Kirjahaku

Whether the subject is Jack Ruby, Willie Nelson, or his own leukemia-stricken son Mark, when it comes to looking at the world through another person's eyes, nobody does it better than Gary Cartwright. For over twenty-five years, readers of Texas Monthly have relied on Cartwright to tell the stories behind the headlines with pull-no-punches honesty and wry humor. His reporting has told us not just what's happened over three decades in Texas, but, more importantly, what we've become as a result. This book collects seventeen of Cartwright's best Texas Monthly articles from the 1980s and 1990s, along with a new essay, "My Most Unforgettable Year," about the lasting legacy of the Kennedy assassination. He ranges widely in these pieces, from the reasons for his return to Texas after a New Mexican exile to profiles of Kris Kristofferson and Willie Nelson. Along the way, he strolls through San Antonio's historic King William District; attends a Dallas Cowboys old-timers reunion and the Holyfield vs. Foreman fight; visits the front lines of Texas' new range wars; gets inside the heads of murderers, gamblers, and revolutionaries; and debunks Viagra miracles, psychic surgery, and Kennedy conspiracy theories. In Cartwright's words, these pieces all record "the renewal of my Texas-ness, a rediscovery of Texas after returning home."

Gary Cartwright is one of Texas’s legendary writers. In a career spanning nearly six decades, he has been a newspaper reporter, Senior Editor of Texas Monthly, and author of several acclaimed books, including Blood Will Tell, Confessions of a Washed-up Sportswriter, and Dirty Dealing. Cartwright was a finalist for a National Magazine Award for reporting excellence, and he has won several awards from the Texas Institute of Letters, including its most prestigious-the Lon Tinkle Award for lifetime achievement. His personal life has been as colorful and occasionally outrageous as any story he reported, and in this vivid, often hilarious, and sometimes deeply moving memoir, Cartwright tells the story of his writing career, tangled like a runaway vine with great friendships, love affairs, four marriages, four or five great dogs . . . looking always to explain, at least to himself, how the pattern probably makes a kind of perverted sense.Cartwright’s career began at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and Fort Worth Press, among kindred spirits and fellow pranksters Edwin “Bud” Shrake and Dan Jenkins. He describes how the three rookie writers followed their mentor Blackie Sherrod to the Dallas Times Herald and the Dallas Morning News, becoming the “best staff of sportswriters anywhere, ever” and creating a new kind of sportswriting that “swept the country and became standard.” Cartwright recalls his twenty-five years at Texas Monthly, where he covered everything from true crime to notable Texans to Texas’s cultural oddities. Along the way, he tells lively stories about “rebelling against sobriety” in many forms, with friends and co-conspirators that included Willie Nelson, Ann Richards, Dennis Hopper, Willie Morris, Don Meredith, Jack Ruby, and countless others. A remarkable portrait of the writing life and Austin’s counterculture, The Best I Recall may skirt the line between fact and fiction, but it always tells the truth.

With the tenth anniversary of his flight from the authorities in his homeland of Kazakhstan fast approaching, the raft of transnational court cases involving fugitive embezzler Mukhtar Ablyazov show no sign of abating. In a global saga which stretches from an institutional aversion to tackling kleptocracy in the United Kingdom to United States President Donald Trump's shady business partners, the murky world of Mukhtar Ablyazov even led his family to make a pit stop in the Central African Republic to pick up diplomatic passports. Yet despite having judgements against him totalling $4.9 billion in the British courts alone, almost six years since he fled from the UK to avoid three concurrent 22-month sentences for contempt of court, Ablyazov remains a free man. So who is this criminal mastermind, a man found to have committed 'fraud on an epic scale' in the UK and sentenced in absentia in his homeland of having ordered the assassination of his erstwhile business partner? A country boy turned kleptocrat, current estimates as to the total amount embezzled by Ablyazov stand at in excess of $10 billion, yet from his villa in France, Ablyazov continues to bemoan his plight to be a simple case of 'political persecution.' This is an argument supported by parties such as the NGO, the Open Dialog Foundation, whose activities, a report from a conference held in the European Parliament in November 2017 found, are funded by companies 'flagged and sanctioned by the West.'

"Cartwright tells the story of the Chagra brothers, Lee and Joe, as they get mixed up with the drug-running community along the border and in short order find themselves hopelessly entangled in a net cast by the DEA. Even readers unfamiliar with the well-publicized events of the book or of the dark, lawless aspect that often rules El Paso will find themselves pulled along by the plot: brigands and intrigue leap from almost every page, and the story just gets wilder the further into it you venture." from an Amazon.com reviewFour pages into this rollicking good story, the central figure, Lee Chagra, comes alive: "[Lee] washed his morning cocaine down with strong coffee and remembered the time he had met Sinatra, how genuine he appeared." Everything you'll need to know and remember about Chagra the son of Syrian immigrants to Mexico and an attorney who spun the world of dope-running, border-crossing, high-living outlaws along the El Paso Juarez border around his finger like the gaudy rings he favored can be neatly summarized in that one sentence. Chagra dies two pages later, yet he haunts the rest of this cautionary tale like a high-rolling specter.Gary Cartwright is a long-respected, award-winning journalist and contributing editor to Texas Monthly magazine. The author of numerous books, he has contributed stories to such national publications as Harper's, Life, and Esquire. He lives in Austin, Texas.

A riveting true story of money and murder and the trial of the Texas millionaire T. Cullen Davis--accused of attempting to kill his estranged wife and later plotting to hire a hit man to finish the job. This fascinating and bizarre true crime story of the murder trials of Texas oil tycoon T. Cullen Davis--the richest man ever indicted for murder--is "bloody wonderfully good" (George Plimpton).