"I want to hear about such folks as my father and how he knows how to make cement, not by recipe, but by something in his bones. I want to hear how my grandfather learned to plow a straight furrow and why even older men always called him Mister. I want to know all of the reasons why, those years ago, my mother cried when the tomatoes in her garden twisted and died."
Trying to find out such things, Jim Corder leads us through the ravines of the Croton Breaks, around to the back side of the Double Mountains, and through the streets of Jayton and Spur, as they are and as they used to be. He takes us right up to gaze at the Big Rock Candy Mountain, which, however, he can't tell us how to find since the day in 1937 when the State Highway Department made it into gravel. Fort Concho and Fort Phantom Hill, outhouses and feed mills, Col. Ranald Mackenzie and a lone Comanche brave, high school athletes and desperately lonely teachers, all come under his scrutiny and are hauntingly considered for their stories, their limitations, and the sense of place they afford.
Nostalgia, wonderment, and a healthy and imaginative provincialism color the pages of this book, which is well illustrated with the author's own pen-and-ink sketches of the places and things he remembers. The vibrantly concrete details of daily existence in a bygone time in a remote and desolate area of Texas are startlingly juxtaposed with philosophical musings about the limitations all of us face in comprehending even that little bit of life we live. "Can poetry, or water, be found in West Texas?" Corder asks at one point. His answer--if such it be--makes it worth our getting lost with him in this journey of the heart and mind.

"I want to hear about such folks as my father and how he knows how to make cement, not by recipe, but by something in his bones. I want to hear how my grandfather learned to plow a straight furrow and why even older men always called him Mister. I want to know all of the reasons why, those years ago, my mother cried when the tomatoes in her garden twisted and died." Trying to find out such things, Jim Corder leads us through the ravines of the Croton Breaks, around to the back side of the Double Mountains, and through the streets of Jayton and Spur, as they are and as they used to be. He takes us right up to gaze at the Big Rock Candy Mountain, which, however, he can't tell us how to find since the day in 1937 when the State Highway Department made it into gravel. Fort Concho and Fort Phantom Hill, outhouses and feed mills, Col. Ranald Mackenzie and a lone Comanche brave, high school athletes and desperately lonely teachers, all come under his scrutiny and are hauntingly considered for their stories, their limitations, and the sense of place they afford. Nostalgia, wonderment, and a healthy and imaginative provincialism color the pages of this book, which is well illustrated with the author's own pen-and-ink sketches of the places and things he remembers. The vibrantly concrete details of daily existence in a bygone time in a remote and desolate area of Texas are startlingly juxtaposed with philosophical musings about the limitations all of us face in comprehending even that little bit of life we live. "Can poetry, or water, be found in West Texas?" Corder asks at one point. His answer-if such it be-makes it worth our getting lost with him in this journey of the heart and mind. JIM W. CORDER is a professor of English at Texas Christian University and the author of many articles and several books, including Lost in West Texas.

Merging cultural commentary and intense introspection, "Yonder" is a remarkable meditation on change, memory, nostalgia, and the modern condition. A contrapuntal mix of contemporary history and the events of the author's personal life, "Yonder "portrays and ponders a world delivered from the pieties and hierarchies of the past yet incapacitated by the dizzying excess of new connotations and perspectives, choices and possibilities. "Yonder" is about Corder's struggle for a footing against nostalgia's pull. In a kind of nonlinear, semi random sorting process reflected in the book's structure, Corder turns inward to refocus hazy memories and estimate and shoulder his responsibilities for the turns his life has taken. These events are juxtaposed against the momentous changes of his generation, drawing universal truths from the offhand and obscure, discerning pitch and tone in the white noise.

On May 9, 1846, Second Lieutenant Theodore Lincoln Chadbourne, United States Army, fell in the battle of Resaca de la Palma during the war with Mexico. Dead at twenty-three in a remote desert, his promise outweighing his accomplishments, Chadbourne slid into obscurity. But his lapse was not immediate, nor was it complete; clues to Chadbourne lay scattered about the historical landscape.
"Hunting Lieutenant Chadbourne" is Jim W. Corder's account of his obsessive search for information about this soldier, whose name he first read on a historical marker beside a highway in Texas. A thoughtful meditation on the connectedness of history and the possibilities of recovering and understanding the past, the book reveals as much about Corder's literary and historiographical preoccupations as it does about the life of his subject. Rather than order his material into a linear, chronological narrative, Corder presents it in much the same sequence and form as it came to him. The effect is to dramatize the historical process and allow the very details that Corder collects to reveal Chadbourne to the reader. Who was Chadbourne, and can we ever really know? If Corder has any answers, they lie in his subtext of uncertainty.