The Diezmo

By: Rick Bass

Narrated by: Brian Reddy

Author Rick Bass has won the Pushcart Prize and the O. Henry and PEN/Nelson Algren Awards for his short fiction. With The Diezmo he crafts a stirring novel that sheds light on an extraordinary but little-known episode of Texas history.

When Sam Houston organizes an attack into Mexico, the gloryseeking Texans are overwhelmed. Captured, they face the terrible Diezmo - a game of chance that ensures every 10th man will be killed.

©2005 Rick Bass (P)2005 Recorded Books, LLC

Fact or Fictionn

A part of Texas history you will never hear about in our school system. How much of it is folklore and how much of it is factual I will leave to the listener to decide. But it is very compelling and captivating story of presumptive decisions of early idealized youth with a lifetime of consequences that mold charact

The Treacherous Life of a Texan Soldier

A few years after the disastrous Battle of the Alamo (1836) a small Texan army attacked a few towns along the Mexican border in what came to be known as The Mier Expedition (1842). This book tells a fictionalized version of the 1842-1843 events starting in Laredo and Ciudad Mier.

The Texans involved were mostly teenagers, but they managed to do a lot of damage before they decided to surrender since they were greatly outnumbered by the Mexican army. They thought they could then return home to San Antonio, but no, the Mexicans had other plans for them and they were marched south toward Mexico City.

This is a great novel for learning about the Mier Expedition. The novel is well-written and easily kept my attention. Although some events were fiction, there's a lot of history here too and some of the characters were taken from history including a young artist whose drawings can be found on the Internet. Listen to this one with a map nearby.