But the author, Samuel Garcia, is a Rio Grande Valley native and his proud mother, Irma, called me to tell me something amazing about her son and his book.
Samuel is a senior in the honors program at the prestigious McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin and a Pi Kappa Phi Fraternity brother of the Zeta Theta Chapter. And in his spare time, he wrote a sparse book Ñ just 68 pages long Ñ expanding on an economic theory that he had developed after growing up raising goats in the Valley and witnessing poverty that only our area colonias can breed.
But that’s not the amazing thing about his book. Just released last Wednesday, Samuel and his millennial peers impressively harnessed the power of social media to spread the word about the book.
And within 12 hours of its release, the book made Amazon’s bestseller list Ñ in two separate categories: Nonprofit Organizations and Charities, and Tropical Agriculture.
Again, it’s not the lists that a John Grisham might have made, but this young man who is about to graduate from college now can add an impressive line to his resume: bestselling author.
Unbeknown to me, I contributed to his bestseller status after his mother called me last week and told me his story. I was intrigued by the story and saw that ebooks were available for a mere 99 cents, so I ordered a copy.
Admittedly, what I read was not the most scintillating prose. But Samuel’s enthusiasm and his story leapt out at me. This treatise on economic theory, Samuel explained in his preface, began as an elegy to his father, David, a lawyer who died of a heart attack when Samuel was a freshman at UT.
“My dad left behind a legacy as the attorney who defended the little guy,” Samuel wrote.