Sunday, October 22, 2000

Shelf Life
Local history buffs to get questions answered
By Bill Whitaker

Abilene history buffs will want to seize a rare opportunity to put their questions and thoughts to a panel of historians gathering for a Friends of Jay-Rollins Library meeting at McMurry University Thursday night.

Local historians Juanita Zachry, Tracy Shilcutt, Dr. David Coffey and Dr. Donald Frazier will gather for a discussion on “The Future Great City of West Texas,” which is what Abilene’s founders originally nicknamed the town back in 1881.

The nickname stuck only long enough for bigger cities in the east to lampoon the presumptuous railroad town and its promoters.

In any case, Thursday night’s discussion will begin at 7. And technically you don’t even have to be a friend of McMurry’s Jay-Rollins Library to attend (or, for that matter, even know who Jay and Rollins were).

Juanita Zachry is probably the best-known historian in the Abilene area. She’s responsible for several books, including an updated edition of A History of Rural Taylor County as well as, more recently, A Living History: Taylor County and the Big Country.

Shilcutt, Coffey and Frazier are authors of the newly released Historic Abilene: An Illustrated History, which re-evaluates historical accounts of the past and serves up some never-before-published vintage photographs of Abilene.

Copies of the historians’ books will be available. Yours truly will moderate the evening’s discussion.

Frazier, Coffey and Shilcutt were recently joined during an autograph party at the Abilene Bookstore by historical re-enactors touting this weekend’s Fort Phantom Hill Rendezvous where yet more history books will be for sale.

Forget-me-not

If author and editor Jonathan Lethem has his way, his new book, The Vintage Book of Amnesia (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard) will prove a most forgettable offering when it’s formally released this Tuesday.

Although amnesia is a rare condition in the real world, it’s a common problem in the realm of fiction, which Lethem attempts to prove with a collection of stories, essays and novel extracts that define a whole new subgenre of literature.

Crime novels, Lethem says, are full of a “thousand haunted, desperate protagonists wandering the black-and-white streets of Noir Metropolis, wondering if they really did something terrible during the boozy binge.”

Incidentally, Lethem, who assembled this collection, has good reason to know about amnesia. Among other books, he authored one titled Amnesia Moon.

“We hope you will share his thrill at discovering a new genre,” a Vintage Books publicity release states, “as Lethem invites us to pick up a book and begin to forget.”

Contact associate editor Bill Whitaker at 676-6732 or whitakerb@abinews.com.