Email
PrintBook Review: Trillin on Texas
One of America's favorite humorists writers looks back at his Texas writings
TRILLIN ON TEXAS
Calvin Trillin
www.utexas.edu/utpress
Many first recall the erudite author Calvin Trillin from his visits with Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show. During his nearly five-decade career writing for The New Yorker and The Nation and authoring 27 books, he has covered a vast array of topics — from Cajun food to death row to Rick Perry’s cowboy boots. The humorist is not often associated with the Lone Star State, but he is quick to reveal a Texas lineage. “Yes, I do have a Texas connection,” he writes at the outset of Trillin on Texas (the Trillin family immigrated to the United States through the port of Galveston), “but, as we say in the Midwest, where I grew up, not so’s you’d know it.”
This collection of articles, poems, and essays covers a wide range of Texas topics, from the best barbecue joints to Mexican-American relations to the rise and fall of drive-in movie critic Joe Bob Briggs. Even the more serious pieces contain at least one laugh-out-loud moment.
