Viva Texas Rivers!
Viva Texas Rivers!

Author: Steven L. Davis

Publisher: Texas A&M University Press

Published: 2022-08-24

Total Pages: 490

ISBN-13: 162349981X

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More than the lifeblood of our natural world, Texas rivers have nourished the human spirit for as long as people have gathered on their banks. A living bond has flowed between Texas writers and rivers ever since the 1960 publication of John Graves’s classic journey along the Brazos, Goodbye to a River. Many of Texas’ leading writers have had their hearts captured by a river, and they have created sparkling accounts of the waterways they love. Now, editors Steven L. Davis and Sam L. Pfiester have assembled the best of those works into a revelatory collection of diverse literary voices. Ranging from the desert canyonlands of the Rio Grande to the swampy Big Thicket, from crystal clear Hill Country streams to the Red River’s treacherous quicksand, Viva Texas Rivers! showcases many classic writings along with brand new essays written for this volume. The literary nonfiction is complemented by flashes of poetry that brilliantly reflect these curving ribbons of light. Authoritative and expertly edited, Viva Texas Rivers! offers shimmering accounts of hidden paradises, as well as searing exposés of abuse and despoliation. Yet even in the bleakest times, as these writers have found, Texas rivers can bestow a sacred grace —and unexpected redemption. Viva Texas Rivers! brings you as close to the living nirvana of a Texas River as you can get without launching yourself into a canoe and following a great blue heron as it glides just above the breaking rapids, leading you around the bend as the river flows onward toward the best places in our hearts.

The Living Waters of Texas
The Living Waters of Texas

Author: Ken Kramer

Publisher: Texas A&M University Press

Published: 2010-10-06

Total Pages: 165

ISBN-13: 1603442014

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In ten impassioned essays, veteran Texas environmental advocates and conservation professionals step outside their roles as lawyers, lobbyists, administrators, consultants, and researchers to write about water. Their personal stories of what the springs, rivers, bottomlands, bayous, marshes, estuaries, bays, lakes, and reservoirs mean to them and to our state come alive in the landscape photography of Charles Kruvand. Allied with the Texas Living Waters Project (a joint education and policy initiative of the Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club, the National Wildlife Federation, and the Environmental Defense Fund, among others), editor Ken Kramer joins his fellow activists in a call to keep rivers flowing, to protect wildlife habitat, and to save tax dollars by using water efficiently and sustainability. INSIDE THIS BOOK:Introduction: the Living Waters of Texas—Ken KramerWhere the First Raindrop Falls—David K. LangfordSpringing to Life: Keeping the Waters Flowing—Dianne WassenichHooked on Rivers—Myron J. HessFalling in Love with Bottomlands: Waters and Forests of East Texas—Janice BezansonOn the Banks of the Bayous: Preserving Nature in an Urban Environment—Mary Ellen WhitworthA Taste of the Marsh—Susan Raleigh KaderkaBays and Estuaries of Texas: An Ephemeral Treasure?—Ben F. Vaughan IIIRio Grande: Fragile Lifeline in the Desert—Mary E. KellyLeaving a Water Legacy for Texas—Ann Thomas HamiltonTexas Water Politics: Forty Years of Going with the Flow—Ken Kramer

River of Contrasts
River of Contrasts

Author: Margie Crisp

Publisher: Texas A&M University Press

Published: 2012-03-29

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 1603444661

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Writer and artist Margie Crisp has traveled the length of Texas’ Colorado River, which rises in Dawson County, south of Lubbock, and flows 860 miles southeast across the state to its mouth on the Gulf of Mexico at Matagorda Bay. Echoing the truth of Heraclitus’s ancient dictum, the river’s character changes dramatically from its dusty headwaters on the High Plains to its meandering presence on the coastal prairie. The Colorado is the longest river with both its source and its mouth in Texas, and its water, from beginning to end, provides for the state’s agricultural, municipal, and recreational needs. As Crisp notes, the Colorado River is perhaps most frequently associated with its middle reaches in the Hill Country, where it has been dammed to create the six reservoirs known as the Highland Lakes. Following Crisp as she explores the river, sometimes with her fisherman husband, readers meet the river’s denizens—animal, plant, and human—and learn something about the natural history, the politics, and those who influence the fate of the river and the water it carries. Those who live intimately with the natural landscape inevitably formulate emotional responses to their surroundings, and the people living on or near the Colorado River are no exception. Crisp’s own loving tribute to the river and its inhabitants is enhanced by the exquisite art she has created for this book. Her photographs and maps round out the useful and beautiful accompaniments to this thoughtful portrait of one of Texas’ most beloved rivers. Former first lady Laura Bush unveils this year's Texas Book Festival poster designed by artist Margie Crisp, author of River of Contrasts: The Texas Colorado. The poster features cliff swallows flying over the Colorado River. Photo by Grant Miller To learn more about The Meadows Center for Water and the Environment, sponsors of this book's series, please click here.

Dallas 1963
Dallas 1963

Author: Bill Minutaglio

Publisher: Hachette+ORM

Published: 2013-05-28

Total Pages: 409

ISBN-13: 1455522112

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In the months and weeks before the fateful November 22nd, 1963, Dallas was brewing with political passions, a city crammed with larger-than-life characters dead-set against the Kennedy presidency. These included rabid warriors like defrocked military general Edwin A. Walker; the world's richest oil baron, H. L. Hunt; the leader of the largest Baptist congregation in the world, W.A. Criswell; and the media mogul Ted Dealey, who raucously confronted JFK and whose family name adorns the plaza where the president was murdered. On the same stage was a compelling cast of marauding gangsters, swashbuckling politicos, unsung civil rights heroes, and a stylish millionaire anxious to save his doomed city. Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis ingeniously explore the swirling forces that led many people to warn President Kennedy to avoid Dallas on his fateful trip to Texas. Breathtakingly paced, Dallas 1963 presents a clear, cinematic, and revelatory look at the shocking tragedy that transformed America. Countless authors have attempted to explain the assassination, but no one has ever bothered to explain Dallas-until now. With spellbinding storytelling, Minutaglio and Davis lead us through intimate glimpses of the Kennedy family and the machinations of the Kennedy White House, to the obsessed men in Dallas who concocted the climate of hatred that led many to blame the city for the president's death. Here at long last is an accurate understanding of what happened in the weeks and months leading to John F. Kennedy's assassination. Dallas 1963 is not only a fresh look at a momentous national tragedy but a sobering reminder of how radical, polarizing ideologies can poison a city-and a nation. Winner of the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Research Nonfiction Named one of the Top 3 JFK Books by Parade Magazine. Named 1 of The 5 Essential Kennedy assassination books ever written by The Daily Beast. Named one of the Top Nonfiction Books of 2013 by Kirkus Reviews.

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.

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.

The Texanist
The Texanist

Author: David Courtney

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2017-04-25

Total Pages: 120

ISBN-13: 1477312978

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A collection of Courtney's columns from the Texas Monthly, curing the curious, exorcizing bedevilment, and orienting the disoriented, advising "on such things as: Is it wrong to wear your football team's jersey to church? When out at a dancehall, do you need to stick with the one that brung ya? Is it real Tex-Mex if it's served with a side of black beans? Can one have too many Texas-themed tattoos?"--Amazon.com.

The Great Plains
The Great Plains

Author: Walter Prescott Webb

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 1959-01-01

Total Pages: 544

ISBN-13: 9780803297029

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A study of the changes initiated into the systems and culture of the plain dwellers

This River Here
This River Here

Author: Carmen Tafolla

Publisher: Wings Press

Published: 2014-07-01

Total Pages: 106

ISBN-13: 1609403991

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San Antonio Poet Laureate Carmen Tafolla captures her hometown — the city of her ancestors for the past three centuries — in poems that celebrate its history as a cosmopolitan multilingual cultural crossroads. Discover San Antonio’s corazón in Tafolla’s poetry, accompanied by historic and contemporary photographs that convey its enduring sense of place. The little river that has charmed so many rises at “the biological hub of the northern half of this hemisphere” (Dr. Karen Stothert) in a spring that Frederick Law Olmsted described as being “among the gems of the natural world.” A century ago, San Antonio gave Oscar Wilde “a thrill of strange pleasure.” J. Frank Dobie claimed that “every Texan has two hometowns — his own and San Antonio,” and Will Rogers declared it to be “one of the three unique cities of America.” To Larry McMurtry, “San Antonio has kept an ambiance that all the rest of our cities lack.” Carmen Tafolla calls forth the soul of this place — the holy home of the waters, called Yanaguana by los Indios — and celebrates the many cultures that have made of it “un rebozo bordado de culturas y colores.”

Texas Literary Outlaws
Texas Literary Outlaws

Author: Steven L. Davis

Publisher:

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 528

ISBN-13: 9780875656755

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Davis makes extensive use of untapped literary archives to weave a fascinating portrait of six Texas writers, calling themselves the Mad Dogs, who came of age during a period of rapid social change: Bud Shrake, Larry L. King, Billy Lee Brammer, Gary Cartwright, Dan Jenkins, and Peter Gent.