Turn Out the Lights

<p>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 <i>Texas Monthly</i> 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.</p> <p>This book collects seventeen of Cartwright's best <i>Texas Monthly</i> 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.</p>