The Untold Story of the Lower Colorado River Authority
The Untold Story of the Lower Colorado River Authority

Author: John Williams

Publisher: Texas A&M University Press

Published: 2016-01-04

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 1623493412

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Arguably, no other institution has transformed the heart of Texas like the Lower Colorado River Authority. Born in the Great Depression of the 1930s, LCRA built a chain of dams and brought predictability to the cycles of extreme droughts and floods that had long plagued Austin and other communities. It also brought hydroelectric power—and with that, modern-day civilization—to the hard-scrabble regions of Central and South Texas. With those achievements, and the support of powerful political leaders like Lyndon Johnson, LCRA for years was touted as one of the state’s major success stories. But LCRA has never been a stranger to controversy, and while it continues to provide much of the energy and water that fuels the economic engine of Austin and beyond, most people know very little about LCRA. In this book, readers will learn about the forces of nature and politics that combined to create LCRA; the colorful personalities who operated, supported, or fought with the agency; its spectacular successes, periodic blunders, and occasional failures; and its evolution into one of the largest public power organizations in Texas. To learn more about The Meadows Center for Water and the Environment, sponsors of this book's series, please click here.

A Thirsty Land
A Thirsty Land

Author: Seamus McGraw

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2020-08-11

Total Pages: 294

ISBN-13: 1477322442

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A Thirsty Land chronicles Texans' epic struggles over water, from San Antonio's mission-era acequias to today's debates in the face of climate change and population growth, with an eye toward innovative technologies and strategies for increasing the suppl

Telling the Untold Story
Telling the Untold Story

Author: Steve Weinberg

Publisher: University of Missouri Press

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 9780826208736

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Author of his own controversial unauthorized biography of Armand Hammer, Steve Weinberg here shows how a new generation of biographers is revealing the lives of powerful individuals in dramatic and important new ways. Trained as investigative journalists, today's writers have entered a domain once dominated by university scholars. Unlike their more academic predecessors, who often wrote nonjudgmental books on the public lives of long-dead individuals, these new biographers are willing to tackle such powerful, living subjects as Nancy Reagan, Henry Kissinger, Hugh Hefner, Pete Rose, and Fidel Castro. Few of these books are adoring. Without cooperation from their subjects, and sometimes under threat of lawsuit, these writers are probing into private lives and enabling readers to make up their own minds about public figures. Tracing the evolution of the craft of biography up to the present day, Weinberg draws on interviews with some of today's best biographers, as well as his own experience with the Hammer biography, to highlight the careers of some of the writers whose work exploded the boundaries of traditional biography. When Robert Caro became the first journalist to win a Pulitzer Prize for Biography for his book on Robert Moses, it marked the dawn of a new approach to the craft. Weinberg also explores the techniques of Philadelphia Inquirer journalists Donald Barlett and James Steele, whose jointly authored biographies of Howard Hughes and Nelson Rockefeller mark another sign of how far the genre of biography has come. The book is enriched by samples of investigative biography at its best, including a scathingly honest profile of the reigning queen of unauthorized biography, KittyKelley, and Calvin Trillin's fascinating New Yorker profile of the Miami Herald's inimitable police reporter Edna Buchanan. "The living of a life is more difficult than the chronicling of it, but the chronicling is certainly no simple task", writes Weinberg. "Telling somebody else's life fully, fairly, and compellingly is probably an impossible task. But it is important to keep pushing the limits of the possible". For writers, reviewers, publishers, and general readers, Telling the Untold Story is a fascinating look at how a new kind of biographer has forever changed our expectations of the genre and continues to push biography to exciting new limits.

The Blanco River
The Blanco River

Author: Wes Ferguson

Publisher: Texas A&M University Press

Published: 2017-02-22

Total Pages: 183

ISBN-13: 1623495105

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For eighty-seven miles, the swift and shallow Blanco River winds through the Texas Hill Country. Its water is clear and green, darkened by frequent pools. Wes Ferguson and Jacob Botter have paddled, walked, and waded the Blanco. They have explored its history, people, wildlife, and the natural beauty that surprises everyone who experiences this river. Described as “the defining element in some of the Hill Country’s most beautiful scenery,” the Blanco flows both above and below ground, part of a network of rivers and aquifers that sustains the region’s wildlife and millions of humans alike. However, overpumping and prolonged drought have combined to weaken the Blanco’s flow and sustenance, and in 2000—for the first time in recorded history—the river’s most significant feeder spring, Jacob’s Well, briefly ceased to flow. It stopped again in 2008. Then, in the spring of 2015, a devastating flood killed twelve people and toppled the huge cypress trees along its banks, altering not just the look of the river, but the communities that had come to depend on its serene presence. River travelers Ferguson and Botter tell the remarkable story of this changeable river, confronting challenges and dangers as well as rare opportunities to see parts of the river few have seen. The authors also photographed and recorded the human response to the destruction of a beloved natural resource that has become yet another episode in the story of water in Texas. To learn more about The Meadows Center for Water and the Environment, sponsors of this book's series, please click here.

River of Redemption
River of Redemption

Author: Krista Schlyer

Publisher: Texas A&M University Press

Published: 2018-11-26

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 1623496926

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Incorporating seven years of photography and research, Krista Schlyer portrays life along the Anacostia River, a Washington, DC, waterway rich in history and biodiversity that has nonetheless lingered for years in obscurity and neglect in our nation’s capital. River of Redemption offers an experience of the river that reveals its eons of natural history, centuries of destruction, and decades of restoration efforts. The story of the Anacostia echoes the story of rivers across America. Inspired by Aldo Leopold’s classic book, A Sand County Almanac, Krista Schlyer evokes a consciousness of time and place, taking readers through the seasons in the watershed as well as through the river’s complex history and ecology. As with rivers nationwide, the ways we’ve changed the Anacostia affect the people and wildlife that inhabit its shores, from the headwaters in Maryland, past its confluence with the Potomac River, and ultimately to the Chesapeake Bay. Centuries of abuse at the hands of people who have altered the landscape and mistreated the waterway have transformed it into a polluted, toxic soup unfit for swimming or fishing. The forgotten river is both a reminder of the worst humanity can do to the natural landscape and a wellspring of memory that offers a roadmap back to health and well-being for watershed residents, human and non-human alike. Blending stunning photography with informative and poignant text, River of Redemption offers the opportunity to reinvent our role in urban ecology and to redeem our relationship with this national river and watersheds nationwide.

The Nueces River
The Nueces River

Author: Margie Crisp

Publisher: Texas A&M University Press

Published: 2017-03-27

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 1623495156

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First appearing on early Spanish maps as the Río Escondido, or hidden river, and later named Río de las Nueces after the abundant pecan trees along its banks, the Nueces today is a stream of seeming contradictions: a river that runs above and below ground; a geographic reminder of a history both noble and egregious; and a spring-fed stream transformed into a salty, steep-sided channel. From its fresh, clear headwaters on the Edwards Plateau, Margie Crisp and William B. Montgomery follow the river through the mesquite and prickly pear of the South Texas Plains, to the river’s end in Nueces and Corpus Christi Bays on the Gulf of Mexico. With vivid prose and paintings, they record their travels as they explore the length of the river on foot, kayak, and fishing boat, ultimately weaving a vivid portrait of today’s Nueces. Capturing the river’s subtle beauty, abundant wildlife, diverse culture, and unique history of exploration, conflict, and settlement, they reveal the untold story of this enigmatic river with passion, humor, and reverence. To learn more about The Meadows Center for Water and the Environment, sponsors of this book's series, please click here.

Riverwoods
Riverwoods

Author: Charles Kruvand

Publisher: Texas A&M University Press

Published: 2018-09-05

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 1623496748

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In this stunning photographic tribute to one of Texas’ most intriguing and perhaps least understood rivers, Riverwoods: Exploring the Wild Neches takes readers on a unique adventure along, and sometimes into, the wild and murky waters of the Neches River. The Neches flows through the heart of East Texas, past primordial bottomland forests, timber and oil industries, and elusive denizens—humans, alligators, bobcats, and herons. Although the river and its watershed have inspired authors, artists, and photographers, it can also seem impenetrable, intimidating, or just plain unsightly to outsiders. Spending many days canoeing the river and nights camping on the banks, Charles Kruvand was drawn to the complicated allure of the Neches river and woods. Once common across the southeastern United States, the Neches bottomland forests exemplify an ecosystem that has almost passed out of existence. Thad Sitton, an East Texas native and noted historian, opens the book with an introduction to the historical, cultural, and ecological significance of the Neches River. He takes readers through time from early Native American inhabitants to Spanish and Anglo settlers to present-day East Texans. He also describes the environmental battles fought over preserving parts of the river woodlands surrounding the waterway and wildlife that have depended on the river for sustenance. Through beautiful photographs and stirring recollections of his trip along the river, Charles Kruvand weaves a rare portrait of one of the last wild rivers in Texas.

The Great Texas Wind Rush
The Great Texas Wind Rush

Author: Kate Galbraith

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2013-07-01

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 0292748809

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From two environmental journalists, “the improbable story of how the oil and gas state became the nation’s wind-power leader” (The Texas Observer). In the late 1990s, West Texas was full of rundown towns and pumpjacks, aging reminders of the oil rush of an earlier era. Today, the towns are thriving as 300-foot-tall wind turbines tower above those pumpjacks. Wind energy has become Texas’s latest boom. How did this dramatic transformation happen in a state that fights federal environmental policies at every turn? In The Great Texas Wind Rush, environmental reporters Kate Galbraith and Asher Price tell the compelling story of a group of unlikely dreamers and innovators, politicos and profiteers. The tale spans a generation and more, and it begins with the early wind pioneers, precocious idealists who saw opportunity after the 1970s oil crisis. Operating in an economy accustomed to exploiting natural resources and always looking for the next big thing, their ideas eventually led to surprising partnerships between entrepreneurs and environmentalists, as everyone from Enron executives to T. Boone Pickens, as well as Ann Richards, George W. Bush and Rick Perry, ended up backing the new technology. In this down-to-earth account, the authors explain the policies and science that propelled the “windcatters” to reap the great harvest of Texas wind. They also explore what the future holds for this relentless resource that is changing the face of Texas energy. “Enjoyable to read. . . . I learned something on every page.” —Michael Webber, Associate Director, Center for International Energy and Environmental Policy, University of Texas at Austin “A thoughtful, valuable story for anyone who cares about renewable energy or climate change.” ―The Associated Press

Congressional Record
Congressional Record

Author: United States. Congress

Publisher:

Published: 1965

Total Pages: 1416

ISBN-13:

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The Congressional Record is the official record of the proceedings and debates of the United States Congress. It is published daily when Congress is in session. The Congressional Record began publication in 1873. Debates for sessions prior to 1873 are recorded in The Debates and Proceedings in the Congress of the United States (1789-1824), the Register of Debates in Congress (1824-1837), and the Congressional Globe (1833-1873)