The Texas Observer, 307 West 7th Street, Austin TX 78701, Tel: 512-477-0746. $32/year (25 issues).

Published every other week in Austin, since 1954 the Texas Observer has been the voice of the "other" Texas -- the anti-authoritarian, no-bull Texas of politicians Henry Gonzalez and Jim Hightower, columnist Molly Ivins, and whatever populist genealogy, going back to the Alamo or before, you may care to construct. The special strength of the "Observer" is its grasp of Texas politics, which has recently given us Jim Baker and Ross Perot, and before that Lyndon Johnson -- the subject of a good book by Texas Observer publisher Ronnie Dugger. But the paper's reach is frequently cosmopolitan. Dugger, educated at Oxford as well as at UT Austin, has also written books about Hiroshima flier Claude Eatherly, university reform, and Ronald Reagan.

Since NameBase is more to the taste of internationalists than regionalists, most of the articles from Texas Observer that grabbed us were by Dave Armstrong, who specialized in exposing the spooky connections of George Bush's family to Big Oil and other slippery Texas pastimes. But then Armstrong resigned as editor at the end of 1991 and we sort of lost interest.

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