A riotous tale of love and lust, valor and villainy on the Mexican frontier of the 1930s. Robert Hough’s vivid and wildly imaginative novel takes us to 1931 Mexico and Corazón de la Fuente, a war-ravaged border town where the only enterprise is a brothel in which every girl is called Maria. Enter, from north of the border, Dr. Romulus Brinkley, inventor of a miraculous “goat gland operation” said to cure sexual impotence. When Brinkley decides to build a gargantuan new radio tower to broadcast his services throughout the United States, he chooses none other than Corazón de la Fuente for its site. The town’s fortunes change overnight, but not all to the good – word of the new prosperity spreads, and Corazón is overrun with desperadoes and mercenaries itching to reopen old wounds. Worst of all, Dr. Brinkley has attracted the affections of the town’s most beautiful citizen, Violeta Cruz. But with the help of a motley band of allies, Violeta’s spurned fiancé, Francisco, decides to fight back. Inspired by the monstrous shenanigans of a real life American con man and peopled with unforgettable characters, Dr. Brinkley’s Tower captures a young Mexico caught between its own ambitions and the designs of its wealthier neighbor to the north. From the Trade Paperback edition.
At various times there arises some extraordinary popular sorcerer to exploit the people in one or all of such potentially profitable fields as religion, politics and, of course, medicine. Such a man was John R. Brinkley, of Kansas, Texas, and Arkansas, medical maverick and potent radio personality, a physician and surgeon with sketchy training, lone-wolf ethics, a sense of glittering destiny and a free-wheeling spirit of adventure, who missed winning the governorship of Kansas twice by a micron’s breadth. Doctor Brinkley revived the old dream of eternal youth on a spacious scale, and devised a goat-gonad operation which, he promised, would make any oldster once again a marvel of sexual potency. Six thousand goats gave up their virility for his patients, netting the doctor twelve million dollars. He owned the most powerful radio station in North America, and had his own busy hospital. He was a guest at the White House, a thirty-second-degree mason, and the owner of a vast fleet of Cadillacs, three yachts, and a palatial Texas estate. But, of course, all his life, the law was just around the corner. In the end, the AMA, the U.S. Post Office, the State Department, and the FCC proved too much for him. He died, the finest flower of U.S. medical quackery, in 1942.
Longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award: Fiction Bonus e-book content includes two out-takes from the novel -- how Antonio Garcia got his beautiful horse and how Miguel Orozco became mayor -- and two essays by Robert Hough: the true history of Dr. Brinkley and Robert Hough's decades-long infatuation with Mexico. Equal parts Mark Twain and Gabriel García Márquez, Robert Hough's wildly imaginative new novel takes us to 1931 and Corazon de la Fuente, a tiny Mexican border town where the only industry is a run-down brothel. Enter Dr. Romulus Brinkley and his gargantuan radio tower, built to broadcast his revolutionary goat-gland fertility operation. Fortunes in Corazon change overnight, but not all for the good. Word of the new prosperity spreads, and the town is overrun by the impoverished, the desperate, and the flat-out criminal. The tower's frequencies are so powerful the whole area glows green, and the signal is soon broadcasting through every bit of metal it can find: fencing wire, toasters, even a young woman's new braces. Meanwhile, Dr. Brinkley has attracted the affections of Violeta Cruz, Corazon’s most beautiful resident. But is he really all that he seems? Peopled with unforgettable characters and capturing a young Mexico caught between its own ambitions and the imperialist designs of its neighbor to the north, Dr. Brinkley’s Tower is a stunning achievement in storytelling.
An illuminating portrait of an unconventional marriage by bestselling and critically acclaimed author Robert Hough. When Rose Camilleri and Scotty Larkin meet, neither expects to spend a lifetime together, navigating a sometimes turbulent marriage and scraping through the process of raising a family. When he first enters the bakery where she works, she is a new arrival from the tiny island nation of Malta, fond of rabbit stew and Hollywood cinema. He is a thoughtful printer’s assistant recently released from juvenile detention after stealing and swiftly totalling a stranger’s car. Even after years of marriage and two children together, Rose struggles to shake the idea that perhaps she should have held out for someone as voluble and optimistic as herself. But while some marriages are weakened by trauma, Rose and Scotty's union is strengthened by the act of survival, and they find their own kind of happiness along the way. In The Marriage of Rose Camilleri, Robert Hough writes his larger-than-life characters with warmth, insight and humour, displaying the masterful approach to storytelling that gained his previous novels acclaim and several prestigious award nominations. Hough transports the reader into the epicentre of an unconventional love story, where he draws out captivating details from the fabric of an ordinary shared lifetime to create a story that lives in the moment and takes seriously the small but vital details of everyday life.
“A lively overview” of this pre-internet mass-communication tool and “the entrepreneurs and evangelists, hucksters and opportunists” who flocked to it (Publishers Weekly). Long before the Internet, another young technology was transforming the way we connect with the world. At the dawn of the twentieth century, radio grew from an obscure hobby into a mass medium with the power to reach millions of people. When amateur enthusiasts began sending fuzzy signals from their garages and rooftops, radio broadcasting was born. Sensing the medium’s potential, snake-oil salesmen and preachers took to the air, innovating styles of mass communication and entertainment while making bedlam of the airwaves. Into this wild new frontier stepped a young secretary of commerce, Herbert Hoover, whose passion for organization transformed radio into an even more powerful political, cultural and economic force. When a charismatic bandleader named Rudy Vallée created the first on-air variety show and America elected Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who communicated with the public through his famous fireside chats, radio had arrived. With extensive knowledge, humor, and an eye for outsized characters forgotten by history, Anthony Rudel tells the story of the boisterous years when radio took its place in the nation’s living room. “Entertaining and informative.” —The Denver Post “Rudel, with extensive professional radio experience, revels in the enterprising personalities who set up shop on this technological frontier. . . .[And] vividly re-creates the anything-goes atmosphere of the ether’s early days.” —Booklist
Del Rio's roots grew in the sandy soil by San Felipe Creek along with the myths and dreams of the old Wild West, where the mighty Rio Grande dances through the dusty lands of the Lone Star State. Ancient nomads left their mark in the riverside canyons of this border country long before the springs at Del Rio became a lonely waystation providing water and rest to travelers, merchants, and soldiers marching the long, hot, and dry San Antonio-El Paso Road. When the products of ranching began riding the rails to eastern markets, Del Rio's population exploded and the town became known as the Wool and Mohair Capital of the World.Del Rio: Queen City of the Rio Grande tells tales of the starry nights and shimmering sunlight of the storied Texas frontier, with vivid images detailing the gripping drama and unique memories chronicled here. From the U.S. Army's experimental Camel Corps to the world's most powerful radio stations in the 1930s and the U-2 spy planes involved in the Cuban Missile Crisis, Del Rio, seat of one of the largest counties in Texas and sister to the thriving Mexican border city Ciudad Acu±a, has played a part on the world stage. Those stories and more, including the little known "Italian Colony" of West Texas and landmark civil rights court cases, are told here.
Tells how radio and television became an integral part of American life, of how a toy became an industry and a force in politics, business, education, religion, and international affairs.
Orson Welles’s greatest breakthrough into the popular consciousness occurred in 1938, three years before Citizen Kane, when his War of the Worlds radio broadcast succeeded so spectacularly that terrified listeners believed they were hearing a genuine report of an alien invasion—a landmark in the history of radio’s powerful relationship with its audience. In Radio’s America, Bruce Lenthall documents the enormous impact radio had on the lives of Depression-era Americans and charts the formative years of our modern mass culture. Many Americans became alienated from their government and economy in the twentieth century, and Lenthall explains that radio’s appeal came from its capability to personalize an increasingly impersonal public arena. His depictions of such figures as proto-Fascist Charles Coughlin and medical quack John Brinkley offer penetrating insight into radio’s use as a persuasive tool, and Lenthall’s book is unique in its exploration of how ordinary Americans made radio a part of their lives. Television inherited radio’s cultural role, and as the voting tallies for American Idol attest, broadcasting continues to occupy a powerfully intimate place in American life. Radio’s America reveals how the connections between power and mass media began.
On a Saturday night in 1948, Hank Williams stepped onto the stage of the Louisiana Hayride and sang "Lovesick Blues." Up to that point, Williams's yodeling style had been pigeon-holed as hillbilly music, cutting him off from the mainstream of popular music. Taking a chance on this untried artist, the Hayride--a radio "barn dance" or country music variety show like the Grand Ole Opry--not only launched Williams's career, but went on to launch the careers of well-known performers such as Jim Reeves, Webb Pierce, Kitty Wells, Johnny Cash, and Slim Whitman.Broadcast from Shreveport, Louisiana, the local station KWKH's 50,000-watt signal reached listeners in over 28 states and lured them to packed performances of the Hayride's road show. By tracing the dynamic history of the Hayride and its sponsoring station, ethnomusicologist Tracey Laird reveals the critical role that this part of northwestern Louisiana played in the development of both country music and rock and roll. Delving into the past of this Red River city, she probes the vibrant historical, cultural, and social backdrop for its dynamic musical scene. Sitting between the Old South and the West, this one-time frontier town provided an ideal setting for the cross-fertilization of musical styles. The scene was shaped by the region's easy mobility, the presence of a legal "red-light" district from 1903-17, and musical interchanges between blacks and whites, who lived in close proximity and in nearly equal numbers. The region nurtured such varied talents as Huddie Ledbetter, the "king of the twelve-string guitar," and Jimmie Davis, the two term "singing governor" of Louisiana who penned "You Are My Sunshine."Against the backdrop of the colorful history of Shreveport, the unique contribution of this radio barn dance is revealed. Radio shaped musical tastes, and the Hayride's frontier-spirit producers took risks with artists whose reputations may have been shaky or whose styles did not neatly fit musical categories (both Hank Williams and Elvis Presley were rejected by the Opry before they came to Shreveport). The Hayride also served as a training ground for a generation of studio sidemen and producers who steered popular music for decades after the Hayride's final broadcast. While only a few years separated the Hayride appearances of Hank Williams and Elvis Presley--who made his national radio debut on the show in 1954--those years encompassed seismic shifts in the tastes, perceptions, and self-consciousness of American youth. Though the Hayride is often overshadowed by the Grand Ole Opry in country music scholarship, Laird balances the record and reveals how this remarkable show both documented and contributed to a powerful transformation in American popular music.
One hundred days have been identified by Getty and National Geographic to represent defining moments of the past 150 years. These moments are crystallised in images that leap from the page revealing joy, anger, despairsand triumph. An insightful text by photography historian Nick Yapp supports these images, which are accompanied by journals, excerpts and 'on-site' notes that offer the backstory of the image and how it was captured.Major events that have shaped our erascaptured in the book include, from the Getty historic archive, the 1848-9 revolution and riots in Europe; President Lincoln's assassination in 1865; the construction of the Eiffel Tower in 1889; the Potemkin Mutiny (1905) that launched the Russians Revolution; the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916; the Wall Street crash of 1929; Kristallnacht in Germany in 1938; the Bristish leaving India in 1947; through to the dawn of the new millennium in 2000.The National Geographic archives are used to illustratescultural geography, the changes in landscape, contemporary conflicts, Native America, and the civil rights movement among others, including the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, Scott and Amundsen reaching the South Pole in 1911; the Lascaux cave paintings discovered in 1940; the first heart transplant in 1967; the Chernobyl disaster of 1986; the cloning of sheep in 1997; the Twin Towers attack of 2001; and the global warming debate of 2007. The wonder of this book is in illustrating how an entire event or age can be captured in a single image - whether it be of a peasant's tears, two heads of state sharing a secret, or the triumph of an Olympic champion. Politics, war, crime, exploration, fashion and fads all make up these one hundred days: From the California Gold Rush of 1849 to the finished structure of the Three Gorges Dam in 2006.
