NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST

Who the heck is Domingo Martinez? That’s a question reverberating throughout the literary world ever since the first-time author’s debut memoir, “The Boy Kings of Texas,” was announced as a finalist for the 2012 National Book Awards on October 10. A graphic designer who managed a print shop in Seattle, Martinez began his memoir with the humblest of intentions—simply to write down his experiences growing up in a Texas border town, straddling two cultures and feeling at home in neither. He received encouragement for his writing and, over the years, shaped his material into a book, sending it to agent Alice Martell.

Although Martell has only represented five books sent to her unsolicited in her more than 20 years as an agent, she knew “Boy Kings” was special. “From literally the second page I knew I was going to fall in love with this book,” Martell says. “The writing was so nuanced and beautiful that I trusted Domingo and was swept into his world and this alternately painful and absolutely charming story. R 16;The Boy Kings’ was truly everything, and more, that I look for in a memoir.” Lyrical and gritty, Martinez’s authentic coming-of-age story examines the pleasures and traumas of growing up in South Texas in the 1980s, and of the often terrible consequences when different cultures collide on the banks of a dying river.

At the awards night in New York City on November 14, Martinez faces stiff competition for the non-fiction award from a field of former Pulitzer Prize-winning authors, including Robert Caro, Anne Applebaum, and Katherine Boo. For now, though, Martinez is still getting used to the idea that he is even a contender. “My phone started glowing around 6 a.m.,” Martinez recalls, explaining how he learned the news. “My first thought was, ‘Wow, those bill collectors are starting much earlier these days,’ and  I ignored it because I didn’t recognize the number. Five minutes later, my phone rang again, and it was my agent. She doesn’t mess around, so I knew it had to be important.”

As Martell explained his nomination, Martinez went into a kind of shock. “I mean, I knew what the National Book Awards are,” he says. “I just wasn’t able to compute that I was a finalist for one of them.”

As the United States prosecuted a bloody campaign to pacify its newly won Philippines territory at the turn of the nineteenth century, a secret mission of mercy went terribly wrong. The result was a prisoner-of-war crisis, the likes of which our nation had never encountered before. The epic struggle for survival that followed was not only a test of the human will to live, but a crucible for heroes. And yet, what was touted as a heroic rescue operation extended a war by almost two years and cost the lives of thousands.

In April 1899, Admiral George Dewey dispatched the USS Yorktown to liberate a detachment of Spanish soldiers under siege by Filipino rebels. To reconnoiter enemy defenses, one of the Yorktown’s armed cutters—manned by a crew of fifteen sailors—was sent toward shore. And then it happened. Defying orders, Lieutenant James C. Gillmore Jr. recklessly pushed upriver into heavy jungle—and headlong into an ambush that would kill four of his men. The survivors were dragged across mountains and through dense jungle from one pestilent prison to the next along what Gillmore called “a veritable Devil’s Causeway.” 

Their captivity and the torturous expedition sent to recover them, recalled toda y a s one of the greatest marches in US Army history, features a tightly hewn cast of characters—including a frail yet determined teenaged sailor and his hardened seafaring mates; battle-tested veterans of the Civil War and the Indian Wars; and a fiery revolutionary commander who gave orders to bury wounded Americans alive. A sweeping military epic drawing on international primary sources, The Devil’s Causeway tells their extraordinary story in its entirety for the first time.