ENTERTAINMENT

Jesse Cancelmo

(Texas A&M, $24.95)

The Flower Garden Banks are a pair of little-known, but protected, coral reefs in the Gulf of Mexico about 110 miles south of the Texas-Louisiana border. Houston photojournalist and underwater photographer Jesse Cancelmo reveals their delicate beauty up close with luxurious photographs and informative text.

Grant, Lee, Sherman, and Davis

in the Mexican War, 1846-1848

Martin Dugard

(Little, Brown, $29.99)

Many of the Civil War's best-known generals on both sides received their military training at West Point and served together in the American army that fought Mexico in the first U.S. war waged in a foreign country. This fascinating study shows how several young officers gained battlefield skills that they later would use against one another with devastating results while leading Union and Confederate armies. Martin Dugard's previous books include The Last Voyage of Columbus and Into Africa.

How to Unscrew a Screwed-Up World

Kinky Friedman

(St. Martin's, $27.95)

Actually, former Texas gubernatorial candidate Kinky Friedman does not have a PowerPoint plan for saving the planet. What he does have in his latest book are some wacky new essays, plus reprints of popular columns from Texas Monthly. In these absurd and complicated times, you might as well laugh as hard as you can while you're alive, the Kinkster seems to believe. "Health, after all," he writes, "is merely the slowest possible rate at which we die."

Joseph B. Fussell

(Truman State University, $19.95)

This richly detailed, entertaining memoir, written by a hell-raising Texas gunslinger who died an old man in 1957, may be mostly true. Or it may be rife with Wild West and late-19th-century exaggerations. In either case, it is good reading. But it has left its editor, E.R. Fussell, one of the author's grandsons, with an enduring dilemma: "[W]ould I rather think of him as a liar or a killer?"

John D. Nesbitt

(Pronghorn Press, $19.95, paperback)

Wyoming is not exactly in the Southwest, but John D. Nesbitt's well-written contemporary Western murder mystery involves a setting also found in Texas: hunting ranches where outdoorsmen take city slickers into the wild to shoot game. In this story, the detective is a hunting guide who discovers something is amiss, and his curiosity and his need to set things right keeps drawing him deeper into a deadly puzzle.

Si Dunn reviews books about Texas and the Southwest.