Search results for ""Trinity University Press""

East Austin, just across Interstate 35 from Austin, Texas’s capital city, is a historically working-class neighborhood that in recent years has become an arts district and hotbed for real estate developers targeting a young urban population. The shops and restaurants that for decades served Latino and African American residents are being crowded out by coffee shops, cocktail bars, and upscale bakeries hoping to attract newer residents. The resulting tensions, part of a trend debated in cities across the country, have received national media attention.After years of observing the fragmentation of east Austin’s Latino and African American communities, photographer John Langmore began to chronicle the historic neighborhood and its residents. His aim was to capture the gentrifying neighborhood’s unique nature and to make Texans aware of the people and places negatively affected by the state’s growth.Fault Lines features more than a hundred color and black-and-white photographs taken between 2006 and 2010, during which time Langmore was fully aware that the window for capturing the east Austin community was rapidly closing. Indeed today many of the neighborhood places, and even the people, have been lost to development and increasing rents and property taxes.The book features a foreword by Michael King, a longtime political reporter for the Austin Chronicle; essays by east Austin resident Wilhelmina Delco, Austin’s first African American elected official and a ten-term member of the Texas House of Representatives, and Johnny Limón, a sixty-six-year resident of east Austin and a prominent member of the neighborhood’s Latino community; and an epilogue by Langmore.

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San Antonio 365: On This Day in History tells one story a day in the history of the Alamo City, from popular lore to lesser known events critical to understanding its people and culture. The result is a treasure trove of remarkable tales highlighting small ripples that created big waves in the region’s history. The stories in San Antonio 365 are fun and enlightening slices of history, but they also highlight our collective need to learn from the past. Internationally known as a center of business and tourism, San Antonio has also been the site of significant episodes in the fight for equal rights and justice, the importance of economic and cultural diversity, and the evolution of good government. Among the 365 stories are the anti-Communist riot at Municipal Auditorium led against Emma Tenayuca, the segregation of cinemas and swimming pools, and the 1955 integration of San Antonio schools. Charming anecdotes and quotes bring each story to life. For instance, did you know that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid cooled their heels on the streets of San Antonio a few miles from what would became Interstate 10—where the rock group R.E.M. filmed their iconic video “Everybody Hurts”? A lively essay introducing each month underscores the important ways that history is never just about the past. As Kurt Vonnegut said, “History is merely a list of surprises. It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again.” San Antonio 365 brings to life more than three hundred years of surprises, highlighting both historical moments that have been overlooked and those told again and again—and the compelling characters who shaped the city.

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To Be Honest is a play script and series of essays reflecting on the ways Muslims are perceived and spoken of in America. With funding from a Mellon Foundation grant, several professors conducted more than two hundred hours of qualitative interviews in Texas with people across religious and political spectrums. Their conversations confirm expected polarizations and reveal new, troubling perspectives. To Be Honest is a “documentary theater” script born from these interviews, which were used to help create monologues that give a face to the nuanced complexity of what is rarely said aloud. The monologues touch on non-Muslim millennials’ understandings of Islam, racism’s intersection with Islamophobia, the fatigue of “activist” Muslims, the impact of intervention in the Middle East on U.S. military veterans, feminist readings of the hijab, the Trump presidency, and more. Six essays contextualize the script’s underlying themes and provide material for further study. In these polarizing times, To Be Honest illuminates the striking reality that Americans have vastly different experiences with Islam, from evangelicals who work to convert Muslims with the aim of “helping them achieve peace” to Muslim youth who struggle to make sense of why society dissects their religion. Students, scholars, readers, and theatergoers will come away with insights that allow them to move beyond limited views of Islam by listening to and engaging with others. To Be Honest is an important script for staging and a valuable tool for dialogue across ideological perspectives.

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How does the human mind transform space into place, or land into landscape? For more than three decades, William L. Fox has looked at empty landscapes and the role of the arts to investigate the way humans make sense of space. In Terra Antarctica, Fox continues this line of inquiry as he travels to the Antarctic, the “largest and most extreme desert on earth.” This contemporary travel narrative interweaves artistic, cartographic, and scientific images with anecdotes from the author's three-month journey in the Antarctic to create an absorbing and readable narrative of the remote continent. Through its images, history, and firsthand experiences—snowmobile trips through whiteouts and his icy solo hikes past the edge of the mapped world—Fox brings to life a place that few have seen and offers us a look into both the nature of landscape and ourselves.

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At age forty, Parker surrendered to her Swept Away meets Swiss Family Robinson fantasy of running an inn far from her home in the Pacific Northwest. For the next twenty-plus years Parker ran La Finca Caribe, an eco-lodge in Vieques, Puerto Rico. What started as a rough-and-tumble dream grew into a paradise enjoyed by guests from around the world. Sketchbook in hand, Parker chronicled her daily adventures living with the land. La Finca is a lively graphic memoir about a woman creating a new life amid countless challenges, including hurricanes that led her to reconsider everything. It is a story about trusting oneself, self-discovery, accepting disappointment and loss, and falling in love with a place.

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Trinity University: Honoring the Past, Shaping the Future showcases the stories, moments, and people of the Trinity community’s 150-year journey. From its beginnings in a lone building in Tehuacana to its roots today in the heart of San Antonio, Trinity’s story is one of resilience, ambition, and success. Founded with the vision to create a new university of the highest order, Trinity’s commitment to innovative learning and enterprise have transformed challenge into opportunity and shaped the university into the esteemed private liberal arts and sciences institution it is today. Early entrepreneurs such as the Munger brothers and Marrs McLean paved the way for the current entrepreneurship program and Stumberg competitions. Forward-thinking programs such as the Office of Experiential Learning, the Student Success Center, and the Collaborative for Learning and Teaching also supplement Trinity’s twenty-five academic departments. Trinity University reflects on all these stories and documents the institution’s vision for what a liberal arts education can become.

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Marfa Garden is a full-color celebration of more than sixty flowering plants of the Chihuahuan Desert and neighboring regions. Marfa, the internationally acclaimed arts and cultural mecca in Far West Texas, sits squarely in the Chihuahuan Desert—North America’s second largest at 140,000 square miles spanning northern Mexico, West Texas, and parts of New Mexico and Arizona. The desert is a surprising showcase for colorful plant diversity. Presented in a style reminiscent of naturalist Karl Blossfeldt’s Art Forms in Nature, the book includes an array of vines, grasses, trees, herbs, shrubs, cacti, and succulents ranging from the little known to the popular to the iconic. Photographs show the plants in year-round cycles, with buds, complex foliage, unfolding blooms, seed pods, and winter texture and color.Also included is a discussion of each plant’s common and scientific names, historical information, garden use, USDA classification, and other helpful details. A visual appendix of detailed botanical and gardening information consists of illustrations relating close-up botanical details.Everyday gardeners, naturalists, landscape designers, architects, and anyone interested in dry gardens or the Southwest will find great value and joy in Marfa Garden.

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My Heart Is Not Blind: On Blindness and Perception is a collection of stunning portraits of blind and visually impaired people taken by photographer Michael Nye. Each image is accompanied by an intimate story told by the subject concerning his or her experiences and unique perspective. The causes of vision loss range from genetic predispositions (retinitis pigmentosa) or disease (glaucoma) to external circumstances such as accidents (struck by a train) or violence (gunshot wound). The people in this diverse group differ not only in their particular conditions and losses but also in their cultural and socio-economic backgrounds. Taken as a whole, however, the accounts of adapting to changing modes of perception are bound by a common theme of resilience, revealed in shared reactions and unexpected insights. The subjects depicted in My Heart Is Not Blind share their experiences and unique perspectives in a personal narratives that accompany their respective portraits. Most speak of the transition from sight to vision loss, and how that has changed—and not changed—their ability to perceive the surrounding world. Some question the classification of blindness as a disability. One participant proposes that blindness may, in some ways, even aid in perception, musing, “if you can always see the sun, you can never discover the stars.” My Heart Is Not Blind offers a window into the world of the blind and visually impaired, revealing surprising similarities and fascinating differences alongside compelling accounts of survival, adaptation, and heightened understanding. The collection invites us to reconsider what we think we know about blindness in order to gain a deeper understanding of vision and perception.

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To create the Confluence of Civilizations in the Americas mural commissioned for the 1968 World's Fair in San Antonio, Texas, Juan O'Gorman collected natural stones from all over Mexico—twelve colors in all—field stones that the artist knew would never fade or change their hue. Juan O'Gorman: A Confluence of Civilizations follows the life of O'Gorman and covers the creation of this spectacular piece of midcentury public art, which stands the test of time not just in vibrancy but as one of the most influential works created by a Mexican artist.Juan O'Gorman was a not only a painter and a muralist, a mosaic artist, a critic, and a professor; he was also an architect and a revolutionary, possibly most famous for his close friendship with Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo and as the designer of their two-house studio in Mexico City—Casa Azul—linked by a symbolic bridge.To celebrate San Antonio's HemisFair Exposition in 1968, O'Gorman created the giant mosaic mural that still adorns one wall of the Lila Cockrell Theater along San Antonio's famed River Walk. The five-ton mosaic measured 2,600 square feet and consisted of 540 numbered panels, each weighing about 90 pounds.

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Jose Maria de Jesus Carvajal is both a biography of a Mexican postrevolutionary and a study of the development of a new border between Mexico and the United States during the crucial decades of the early to mid--nineteenth century. The work examines the challenges faced by Carvajal, a bilingual, bicultural character in confusing times, against the historical backdrop of the history of colonial Texas and northern Mexico. Chance has chosen to focus on a political-military figure whose career stretches from the Texas Revolution to the French Intervention. Carvajal played a key role in the violent struggle between the liberal and conservative political factions that vied for control of the Republic of Mexico from 1830 to 1874. He was the leader of a mercenary army that invaded Mexico from the United States in 1851 in an unsuccessful attempt for the creation of the so-called independent Republic of the Sierra Madre. In addition, he played significant roles in the struggle for Texas Independence and formation of the ill-fated Republic of the Rio Grande; and he opposed the American occupation of northern Mexico during the Mexican-American War, the War of Reform that solidified liberal control of Mexico under the leadership of Benito Juarez, and the French Intervention into Mexico. Carvajal's life and exploits have been largely overlooked by contemporary historians. This work sheds new light on several important chapters in the history of Texas and northern Mexico.

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Every year people watch in shock as homes are destroyed and communities devastated by natural disasters. As the media arrives, the information that is reported is mainly statistical. The horror of living through and recovering from the experience is rarely told because almost no one has the emotional strength to speak out while the smoke is still in the air or the floodwaters are still receding. The stories of a disaster's most important effects--which unfold slowly and invisibly for months and sometimes years--are never told. That is, until now. Hail of Fire: A Man and His Family Face Natural Disaster is an intimate account of the third worst wildfire in modern U.S. history, and the most destructive in the history of Texas. It is a memoir about what happened to Randy Fritz, an artist turned turned public policy leader, and his family during and after, combining a searing account of the fire as it grew to apocalyptic strength with universal themes of loss, grief, and the rebuilding of one's life after a calamitous event. The wildfire itself was traumatic to those who witnessed it and suffered its immediate aftermath. But the most significant impact came in the months and years following, as families grieved, struggled to adapt to a their new world, and accepted the destruction of an iconic forest of internationally acclaimed natural beauty--the Lost Pines. Neighbors once close worried about or could not find one another, while others discovered new friendships that transcended the boundaries of race, class, and family lineage. Fritz, a man who previously held the highest elective office in his community, struggled as his wife, Holly, and their youngest daughter, Miranda, tried to make sense of their losses. He never imagined the impact this disaster would have on them individually and as a family, as well as the emotional toll he would pay and the journey to make sense of it all. While natural disasters seem increasingly common, deeply personal and redemptive accounts of them are less so. Hail of Fire is an unflinching story of how a man and his tight-knit family found grace after a wildfire took everything. Fritz's hard-won insights provide inspiration to anyone with a quest to figure out what truly matters, particularly those who have undergone an unexpected and life-changing event and those who love and care for them.

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Gerald Stern has been a significant presence and an impassioned and idiosyncratic voice in twentieth and twenty-first-century American poetry. Insane Devotion is a retrospective of his career and features fourteen writers, critics, and poets examining the themes, stylistic traits, and craft of a poet who has shaped and inspired American verse for generations. The essays and interviews in Insane Devotion paint a broad picture of a man made whole by the influence of the written word. They touch on the contentious and nuanced stance of Judaism in the breadth of Stern's work and explore Stern's capacious memory and his use of personal history to illuminate our common humanity. What is revealed is a poet of complexity and heart, often tender, often outraged. As Philip Levine writes in his lyrical foreword to the volume, Stern is both sweet and spiky, "a born teacher who can teach me to see the universe in an acorn and hear the music of the lost in an empty Pepsi can."

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Depression and the worst drought in Texas history did not make it easy for a large family on a small South Texas farm in the mid-twentieth century. Lawrence Zook tried cotton, corn, peanuts, even black-eyed peas on his 100 sandy acres 30 miles southeast of San Antonio near Floresville, now known as the Peanut Capital of Texas. His family survived, though he tended to be disagreeable when it didn't rain which seemed to be most of the time.Brush Country natives will quickly relate to the moving descriptions of sweeping the family's sunbaked, grassless lawn, of six-man football on Friday nights, of dance hall rituals on Saturday nights. Those who grew up elsewhere will enjoy being introduced to the lifestyle of a Texas region that is too often overlooked.

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As the nation undertook the business of winning two world wars, tens of thousands of soldiers and airmen went through San Antonio bases. The picture postcards that they sent home uniquely document military life in these memorable years. One chapter of images eals with the Pershing Expedition's chase--supplied from San Antonio--of Pancho Villa on the Mexican border.

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This is the first book on the extensive Spanish-era acequia system that supplied water to San Antonio for nearly two centuries. Using techniques brought to Spain from North Africa by the Moors, this 50-mile system of acequias—irrigation ditches—used a variety of ingenious techniques such as hollowed logs, diversion dams and stone aqueducts to coax water from San Pedro Springs and the San Antonio River to homes and fields. It was perhaps the most extensive such network within the presentday United States. Just south of San Antonio, the Espada Mission acequia and its 1740s aqueduct have remained in continuous use.

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Diversions of the Field contains a collection of essays tackling the subjects of hunting, fishing, game animals, and wildlife throughout different regions of the country. The Atlantic called it "a refreshing animal book," and The New York Times praised Peattie's work, contending that "it is written by a naturalist, who is at heart a poet, to the land that bore him."

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The Grand Array is a stunning collection of 18 essays by widely acclaimed poet Pattiann Rogers. Written over a span of 25 years, in these essays Rogers daringly lays out the essential unity of science, spirituality, the arts, and our sensual experience of the physical world. With an anecdotal and lyrical style, Rogers celebrates human existence and questions many of our basic concepts about nature, God, and the importance of faith. Praised by everyone from Barry Lopez to Terry Tempest Williams, Rogers has an incredible perspective and finesse with which she weaves a magnificent tapestry of themes.

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The Plazas of New Mexico documents the rich heritage of New Mexico's plazas and the everyday life and community celebrations that help sustain them. It traces three distinct design traditions -- the Native American center place with kiva and terraced residential blocks, the Hispanic plaza with church and courtyard houses, and the Anglo square with courthouse and business blocks. This landmark volume has resulted from a multi-year research project involving 50 students, a half dozen faculty members, and outside experts working through the Historic Preservation and Regionalism program at the University of New Mexico School of Architecture and Planning. New Mexico's plazas, like urban spaces everywhere, are gaining renewed attention in this time when the challenges of sustainability have sparked the Smart Growth movement, urban revitalization and intensified historic preservation. Detailing the success of restoration projects, this book shows how to encourage heritage tourism in the service of, rather than at the expense of, local quality of life and community sustainability.

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Long before cities were scrambling to go green and eco-conscious commuters were sensibly strapping on their bike helmets, New Haven, Connecticut, was envisioning a plan for its growth taken from the challenging ideas of the City Beautiful Movement and its call for civic monumentality. In a 1910 plan commissioned from legendary landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted and prominent architect Cass Gilbert, New Haven's leaders charted new ground by incorporating revolutionary models for studying social and demographic data and using that information to help guide the physical plan for the city's growth. The visionary result is a gem of American urban planning history that became a benchmark in discussions about the shape the new American city would take in the twentieth century. This facsimile edition of the 1910 Plan for New Haven, available to general readers for the first time, includes a critical contemporary review of the century-old plan. Architectural scholar Alan Plattus and urban economist Douglas Rae contribute modern perspectives on the plan's importance to the development of both New Haven and American urbanism in the current rediscovery of urban livability and sustainability. The lessons of master urban planners like Cass and Gilbert have never been more valuable and can guide an exploration of how American urbanism has evolved and where it is going in the twenty-first century.

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What better way to learn how to count than with eye-catching works of art? From fanciful folk Mexican puppets, Egyptian eyes, and lively masks to golden antiquities, Olmec era sculpture, and European paintings, children will become armchair world travelers while being introduced to the world of art and learning how to count from one to ten. This bilingual edition also introduces children at a young age to both English and Spanish. The first in the series of bilingual board books called Arte Kids that also includes Hello Circulos! (an artistic exploration of shapes) and Colores Everywhere! (featuring colors in the arts). Art for all the Arte Kids books was selected from the collection of the San Antonio Museum of Art, one of the leading art museums in the United States with a collection spanning a broad range of history and world cultures. Winner of the Moonbeam Children's Book Award Gold Medal (best board book) Winner of the International Latino Book Awards (best educational children's bilingual book, 2nd place) Winner of the Foreword Magazine Best Children's Book Award (picture books, finalist)

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The author profiles the work of eight visionaries who have dedicated their lives to various environmental issues. Each story provides a portrait of an individual's valiant and inspiring campaign to improve the conditions for life on our planet. Taken together, the work of these people points the way toward creating an ecologically centered civilization in which a brighter future for all life, including human, is possible. *Terri Swearingen takes on one of the world's largest hazardous waste incinerators burning toxic waste next door to an elementary school. *Stephen Schneider establishes the scientific basis for climate change *Herman Daly advocates a dynamic steady-state economy that respects the laws of nature and human behavior. *David Orr champions educational reform to make universities a place where students learn how to be environmentally aware citizens *Werner Fornos works toward empowering every person with the knowledge and means to decide when and how many children to have *Helena Norberg-Hodge champions local living with appropriate technologies to enhance our spiritual and ecological well-being. *Wes Jackson promotes sustainable agriculture based on local ecology and community values *Dave Foreman leads the effort to rewild almost half of North America with wolves, mountain lions, jaguars, falcons, and others to restore functional ecosystems and preserve biodiversity

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Acclaimed poet and MacArthur Foundation Fellow, Lucia Perillo, a former park ranger who loved to hike the Cascade Mountains alone and prided herself on daring solo skis down the wild slopes of Mount Rainier, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis when she was in her thirties. I've Heard the Vultures Singing is a clear-eyed and brazenly outspoken examination of her life as a person with disabilities. In unwavering and witty prose, and without a trace of self-pity, she contemplates the bitter ironies of being unable to walk, what it's like to experience eros as a sick person, how to lower one's expectations for a wilderness experience, and how to deal with the vagaries of a disease that has no predictable trajectory. Masterfully written, the essays resonate with lovers of literature and nature, and with anyone who has dealt with disadvantages of the body or the hard-luck limitations of ordinary life.

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Places for the Spirit is a stunning collection of over 80 documentary photographs of African American folk gardens -- and their creators -- in the Deep South (Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina). These landscapes have a unique historical significance due to the design elements and spiritual meanings that have been traced to the yards and gardens of American slaves and further back to their prior African heritage. These deceptively casual or whimsical foliage arrangements are subtle and symbolic reminders of the divine in everyday life, the cycles of nature, and implied right and wrong ways to live. In the spirit of "outsider" art traditions, blues musical roots, and other such folk manifestations, these gardens have a unique aesthetic and cultural significance. Over 20 years in the making, this is the first collection of fine art photography to document this subject and, as such, it adds greatly to our understanding and appreciation of this disappearing element of African American culture.

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This book blends personal observations on Yosemite with reflections on photography and aesthetics, tourism and public life, and the histories of environmental and social politics. Rebecca Solnit's linked essays are interwoven with stunning images old and new: the book combines classic pictures by Eadweard Muybridge, Ansel Adams, and Edward Weston with painstakingly re-photographed versions to show the startling changes wrought over time -- by nature and humankind. Yosemite in Time paints a multifaceted portrait of a natural treasure that reflects the most compelling issues of our time.

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In Navigating Rocky Terrain, a nature memoir in essays, Laurie Roath Frazier explores the subterranean in search of footholds to move forward in an ever-changing landscape. The journey begins soon after her mother’s diagnosis of dementia. As Frazier hikes through Canyon Lake Gorge, an enormous scar left behind by a megaflood, questions emerge. What is life like in cracked and disturbed places? How do people and places—plants, animals, and the land—heal following a disturbance? How does life flourish in the shadow of an uncertain future? These questions continue to guide Frazier through the limestone terrain of the Texas Hill Country. Each essay delves into the geology and ecology of a special place: a gorge, a cave, a sinkhole, a disappearing river—key features in the crumbling spaces, the holes and cracks, of karst terrai

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In her nearly 60-year career as a groundbreaking primatologist and a passionate conservationist, Jane Goodall has touched the hearts of millions of people. The Jane Effect: Celebrating Jane Goodall is a collection of testimonies by her friends and colleagues honoring her as a scientific pioneer, an inspiring teacher, a devoted friend, and an engaging spirit whose complex personality tends to break down usual categories. Jane Goodall is the celebrity who transcends celebrity. The distinguished scientist who's open to nonscientific ways of seeing and thinking. The human who has lived among non-humans. She is a thoughtful adult with depth and sobriety who also possesses a child's psychological immediacy and sense of wonder. She is a great scientific pioneer, and yet her pioneering work goes far beyond producing advances in scientific knowledge. The more than 100 original pieces included in this inspirational collection give us a sense of her amazing reach and the power of the "Jane effect."

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From Here to the Horizon presents the work of fifty of America’s leading contemporary landscape photographers in honor of the life and influence of Barry Lopez (1945–2020), one of our most revered writers about the landscape and our place within it. Work by each photographer was selected in relation to, and accompanied by, an excerpt from the best-selling book Home Ground: A Guide to the American Landscape, a reader’s A-to-Z guide to American landscape terms, edited by Lopez and Debra Gwartney. With images reflecting landforms or locations and others that are more evocative, the collection creates a portrait of the beauty, diversity, and abundance found in our shared North American topography.For Lopez, the land was never simply a background for human activity but reflected our aspirations and desires, both as individuals and communities. He had a particular affinity with photographers, and some have compared his precise, crystalline language to the artistry found in photography. As Virginia Beahan noted, “What impressed me so much about Barry’s writing was the slow-moving attention to detail . . . as he tried to make sense of the world.The collection includes leading photographers such as Virginia Beahan, Barbara Bosworth, Frank Gohlke, Lois Conner, Emmet Gowin, Mark Klett, David Maisel, Laura McPhee, Andrew Moore, Mark Ruwedel, and essays by Debra Gwartney, Robert Macfarlane, and Toby Jurovics. From Here to the Horizon serves as a marker of the admiration of and affection for Lopez and will spark the imagination of places we already know, or hope to one day visit, or may never see but carry with us because of the life-affirming work of writers like Lopez.Photographers: Robert Adams, Virginia Beahan, Marion Belanger, Michael Berman, Andrew Borowiec, Barbara Bosworth, Joann Brennan, Gregory Conniff, Linda Connor, Lois Conner , Thomas Joshua Cooper, Robert Dawson, Peter de Lory, Lucinda Devlin, Rick Dingus, Terry Evans, Lukas Felzmann, Steve Fitch, Frank Gohlke, Peter Goin, Emmet Gowin, Wayne Gudmundson, Owen Gump, David T. Hanson, Alex Harris, Allen Hess, Ron Jude, Robert Glenn Ketchum, Mark Klett, Stuart Klipper, Peter Latner, David Maisel, Laura McPhee, Andrew Moore, Eric Paddock, Mary Peck, Edward Ranney, Jeff Rich, Meghann Riepenhoff, Mark Ruwedel, Mike Smith, Joel Sternfeld, Martin Stupich, Willy Sutton, Bob Thall , Terry Toedtemeier, Geoff Winningham, Dennis Witmer, and William WylieWriters: Jeffery Renard Allen, Kim Barnes, Conger Beasley Jr., Lan Samantha Chang, Michael Collier, Elizabeth Cox, William deBuys, Pamela Frierson, Robert Hass, Patricia Hampl, Emily Hiestand, Linda Hogan, Barbara Kingsolver, William Kittredge, Gretchen Legler, Ellen Meloy, Robert Morgan, Antonya Nelson, Pattiann Rogers, Scott Russell Sanders, Eva Saulitis, Donna Seaman, Carolyn Servid, Kim Stafford, Arthur Sze, D. J. Waldie, Joy Williams, Terry Tempest Williams, and Larry Woiwod

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In Mossback, David Pritchett traverses geography, history, and genealogy to explore landscapes and mythologies at the intersection of environmental, indigenous, and social justice. This collection of a dozen essays searches terrain—from the heart of a swamp to the modern grid lines remaking our watersheds, to the tracks of the animals who share this earth, to the inner landscapes of the soul—to find glimpses of light in dark places and hope in painful legacies.Pritchett recounts a trip to Dismal Swamp, where he takes inspiration from the many enslaved people who found refuge there. Another piece offers two ways of seeing the landscape: the watershed as an ecological unit, and the grid as a colonial construct. Still another weaves personal narrative with the story of the Trail of Tears to describe how settler colonialism became an apocalypse for indigenous nations and ecologies. Pritchett explores an early apocalyptic story from the book of Daniel and considers new ways of relating to the land and its inhabitants. He focuses on the relationship between technology and trees to argue that humans have largely discarded ecological interrelationship in favor of extractive ways of living, and he travels the Ventura River, reflecting on waterways as being endangered but still operating as places of refuge for people and wildlife.The word “mossback” has been used to describe rural southerners who lived in swampy areas during colonial times and moved so slowly that moss grew on their clothing. It is also used to describe fish and turtles who show similar growth on their shells, Confederate deserters who refused to fight and, after the war, southerners who fought against the Ku Klux Klan. Pritchett reclaims the word to celebrate those who move deliberately through the natural world, protecting the land and the relations they depend on.

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Looking for adventure and continuing a process of self-discovery, Janisse Ray has repeatedly set out to immerse herself in wildness, to be wild, and to learn what wildness can teach us. From overwintering with monarch butterflies in Mexico to counting birds in Belize, the stories in Wild Spectacle capture her luckiest moments—ones of heart-pounding amazement, discovery of romance, and moving toward living more wisely. In Ray’s worst moments she crosses boundaries to encounter danger and embrace sadness.Anchored firmly in two places Ray has called home—Montana and southern Georgia—the sixteen essays here span a landscape from Alaska to Central America, connecting common elements in the ecosystems of people and place. One of her abiding griefs is that she has missed the sights of explorers like Bartram, Sacagawea, and Carver: flocks of passenger pigeons, routes of wolves, herds of bison. She craves a wilder world and documents encounters that are rare in a time of disappearing habitat, declining biodiversity, and a world too slowly coming to terms with climate change. In an age of increasingly virtual, urban life, Ray embraces the intentionality of trying to be a better person balanced with seeking out natural spectacle, abundance, and less trammeled environments. She questions what it means to travel into the wild as a woman, speculates on the impacts of ecotourism and travel in general, questions assumptions about eating from the land, and appeals to future generations to make substantive change.Wild Spectacle explores our first home, the wild earth, and invites us to question its known and unknown beauties and curiosities.

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In spring 2014 Peggy Kokernot Kaplan, a former Trinity University athlete and cofounder of the women’s track team, emailed her alma mater’s athletic department asking the school to post statistics from the team’s 1975 season. It’s no surprise that they couldn’t fulfill her request, for Trinity had sparse records from the 1970s—not just for track and field but for most performances by female athletes before 1991, when the school joined a NCAA Division III conference. What started as a humble email request nearly a decade ago has culminated in From the Sidelines to the Headlines: The Legacy of Women's Sports at Trinity University, an expansive book aimed at filling in the gaps in coverage of half a century of women’s intercollegiate sports. Former Trinity athlete Betsy Gerhardt Pasley and historian Doug Brackenridge, along with other members of the Trinity community, have collected hundreds of long-forgotten documents and conducted dozens of interviews with former students, coaches, and administrators to tell the fascinating, multifaceted story of women’s sports at this liberal arts school in San Antonio, Texas.While the book focuses primarily on the post–Title IX years between 1972 and 1999, its scope extends to Trinity’s founding in 1869, illuminating the century-long evolution of women in competitive sports, at Trinity and elsewhere, before Title IX. The story, told alongside the cultural shifts that formed the social and athletic context for female athletes of the day, also documents the decision Trinity and other institutions of higher learning faced after Title IX: Should they adhere to a commercial model, in which a focus on athletics often overshadowed academics, or strive for a more balanced student-athlete, nonscholarship model? Trinity chose the latter and has decades of national championships and academic accolades to show for it.

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Witness to War presents a compelling visual record of a young American man’s venture in Mexico as the country veered into revolution in the early 1900s. Walter Elias Hadsell, a skilled photographer who had recently graduated as a mining engineer, documented a critical period of foreign investment in Mexico’s mining industry and, in the process, captured scenes of Mexican life in other cities.Susan Toomey Frost draws from an extensive collection of Hadsell’s original photographic prints to narrate his ten years in Mexico. The images in Witness to War follow him from his time as a mining engineer in Mexico to his 1917 return to mining in Arizona, his home state.Planning for a future career in photography, Hadsell soon acquired the Kodak franchise for Veracruz, Mexico’s most important port since colonial times. He documented the damage done in Mexico City during a ten-day uprising in 1913 that led to the assassination of

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In (Don’t) Stop Me If You’ve Heard This Before, Peter Turchi combines personal narrative and close reading of a wide range of stories and novels to reveal how writers create the fiction that matters to us. Building on his much-loved Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer, Turchi leads readers and writers to an understanding of how the intricate mechanics of storytelling—including shifts in characters’ authority, the subtle manipulation of images, careful attention to point of view, the strategic release of information, and even digressing from the (apparent) story—can create powerful effects.Using examples from Dickens, Chekhov, and Salinger, and Twain to more contemporary writers including Toni Morrison, Alice Munro, E. L. Doctorow, Jenny Erpenbeck, Adam Johnson, Mohsin Hamid, Jai Chakrabarti, Yoko Ogawa, Richard Powers, Deborah Eisenberg, Olga Tokarczuk, Rachel Cusk, and Colson Whitehead, Turchi offers illuminating insights into the inner workings of fiction as well as practical advice for writers looking to explore their craft from a fresh angle beyond the fundamentals of character and setting, plot, and scene.While these essays draw from decades of teaching undergraduate and graduate students, they also speak to writers working on their own. In “Out of the Workshop, into the Laboratory,” Turchi discusses how anyone can make the most of discussions of stories or novels in progress, and in “Reading Like a Writer” he provides guidelines for learning from writing you admire. Perhaps best of all, these essays by a writer the Houston Chronicle has called “one of the country’s foremost thinkers on the art of writing” are as entertaining as they are edifying, always reminding us of the power and pleasure of storytelling.

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There’s no such thing as the middle of nowhere. Everywhere is the middle of somewhere for some living being. That was Suzanne Stryk’s mantra as she journeyed through her home state on a mission inspired by the reflective, encyclopedic sensibility of Thomas Jefferson’s book Notes on the State of Virginia. While acknowledging the moral contradictions in the founding father’s work and life, Stryk offers a contemporary interpretation of Virginia’s ecology from a visual artist’s point of view. The Middle of Somewhere is an assemblage of essays, sketches, and ephemera from her travels. In a challenge that is universal, Stryk invites us to travel slowly, tread lightly, and look closely at each somewhere that defines a place.

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A Rock between Two Rivers is the story of a man coming to terms with the environmental legacy of his family’s ranch in Dimmitt County, Texas, and reckoning with the birthright he’ll leave for the generations who follow. What began for Hugh Fitzsimons as a mission to expose local ecological hazards from hydraulic fracking has turned into a lifelong ache to understand the more complicated story of how his family changed the land inherited from his grandfather, and deeper still, how the land irrevocably changed the family.Water is the lens through which this fifth-generation rancher tells his story. While the discovery of oil in this part of Texas fueled the region's growth, water has the upper hand, determining where people live and how they make their living. Agriculture, ranching, drilling for oil, and now fracking all require water, with each pursuit requiring more and more but giving back less and less to the communities they’ve helped enrich. In A Rock between Two Rivers, Fitzsimons struggles with the inheritance he wants for his own children, one that considers the future consequences of our actions toward the land we are born to and owns the broader threats to our natural resources that loom in the near distance.Interweaving a family narrative of a life built on the U.S.-Mexico border and the history of European colonization with its brutal consequences on the land and indigenous peoples, Fitzsimons explores how our attitudes toward this precious resource have changed alongside our relationship to the places we call home.

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"Defiant Gardens" examines gardens of war in the twentieth century, including gardens built behind the trenches in World War I, in the ghettos during World War II, and in Japanese-American internment camps in the US, as well as gardens created by soldiers at their bases and encampments during the Gulf War, Vietnam, Korea and the Second World Wars.

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A Kite in the Wind is an anthology of essays by 20 veteran writers and master teachers. While the contributors offer specific, practical advice on such fundamental aspects of craft as characterization, character names, the first person point of view, and unreliable narrators, they also give extended, thoughtful consideration to more sophisticated topics, including "imminence," or the power of a sense of beginning; creating and maintaining tension; "lushness"; and the deliberate manipulation of information to create particular effects. The essays in A Kite in the Wind begin as personal investigations -- attempts to understand why a decision in a particular story or novel seemed unsuccessful; to define a quality or problem that seemed either unrecognized or unsatisfactorily defined; to understand what, despite years of experience as a fiction writer, resisted comprehension; and to pursue haunting, even unanswerable questions. Unlike a how-to book, the anthology is less an instruction manual than it is an intimate visit with twenty very different writers as they explore topics that excite, intrigue, and even puzzle them. Each discussion uses specific examples and illustrations, including both canonical stories and novels and writing less frequently discussed, from the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, by both American and international authors. The contributors share their hard-earned insights for beginning and advanced writers with humility, wit, and compassion. The first section of the book focuses on narration, with particular attention paid to various kinds of narrators; the second, on strategic creation and presentation of character; the third, on some of the roles of the visual, beginning with establishing setting; and the fourth, on structural and organizational issues, from movement through time to the manipulation of information to create mystery and suspense.

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“Woodsqueer” is sometimes used to describe the mindset of a person who has taken to the wild for an extended period of time. Gretchen Legler is no stranger to life away from the rapid-fire pace of the twenty-first century, which can often lead to a kind of stir-craziness. Woodsqueer chronicles her experiences intentionally focusing on not just making a living but making a life—in this case, an agrarian one more in tune with the earth on eighty acres in backwoods Maine. Building a home with her partner, Ruth, on their farm means learning to live with solitude, endless trees, and the wild animals the couple come to welcome as family. Whether trying to outsmart their goats, calculating how much firewood they need for the winter, or bartering with neighbors for goods and services, they hone life skills brought with them (carpentry, tracking and hunting wild game) and other skills they learn along the way (animal husbandry, vegetable gardening, woodcutting). Legler’s story is at times humbling and grueling, but it is also amusing. A homage to agrarian American life echoing the back-to-the-land movement popularized in the mid-twentieth century, Woodsqueer reminds us of the benefits of living close to the land. Legler unapologetically considers what we have lost in America, in less than a century—individually and collectively—as a result of our urban, mass-produced, technology-driven lifestyles. Illustrated with rustic pen-and-ink illustrations, Woodsqueer shows the value of a solitary sojourn and both the pathway to and possibilities for making a sustainable, meaningful life on the land. The result, for Legler and her partner, is an evolution of their humanity as they become more physically, emotionally, and even spiritually connected to their land and each other in a complex ecosystem ruled by the changing seasons.

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Enchiladas: Aztec to Tex-Mex is an in-depth exploration of one of Mexico’s most historic and popular foods. Illustrated with sumptuous photography, the book showcases more than sixty traditional and contemporary recipes for enchiladas, as well as recipes for the salsas, salads, and sides that accompany them.The enchilada is more than an everyday Mexican food. It is the history of a people--rolled, folded, and flat--that embodies thousands of years of Mexican life. The evolving ingredients in enchiladas from pre-Columbian to modern times reveal the internal and external forces that have shaped the cuisine and culture of a nation. In this definitive cookbook, you’ll explore every aspect of this iconic food, as well as gain insights into many popular Mexican ingredients, including herbs, spices, cheeses, and chiles. You’ll learn the basic techniques for making many staples of the Mexican cocina, such as homemade tortillas, queso fresco, crema Mexicana, and chorizo. With Enchiladas: Aztec to Tex-Mex, you can prepare enchiladas in the traditional Mexican way--with loving hands.With this book, you'll learn to make corn tortillas from scratch, including colorful flavor-infused versions; fire roast fresh chiles and prepare dried chiles for enchilada sauces and moles; dry roast tomatoes, onions, garlic, and chiles using a traditional comal (griddle); make your own homemade queso fresco, crema Mexicana, and chorizo; prepare tender pot beans and savory refried beansCook perfect Mexican rice--six ways; prepare chicken, pork, beef, seafood, and vegetables for fillings.Enchiladas: Aztec to Tex-Mex is also packed with information about many other key ingredients of Mexican cuisine, including avocados, tomatoes, tomatillos, and nopales (cactus). A section on Mexican cheeses describes their flavors, textures, melting properties, and possible substitutes. Fresh and dried chiles used in enchilada cookery are presented, along with a description of their flavor profiles, heat levels, and specific uses. Experience the history of Mexico through its most delicious ambassador, the enchilada!

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By definition, a maverick is a “lone dissenter” who “takes an independent stand apart from his or her associates” or “a person pursuing rebellious, even potentially disruptive policies or ideas.” The word maverick has evolved in the English language from being the term for an unbranded stray calf to a label given to a nontraditional person to a more extreme “uncontrollable individualist, iconoclast, unstable nonconformist.” The word has grown into an adjective (“he made a maverick decision”) and become a verb (mavericking or mavericked). Of all the words that originated in the Old West and survive to the present day, author Lewis Fisher notes, maverick has been called the least understood and most corrupted. But where did the word come from?The word’s definition is still such a mystery that Merriam-Webster lists it in the top 10 percent of its most-looked-up words. All of the origin stories agree it had something to do with Samuel A. Maverick and his cattle, but from there things go amok rather quickly. Was Sam Maverick a cattle thief? A legendary nonconformist who broke the code of the West by refusing to brand his calves? A Texas rancher who believed branding cattle was cruelty to animals? A runaway from South Carolina who branded all the wild cattle he could find and ended up with more cattle than anyone else in Texas?Samuel A. Maverick was a notable landholder and public figure in his own time, but his latter-day fame is based on the legend that he was a cattle rancher. No amount of truth-telling about maverick seems to have slowed the tall tales surrounding the word’s origination. Maverick: The American Name That Became a Legend is a whodunit, a historical telling of the man who unwittingly inspired the term, the family it’s derived from, the cowboys who embraced it as an adjective meaning rakish and independent, the curious inquirers intrigued by its narrative, and the appropriators who have borrowed it for political fame.Texas historian (and secondhand Maverick by marriage) Lewis Fisher has combed through Maverick family papers along with cultural memorabilia and university collections to get at the heart of the truth behind the far-flung Maverick legends. Maverick follows the history of the word through the “Maverick gene” all the way to Hollywood and uncovers the mysteries that shadow one of our country’s iconic words. Taken as a whole, the book is a fascinating portrayal of how we form, use, and change our language in the course of everyday life, and of the Maverick family’s ongoing relationship to its own contributions, all seen through the lens of a story featuring cowboys, Texas Longhorns, rustlers, promoters, movie stars, athletes, novelists, lawyers, mayors, congressmen, and senators—to say nothing of named maverick brands ranging from Ford cars and air-to-ground missiles to computer operating systems, Vermont maple syrup, and Australian wines. Ironically, given its literal meaning as unbranded, maverick is a brand name that helped shape the history of the American West and represents the ideal of being true to oneself.

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Along with the movement Humans of New York, a project to share the stories of New Yorkers, Humans of San Antonio is part of the Global Humans Project, a network of major cities around the world dedicated to capturing a glimpse into the lives of the everyday citizen. From Amsterdam to India to Rio de Janeiro, San Antonio joins the ranks of cities photographed and shown through social media to the rest of the world. Michael Cirlos is the photojournalist behind Humans of San Antonio, a social media project founded in 2012 that combines photography and storytelling to promote the spirit of San Antonio's growing downtown community. Humans of San Antonio, the book, is the culmination of more than four years of photographs that highlight the people, culture, and vibrancy of San Antonio. As a community that has weathered economic imbalance and proven itself a leader in urban redevelopment and 21-century innovation, San Antonio embraces change while continuing to celebrate the diversity, history, and individuality that makes it so completely unique. This book reflects the the city's heart and symbolizes the importance of the people who make up its melting pot of cultures. Each photograph tells the story of a citizen of downtown, and through images and his subject's own stories, Michael is able to communicate not just the human vulnerability to fear, sadness, and anger but also its resilience, strength, hope, tolerance, and perseverance. Humans of San Antonio is at once uniquely individual as a photography collection while celebrating the international collaborative that forms its roots. Each personal history maps out the family, friends, and neighbors that populate a lifetime and encourages the reader to explore San Antonio's cultural differences by showcasing the diversity it honors.

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Here is the ultimate San Antonio sports reference handbook, tracing big-league sports since the city's first baseball team in 1888. The text includes narratives of major and minor league baseball, basketball, football, and ice hockey teams and boxers. There are rosters, scoring records, top honors and a wealth of other data, including Babe Ruth's memorable home run in League Park.

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Introductory text in this handsome coffee table book accompanies compelling historic South Texas images, from cowboys to firewood vendors to the imprisoned Geronimo to Mrs. Favre’s piano class enjoying a picnic.

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Since its founding in 1993 by the late Pace Foods heiress Linda Pace, Artpace has become one of the premiere foundations for contemporary art. An artist residency program based in San Antonio, Texas, Artpace's goal is to give artists time and space to imagine new ways to work. Each year, nine artists (three from Texas, three from other areas of the United States, and three from abroad) are invited to the foundation to create new work. Selected by guest curators like Robert Storr and Okwui Enwezor, the artists who have undertaken residencies is impressive, prescient, and diverse, including Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Annette Messager, Tracey Moffatt, Xu Bing, Nancy Rubins, Cornelia Parker, Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, Glenn Ligon, Kendell Geers, Carolee Schneemann, Mona Hatoum, Isaac Julien, Arturo Herrera, and Christian Jankowski. Dreaming Red includes images of all the works created at Artpace since its inception; an essay by art historian Eleanor Heartney; short essays on selected artists by guest curators, including Cuauhtemoc Medina, Lynne Cooke, Chrissie Iles, and Judith Russi Kirshner; and a lengthy essay on the personal history of the foundation and its founder.

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The incomparable Rebecca Solnit, author of more than a dozen acclaimed books of nonfiction, brings the same dazzling writing to the twenty-nine essays in The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness. As the title suggests, the territory of Solnit's concerns is vast, and in her signature alchemical style she combines commentary on history, justice, war and peace, and explorations of place, art, and community, all while writing with the lyricism of a poet to achieve incandescence and wisdom. Gathered here are celebrated iconic essays along with little-known pieces that create a powerful survey of the world we live in. In its encyclopedic reach and its generous compassion, Solnit's collection charts a way through the thickets of our complex social and political worlds. Like the women who've pioneered before her--Sontag, Didion, and Dillard--her essays are a beacon.

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Bob Shacochis, author of the critically acclaimed novel The Woman Who Lost Her Soul, and National Book Award winning-author of such books as Swimming in the Volcano, Easy in the Islands, and The Next New World, hones his nonfiction skills in this tour de force romp through the worlds of eating and eroticism. Domesticity is an irreverent exploration of the sweet and sour evolution of the enduring romance between author and lover. In this relationship, Shacochis stays at home and cooks, all the while reflecting on the ups and downs of a romantic partnership, the connection between heart and stomach, and how the crazed lust of youth evolves into inevitably settling down and, well, simply making dinner. Shacochis's delectable musings on monogamy, emotional and physical separations, dogs, career changes, the stress of the holidays, the aesthetics of food, moving, sex and seafood, friendships, writings and the angst over who is going to do the dishes are deftly folded into seventy-five recipes, half of them of the author's own creation. Guilelessly hilarious, and ever entertaining, Domesticity is Shacochis's celebration of a life spent in proximity to the boiling point. Guilelessly hilarious, and ever entertaining, Domesticity is a celebration of a life spent in proximity to the boiling point, a "prose stew" of audacious candor, a culinary valentine for lovers of literature.

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With a history more than 290 years old, San Antonio boasts a diverse, eclectic, and important architectural inventory. From the Spanish Missions of the 17th century to invigorating adaptation and restoration of historic buildings alongside landmark new construction, there is a wide array of culturally significant assets reflecting Anglo and Hispanic traditions, alongside regional variations of southern and southwestern American styles. San Antonio Architecture is the comprehensive catalog of the architecture inventory of the city. Complete with color illustrations, keyed maps, and informative essays, it is a must-have book for every armchair and on foot architectural, art, and community historian.

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In Green Laurels, Donald Culross Peattie combines his extensive knowledge of history's foremost naturalists with his personal observations about the subject to form what the New York Herald Tribune calls "a delightful book...one would not wish to miss on any account." This piece is accurate and precise but according to Nation, "there is not a line which is not dramatically vivid and entertaining." Peattie's enthusiasm and enlightened curiosity make Green Laurels appealing to readers of all backgrounds.

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