Dallas 1963 by Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis, 2013

NPR's author interviews are just the best, keeping me up with the latest and greatest of recently published. Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis have co-authored Dallas 1963 as the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy's assassination approaches, and I heard Melissa Block discuss the book with Bill last week.

...and now I've ordered it from my local bookstore. What can I say?! 

The book describes the political tension and climate in Dallas prior to that infamous event at the grassy knoll on November 22, 1963. In the brief interview, Minutaglio mentioned the Mink Coat Mob incident in which LBJ and Ladybird Johnson were attacked by a mob of Dallas' "leading citizens" just a few days prior to the election in 1960. And I was intrigued. I enjoy books like this...little nuggets and microcosms of history, descriptions of a city or a year, something focused. Bill Bryson has a new book with that same sort of focus, One Summer: America, 1927 (thanks, Diane Rehm!), as if he plucked this year, this moment out of a vast history to really focus the reader and help him or her better understand the feeling, the movement.

Listen to the interview here and scroll down to read an excerpt from the book. And then go order it from your local bookstore (because if I wait for this new release from my library, it may be January before I get it, and I can totally regift this at Christmas, right?).

Happy reading! Happy October! Eating pumpkin bread and hunkering down with Roald Dahl's The Witches over here. How will you celebrate the season?

P.S. Remember Anjelica Huston's terrifying performance in the creepy 1990 movie version of The Witches?! If that film doesn't give you nightmares, you're made of tougher stuff than I.