The Soldiers Did the Fighting, the Generals Did the Infighting
In the waning months of the American Civil War, a delusional Confederate commander makes a desperate attempt to change the course of the South’s dwindling hopes by invading middle Tennessee. The tragic result of Lt. Gen. John Bell Hood’s misplaced hubris devastates his Army of Tennessee and alters the lives of the citizens of Franklin, Tennessee.
In a historical novel reminiscent of The Killer Angels, Too Much the Lion follows a handful of Confederate generals, infantrymen and local residents through the five days leading up to the horrific Battle of Franklin on November 30, 1864. The lives of soldiers ranging from Major General Patrick Cleburne to Brigadier General Hiram Granbury and from Sergeant Major Sumner Cunningham and to Corporal Sam Watkins will be forever changed by Hood’s decisions and mistakes.
Franklin civilians like apprehensive and loving mother Mary Alice McPhail and teen Hardin Figuers, desperate to serve the Confederacy but too young to enlist, are ensnared in the events that will bring death and devastation to their very doorsteps. Devout Confederate Chaplain Charles T. Quintard must reconcile his religious beliefs with his support of slavery. Slaves like the elder Wiley Howard and the inquisitive young Henry B. Free are trapped on the fault line between what has been and what could be.
Too Much the Lion offers an unvarnished account of the dying days of the Confederacy in a powerful and moving narrative of honor and betrayal, bravery and cowardice, death and survival. Told with poignancy and honesty by an accomplished novelist, Too Much the Lion achieves for the Battle of Franklin what The Killer Angels did for the Battle of Gettysburg, providing a classic fictional account of one of the Civil War’s pivotal encounters.
Children tread lightly through the pages of Old West history. Pintsized Pioneers: Taming the Frontier, One Chore at a Time gives frontier children their due for all the work they did to assist their families. Even at early ages, the youngsters helped families make ends meet and handled chores that today seem unbelievable. Written for today’s young adults, Pintsized Pioneers offers lessons on frontier history and on the value of work for contemporary youth.
In 1850 adolescents 16 and under accounted for 46 percent of the national population, making them an important labor force in settling the country. Pintsized Pioneers examines their tasks and toils starting with the chores on the trail west. Children assisted in providing fuel and water on the trail and at home when they settled down. In their new locations the young ones helped grow food, make clothing for the entire family and assist with the housekeeping in primitive dwellings.
These pintsized pioneers took on farm and ranch chores as young as six, some going on cattle drives at eight years of age. Even Old West town tykes, who enjoyed more career possibilities, helped their folks survive as well. In the end, many pintsized pioneers pitched in to help their families make ends meet. Difficult as their lives might have been, the lessons those children learned handling chores helped them and their country in the years ahead. Those pintsized lessons have contemporary applications to the youth of today.
Targeted at young adults, Pintsized Pioneers is written at a ninth-grade reading level and includes a supplementary glossary. Even so, Pintsized Pioneers is an eye-opener for adult readers as well.
When the young Englishman Baron Jerome Manchester Paget arrives in 1878 Fort Griffin with a satchel full of money to start a buffalo ranch and find a bride, a horde of colorful swindlers from throughout Texas arrive to help him. With a passel of oddball characters and more twists and turns than a stagecoach trail, The Fleecing of Fort Griffin pits the baron against crooked gamblers, a one-eyed gunfighter, a savvy marshal, conniving females and a worldly stump preacher. To stay rich, the baron must stay alive! Written by Spur Award-winning author Preston Lewis, a master of western plot twists and humor, The Fleecing of Fort Griffin takes readers on an unconventional and uproarious journey through the Old West.
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Children of the Cotton Patch
Cotton—like the families that produced it—is today undervalued for its contribution to Texas’s wealth and heritage, but for the region’s first century as a colony, a nation and then a state, the fluffy commodity carried the Lone Star economy bale by bale toward prosperity. In Cotton-Picking Folks, award-winning author of fiction and nonfiction Preston Lewis explores one family’s experiences on dryland tenant farms during the Great Depression and the waning years of the sharecropping and crop lien system.
As the grandson of a tenant farmer, Lewis in the 1970s collected the written and oral histories of his grandfather’s five daughters and two sons. Born into a poverty that demanded their child labor, all seven picked cotton before they could read and all faced a biscuit-and-gravy existence that typified the farm tenancy system in the cotton South in the first five decades of the twentieth century. The seven matured as tenant farming reached its Texas zenith in a labor-intensive industry that sucked children into the state’s cotton fields to feed the voracious global hunger for the versatile fiber.
Their coming-of-age recollections are enlightening and touching testaments to the enduring spirit and faith of the Greatest Generation, whose work in the cotton fields was little different than it had been the previous century. In the 78,000-word volume, Lewis provides a 16,000-word essay that puts the Depression-era cotton culture in perspective, then lets those who worked in the fields and farm homes tell their stories through their letters and recollections.
Cotton-Picking Folks is a heartfelt tribute to a farm generation poor in material goods but rich in spirit.
Long before Tombstone and the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, frontier vagabond Doc Holliday rode into the tumultuous Texas town of Fort Griffin, looking for a mysterious lady gambler, not trouble. Only after he finds both does he escape into legend. Known throughout the rough-and-tumble towns of west Texas for her beauty, female gambler Lottie Deno possesses uncanny luck at the gaming tables. Trouble, though, comes in several shapes, none more volatile nor more available than “Big Nose” Kate Elder, a soiled dove with a heart of bold!
As Doc attempts to win Lottie’s money and her heart, both he and she become pawns in a duel of saloon rivals to control Fort Griffin’s gambling underworld. In this contest between gambling king and queen, Kate elder becomes the unpredictable joker, as infatuated with Doc as he is with Lottie. A model of feminine propriety except for her gambling, Lottie Deno cannot escape a terrible secret from her past. Kate cannot escape her marital ambitions. Only with the help of one of them can Doc Holliday, a man torn between love and lust, escape a lynch mob and an early grave in wicked Fort Griffin.
Lottie’s Luck is a revised and updated version of The Lady and Doc Holliday, originally published in 1989.
A Call to Duty
The greatest conflict in human history started brothers Ray F. and John B. Lewis on a journey that they never imagined as farm boys picking cotton in the dusty fields of West Texas during the Great Depression. World War II took them across the Atlantic to places they had only read about in books or seen on movie screens when they could afford theater tickets. By the time they returned to the States, they had lost their country-boy naivete.
In To War and Back: The World War II Journey of Two West Texas Farm Boys, award-winning author of fiction and nonfiction Preston Lewis explores the wartime exploits of his uncle Ray and his father John. Ray saw combat in the 552nd Anti-Aircraft Artillery Battalion, but John never heard a shot fired in anger while a merchant mariner at the end of the conflict.
To War and Back is the sequel to Cotton-Picking Folks: Eulogy for a Texas Depression Era Farm Family. Enthralled by his family’s stories of West Texas life in the 1930s and 1940s, Lewis in the 1970s collected the written and oral histories of his grandfather’s five daughters and two sons. Fascinated by his uncle’s and father’s accounts of World War II, he extracted them from those oral histories and added background and context on their European adventures, some sad, many poignant and others humorous.
Ray and John were both bit players in the events of the war, although John rides to the rescue of a downed Women Airforce Service Pilot as an anonymous cowboy in several books on female aviation history. Even though they played minor roles in the war, their stories provide a glimpse into tough times by men committed to serving their country.
The 44,000-word memoir provides a poignant glimpse into the lives of two brothers of the Greatest Generation. With only an estimated 300,000 WWII veterans remaining in the United States, the living memory of World War II is gradually fading away. To War and Back: The World War II Journey of Two West Texas Farm Boys saves for posterity the stories of these two young men who grew to maturity during the troubled war years.
As new empty-nesters Harriet and Preston next looked forward to becoming grandparents. Their journey to assuming the names of Mema and P-Pa, however, took a tragic and unexpected turn.
The Gulag P-Pa Diaries tells a bittersweet story of anticipation, loss and sorrow counterbalanced with hope, faith and a butterfly on the path to grandparenthood.
Told with poignancy and humor, the narrative triumphs over tragedy by chronicling The Grands’ misadventures each summer at Camp Mema/Gulag P-Pa.
The Gulag P-Pa Diaries will touch your heart and tickle your funny bone.
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As a popular pastime on the American frontier, horse racing could always draw a crowd to admire and bet on horseflesh. Realizing its appeal, boosters of the nascent West Texas community of San Angelo used horse racing to attract investors and settlers and to distance themselves from competing communities in the Concho Valley.
Betting on Horses: Racing as an Economic Development Tool in Frontier West Texas, 1886-1896, explores how San Angelo promoters incorporated racing into their boosterism, sending local horses across the nation and broadening the community’s national exposure and reputation. Betting on Horses is the story of one frontier town’s efforts to survive and thrive as it vied with competitors for the telegraph, for the railroad, for exposure that would attract investors and for its long-term survival.
Too, it’s the story of Concho Valley racehorses like Belle P, Get There, Hal Fisher and Viola Belle, who raced on tracks from San Francisco to New York and from Chicago to New Orleans. Most famous of all the San Angelo racers was Charley Wilson, the star-crossed chestnut with the gigantic stride that beat fabled California mare Geraldine in two out of three races but was later tarnished in a cheating scandal.
Betting on Horses offers a fresh look at the role of horses in frontier life and boosterism.
In Recipes from a Tasteless Machine: A Culinary Journey through Artificial Intelligence the authors put ChatGPT to the taste test, challenging it to develop delicious recipes on a variety of themes. The result provides an amusing mix of recipes and a fascinating look into how artificial intelligence thinks in the kitchen.
Recipes from a Tasteless Machine is the third book in the Magic Machine Series from award winning authors Preston Lewis and Harriet Kocher Lewis. The book organizes recipes around themes based on the months of the year and related holidays. From breakfast meals in January and to holiday fare at the end of the year, the authors provide a culinary calendar of mostly delectable dishes that’ll bring a smile to the face if not to the tastebuds.
New Year’s Day recipes cover breakfast, pastries and brunch while February focuses on candies, cookies and cakes in celebration of Valentine’s Day. March and St. Patrick’s Day provide offerings on salads and beverages while April Fool’s Day explores whimsical foods. Ethnic foods are covered in May with Cinco de Mayo and Mexican food and in June with Juneteenth recipes celebrating African-American and Southern foods.
Fourth of July recipes look at American fare like hamburgers, hot dogs and ice cream. Box lunches are explored in August in celebration of the start of school while Labor Day dishes explore comfort food and casseroles. For October Columbus Day dishes include Italian and indigenous people’s foods. November covers holiday dishes while December and Winter Solstice are celebrated with soups stews and chilis.
The authors offer a baker’s dozen of chapters with a thirteenth holiday they call “Family Day” to celebrate some of their tried-and-true family recipes and the stories behind them. All in all, Recipes from a Tasteless Machine provides a variety of recipes and food trivia to satisfy any taste. As the French, would say “Bon appétit,” though the authors note that since the recipes were developed by artificial intelligence the French might also say “Mangez à vos risques et perils!”
Previous titles in the Magic Machine Series are Devotionals from a Soulless Machine and Jokes from a Humorless Machine.
Crashing thunder! Pelting sand! The whirl of confusion and the winds of madness.
Join 13 unsurpassed storytellers to journey through Western storms with tales of perseverance, grit, and courage as vast as the 19th-century American landscape.
Curated by award-winning editor Richard Prosch, Through Western Storms features the best Western writers working in America today.
Too, it’s the story of Concho Valley racehorses like Belle P, Get There, Hal Fisher and Viola Belle, who raced on tracks from San Francisco to New York and from Chicago to New Orleans. Most famous of all the San Angelo racers was Charley Wilson, the star-crossed chestnut with the gigantic stride that beat fabled California mare Geraldine in two out of three races but was later tarnished in a cheating scandal.
Betting on Horses offers a fresh look at the role of horses in frontier life and boosterism.