Here's the review I wrote of the book in 2007. Note that you can now,
temporarily, get it for a lower price, as announced here today. --
Mixon
50 Years of Texas Caving. Carl E. Kunath. A&K Enterprises, San
Angelo, Texas; 2007. 8.5 by 11 inches, 526 pages, hardbound. $50.
(Order from the author at 3720 Ransom Road, San Angelo, Texas 76903.
Add $5 for U.S. surface shipping. For other postage, ask carl.kun...@suddenlink.net
.)
Wow! Five hundred pages. Six hundred illustrations. Two hundred
thousand words. Nearly five pounds of heavy, coated paper in a hard
cover. Could this be a fifty-dollar book that is actually worth
fifty dollars?
This book nominally covers the period from 1951 through 2000, but
there are some notes from earlier years, and some data from later
years appear in tables and elsewhere, including a short epilog. The
main chronological section contains year-by-year summaries of two or
three pages each. Then there are capsule histories of the sixty-nine
Texas caving groups that have existed over the years. Next is a
Serious Side section covering things like cave science and
conservation, Texas cavers' work in Mexico and New Mexico, cave
diving, and accidents and fatalities. A Lighter Side section
describes famous parties and recounts humorous tales about things
like vehicular misadventures. Finally there is a long section with
histories of Texas's ten greatest caves and one cave in Mexico with
which Texas cavers have been heavily involved, especially in
restoration.
The book is to some extent organized around the history of the Texas
Region of the NSS, now called the Texas Speleological Association.
The amount of research is impressive, with information from the
Texas Caver, the archives of the TSA and the Texas Speleological
Survey, and many interviews and other sources. Jerry Atkinson wrote
a lot of the groups section, and some others contributed portions of
the book, notably in the science chapters. Interesting old letters
are quoted or reproduced.
The illustrations include about 375 photos, two-thirds of them in
color. The colors in some of the older photos look a bit faded, but
generally the photographs are well printed. A wide net was cast for
photos, and we see such things as a yearbook photo of the 1958
members of the Kerrville Speleological Society at the Schreiner
Institute (now Schreiner University, where the International
Congress of Speleology will be held in 2009). Especially noteworthy
are photographs in the greatest caves section, many by the author.
There are cartoons scattered throughout, and the other drawings,
many in color, include things like posters and newsletter covers. A
few of the photos and cartoons have been childishly censored, even
to the extent of digitally amputating a middle finger that would
have been a whole eighth of an inch long on the page.
I had read snatches of the book as I was doing the final page layout
following the author's specifications. Before writing this review, I
borrowed a set of unbound press proofs while the finished books were
on their way from China, thinking that I really ought to read some
more of it before I wrote a review. I ended up reading the whole
thing straight through. In doing so, I noticed a few redundancies,
but this might actually be a good thing, because I imagine most
readers will skip around in the book, picking out the parts most
interesting to them and, perhaps, never quite getting around to the
history of the Central Catholic High School Grotto (1972–1973).
While, inevitably, I could quibble with the punctuation here and
there, the grammar is exceptional, and everything reads smoothly. I
noticed one clearly typographical error in the whole book. (I
believe Jerry Atkinson deserves much credit for proofreading, too.)
In these respects, this book must be in the top percent or so of
cave books.
Carl Kunath is a bit of a curmudgeon, and it doesn't take a very
close reading to see that he thinks Texas caving, and the Texas
Speleological Association in particular, have gone all to hell since
the good old days. To some extent, he is justified. Certainly there
haven't been any recent discoveries like Caverns of Sonora or
Natural Bridge Caverns, which became two of the country's top show
caves. The main responsibilities of the TSA, the Texas Caver and the
annual spring conventions, have been hit or miss. He doesn’t give
much credit for the more popular, if unofficial, Texas Caver
Reunions that have been held faithfully for the past thirty years.
The book seems to be best about the earlier times, when Kunath was
himself more involved and knew most of the smaller number of active
cavers. Of course, the older days will be most interesting to the
reader, too, because they are less familiar to most of us. Kunath
also tends to assess the quality of grottos based on their esprit de
corps and whether they celebrate their anniversaries, rather than
the actual activities of their members. I suppose that is a natural
bias in a historian.
I don't expect to live to see another history of an NSS region as
good, or even as extensive, as 50 Years of Texas Caving. The answer
to the question in the first paragraph is yes.—Bill Mixon
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