The Men in My Life and Other More or Less True Recollections of Kinship

In 12 loosely connected chapters, a San Franciscoborn novelist (The Californians recalls men who strongly affected his life: his Uncle Jay from Texas, who hoped that Houston would become an All-American football player at Abilene Christian College; his father Dudley, a would-be guitarist who couldn't stand his son's musical attempts; his ""dangerous'' Uncle Anderson, whose fighting cock destroyed Dudley's laying hens. Houston also offers memories of his own experiences, including a glimpse of Count Basie in decline, an encounter with a German truck driver who picked him up when he was hitchhiking in Sweden and his delivery of a nuclear-bomb cartridge to a fighter plane during a 1958 crisis that might have led to war. The memoir's most impressive chapter also is its most repulsive: an account of a hazing Houston endured upon joining a college fraternity. (August 2)