The Friends of the TCU Library, in partnership with the TCU Press, will honor best-selling author, award-winning journalist and historian Sam C. Gwynne as the 2011 TCU Texas Book Award winner. The presentation will be at the annual Friends Dinner on Monday, March 21, at the Kelly Center. A cocktail reception begins at 6:30 p.m., with dinner to follow. Cost to attend is $30. RSVP by March 14 to Shelda Dean, ext. 6109.

 

The Texas Book Award is given every two years to honor the best book published about Texas. Gwynne’s book, Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History spent four months on The New York Times top 100 best-seller list.

 

“While S.C. Gwynne chronicles all of the long tribal saga, Empire of the Summer Moon centers on its last 40 turbulent years, the years before Quanah Parker, ‘the last chief of the most dominant and influential tribe in American history,’ led his Quahadi band to surrender to the white victors,” writes Dale L. Walker with the Dallas Morning News.
“He confronts the question of moral judgments by acknowledging the Comanche's ‘demonic immorality,’ in which torture-killings, gang rapes of female captives, and the infliction of pain were routine in raids and warfare by a people who ‘lived in a world alive with magic and taboo’ with no notions of ‘moral elevation ... no ultimate good and evil.’ Empire of the Summer Moon is a skillfully told, brutally truthful, history.”

 

Gwynne joined the Dallas Morning News in 2010 as a senior writer. His work has appeared extensively in Time, for which he worked as a bureau chief, national correspondent and senior editor from 1988 to 2000 and in Texas Monthly, where he was executive editor. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s and California Magazine. His previous book Outlaw Bank detailed the rise and fall of the corrupt global bank BCCI. He attended Princeton University and Johns Hopkins University and lives in Austin with his wife and daughter.

 

TCU Press has traditionally published the history and literature of Texas and the American West. As the press has grown steadily in stature and in its ability to bring credit to its parent university over the last 20 years, it has been praised for publishing regional fiction, which often doesn’t find a market in New York, and for discovering and preserving local history.