Austin American Stateman

Coffee table books 2006: 27 tomes you must display before you die

Museums, monsters, Dexy's Midnight Runners and more.

Sunday, December 03, 2006

Holiday shopping season is here and, sure, you could head over to Best Buy and get a new 52-inch 1080i plasma TV to replace the 46-inch 720p model you bought last year. But why not invest in a communications technology that'll last you a lot longer? Books, as they're called, are portable, user-friendly devices that almost never break down. Better still, really big ones will look awfully nice on your coffee table — where they can keep all those remote controls from getting lonely.

Another reason to wonder what's in the water

They always dump the nasty stuff where they think the people are too poor to fight it, which, according to "Fruit of the Orchard: Environmental Justice in East Texas" (University of North Texas Press, $29.95), is exactly what happened in 1982 in the Piney Woods town of Winona. Down the road from a school, residents were told a company would be injecting salt water from oil fields into open-ended wells and growing fruit trees on the acreage. In fact, untreated noxious junk was being trucked in from all over the U.S. and Mexico and dumped, where it passed into the aquifer. A spike in human and animal birth defects and cancers followed, and the facility eventually closed in 1998, thanks largely to the negative publicity generated by Mothers Organized to Stop Environmental Sins, who recruited photographer Tammy Cromer-Campbell to produce a photo for a campaign poster. Using a plastic Holga camera, her black-and-white images, collected here, are spectral, and utterly suitable for this surreal story.

— Patrick Beach