Reading Recommendations: The Lone Star, The Life of John Connally, James Reston, Jr.

This superbly readable biography is a sweeping drama of power, money, and politics on the grand scale. It chronicles one of the great political stories of our era, the life of a son of the Texas Dust Bowl who rose almost to the pinnacle of power in America.

"Connelly is an Olympian figure,"says James Reston, Jr. "By virtue of his eloquence and sheer force of personality, he dominated Texas and Washington for more than twenty years. At the center of three presidencies, he came as close to becoming a president himself as he did to being a lesser martyr when Kennedy was assassinated. His life has drama of epic proportions."

Great expectation surrounded Connelly from his early days at the University of Texas, and the author writes, in scenes filled with drama of Connelly's intimate friendship with Lyndon Johnson, his strange friendship with Richard Nixon and Nixon's doting admiration of him, his term as governor of Texas, his tenure as secretary of the Treasury and his Watergate bribery trial in which he was brilliantly defended by Edward Bennett Williams. Reston suggests that Connally may have been Lee Harvey Oswald's primary target and he reveals that Connally was the catalyst in Johnson's decision not to seek reelection in 1968.

Finally, we watch as Connally returns to Texas to become truly rich and lose it all.

And it tells a truly haunting story of the fall of a man whom destiny seemed to have touched.

From the Texas Bookshelves

The Illumination

At 8:17 on a Friday night, the illumination commences. Every wound begins to shine, every bruise to glow and shimmer. And in the aftermath of a fatal car accident, a private journal of love notes, written by a husband to his wife, passes into the keeping of a hospital patient and from there through the hands of fine other suffering people, touching each of them uniquely.

"I love the soft blue veins in your wrist. I love your lopsided smile. I love watching TV and shelling sunflower seeds with you."

The six recipients, a data analyst, a photojournalist, a school child, a missionary, a writer and a steel vendor inhabit an acutely observed, beautifully familiar yet particularly strange universe; a world in which human pain is expressed as illumination, so that ones wounds glitter fluorescent and blaze with light. As we follow the journey of the book from stranger to stranger, we come to understand how intricately and brilliantly they are connected in all their human injury and experience.

This book is different to anything I've read. If any of you read this one, I'd like to hear from you. Give me your feelings, etc.

Eating for Lower Blood Pressure

One in three adults in the U.S. has high blood pressure, which greatly increases the risk for heart disease and stroke, the first and third leading causes of death in the U.S.

However, the good news is that if your blood pressure is higher than it should be, making some simple changes to what you eat could make all the difference between needing to take blood pressure medications or not. Eating healthy, cuttting down on salt and alcohol and being more active will make you feel better and this book is packed with expert advice and restaurant class recipes to show you how.

A leading chef and a nutritionist have worked together to create 100 Family-Friendly Recipes.

Happy Eating!

See you at Rylander