptive and personal, more fictional or poetic than photojournalistic.” Hometown Texas is divided into five geographical regions: West, North, Central, South, and East Texas. Brown provides an “impressionistic” set of photographs, basically his artistic responses to each of these five regions.

Hometown Texas brings home the daily relevance of history, and the truism that truth is stranger than fiction. I’d use this book as a travel guide, and a primer on how small towns survive, thrive, or don’t. “There is much to be seen, heard, and appreciated in these little towns,” Brown writes, “there are creative and energetic people working with good ideas that they apply locally, and that their stories are worth passing on and celebrating.” Indeed.

Originally published in Lone Star Literary Life.
… (mere)
 
Markeret
TexasBookLover | Feb 5, 2018 |

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Associated Authors

Averil Cameron Contributor
Christopher Kelly Contributor, Preface
Henry Chadwick Contributor
Patrick J. Geary Contributor
Hugh Kennedy Contributor
Henry Maguire Contributor
Brent D. Shaw Contributor
Yizhar Hirschfeld Contributor
Richard Lim Contributor
Garth Fowden Contributor
John Kennedy Photographer
Béatrice Caseau Contributor
Béatrice Caseau Contributor
Christophe J. Goddard Contributor, Translator
Jennifer Thorp Contributor
Amy Wygant Contributor
Michele Napolitano Contributor
Nicholas Attfield Contributor
Anastasia Belina Contributor
Jason Geary Contributor
Bruno Forment Contributor
Roger Savage Contributor
Simone Beta Contributor
Reinhard Strohm Contributor
Christian Wolff Contributor
David Beard Contributor
Stephen Walsh Contributor
Wendy Heller Contributor
Michael Ewans Contributor
Robert Cowan Contributor
Simon Goldhill Contributor
Michael Burden Contributor
Robert C. Ketterer Contributor
Guido Clemente Contributor
Béatrice Caseau Contributor
Federico Fatti Contributor
Alan Cameron Contributor
Silvia Orlandi Contributor
Kate Cooper Contributor
Giorgio Bonamente Contributor
Sergio Knipe Contributor
Hervé Inglebert Contributor
Paolo Liverani Contributor
Francisco Marshall Contributor
Arnaldo Marcone Contributor
Giorgio Cracco Contributor
Maijastina Kahlos Contributor
Gianfranco Agosti Contributor
Johannes Hahn Contributor
Claude Lepelley Contributor
CARLOS MACHADO Contributor
Alberto Melloni Contributor
Gianmaria Zamagni Contributor
Pierre Chuvin Contributor
Guy Larrieu Photographer
Jonathan Benington Introduction
Elina Vuori Translator
Julie Guinard Translator
Michael Bayer Übersetzer
Béatrice Bonne Traduction

Statistikker

Værker
3
Medlemmer
43
Popularitet
#352,016
Vurdering
4.0
Anmeldelser
1
ISBN
490
Sprog
18