A series of funny social and personal observations couched in an engaging story, Maintaining Texas Pride is a satiric how-to manual for operating a car wash. Dave Kuhne's bemused, wry, and woeful narrator connects the car wash vignettes to create a funny, stunning, and sometimes bitter commentary on a professor's fall from the ivory tower and into manual labor in a "realer" world. Step one open the novel. Step two, let the narrator keep you turning pages. --Jim Sanderson, author of Nothing to Lose, El Camino del Rio, La Mordida and other works of fiction.