Close Calls: Jan Reid's Texas

by Jan Reid

For more than three decades of writing about Texas, Jan Reid has reported topics and perspectives that are unsentimental and often stories of cops on the beat, Mexican jailbreaks, counterculture country musicians, an oldtime liberal Texas politician, and cows in the corn at J. Frank Dobie's Paisano Ranch. In the course of that reporting, he has seen and has experienced some close calls—none closer than one in Mexico that threatened his own life. Close Calls collects some of the best of Reid's prolific writings into a volume that provides a uniquely personal crosssection of life—the dangerous and the daily—in Texas. The stories that emerge from these pages show and encourage a hardbiting appreciation for the real Texas and its real people. In Reid's nature pieces, he writes vividly of the rivers, canyonlands, and prairies that enrich our national heritage and of his adventures in the wild, including paddling the Devils River, visiting exotic ranches in South Texas, or dealing with rabid coyotes. In other chapters Reid relates dangers of a different sort, including his addiction to the sport of boxing.

But Close Calls is first a book of people—profiles of Texans rich and poor, famous and downtrodden. Reid provides details of his various assignments and the people and places he has encountered while working for Texas Monthly and other publications—going on beats with Texas police officers, attending church with George Foreman in New York, and meeting Kickapoo Indians in the Sierra Madres.

The book closes with a dramatic account of Reid's hijacking and nearfatal shooting by robbers in Mexico and of the tortuous fight he has waged back to health from his closest call of all.

304 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Jan 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.

Reviews

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dad said the writing was really good.