Texas Books

This work by Mary Deborah Petite provides very clear answers to one of the most myth filled stories of Western America. It does not cause disappointment for the reader, but by providing a clear look at the facts actually enhances the story and the sacrifice of the willing and determined participants. It is concise, full of information, and a real pleasure to read. This reader is looking forward to future works by Ms Petite.

I had the good fortune to hear Ms. Petite give a lecture on The Alamo recently and purchased a copy of her newly released book immediately afterward. I was impressed by the manner in which the book dispels many of the myths surrounding that battle and the Texas Revolution, replacing them with the facts which are as interesting, if not more so. Most of the facts and some of the myths were entirely new to me.

Many of the subjects dealt with are very moving and lose none of their passion in the telling: Travis letters of determination to stand and die and calls for aid; the story of Juan Seguin, a Mexican, but no less a true fighter for Texas independence fighting along side men like Travis, Bowie and Crockett; the horrible massacres of men on both sides. I also found a lighter side to the book, including references to the famous "Yellow Rose of Texas," and some well known participants' fondness for opium and for women.

The format of the book is well suited for its apparent purposes: to enlighten and entertain. The facts and the legends selected appear to have been choosen with the utmost care, including some of the latest research. The author has managed to pair down what must have been a vast amount of material and include those facts most valuable to telling the story, and those most enjoyable to read.

When studying in school and trying to remember dates,names and events to receive a decent grade on History Tests, this would have been the ideal book for me. It's all here compiled in a readiable story form that brings the characters and dates and ordeals that all went through in a fashion that makes it very interesting and all too true. Your heart can't help but go out to all that were connected in this important part of American History, the good with the bad. I highly recommend this book for anyone who is just interested in wanting to read about the Alamo to those who want to know the actual facts. Kudos to the Author.

My cousin is the author of this eloquent book. He even wrote me into the story. Aside from all of that, Arturo has seen the destruction of the Texas and especially South Texas brushland as bit by bit of it has been rootplowed to make farmland and now Colonias and subdivisions. As young adults we watched the brush piles lit and the sky look like the fires of hell as wildlife habitat was destoyed. If anyone could write this book with the soul of one who mourns destruction, it is Arturo--he lived it.

This book tells you how the brushlands of south Texas used to be, but there is still hope of saving it for future generations. The author tells his story in such a beautiful way that the reader can actually see the brushlands.

Sr. Longoria's words transport the reader into the brushlands and into the cultural and political climate of S. Texas. He eloquently expresses what I can only feel about the many values of our wild places. A career in investigative reporting serves the author well: his explanations of why the brushlands have disappeared provide essential understanding for anyone hoping to reverse that trend. It's an exciting book, hard to put down. It is my hope that decision-makers will adopt the author's tenets on how to proceed in imparting an essential love of and respect for wild places in the hearts of our children.

I was pretty familiar with the history of this subject, but was more interested in the archeological finds. For instance, in the world of shooting today the 50-70 is all but forgotten yet there were more 50-70 cases and cartridges found than any other caliber. The thing about some of the long shots the hunters made during the siege is that the authors point out that the hunters had no doubt tested their prowess at different targets at different distances, so had probably already "marked" many of the shots and distances. Good reference for anyone studying the battle, I am going to the site this summer, and read this as a preface...Ivery

Best book on the Adobe Walls battle available. Covers every aspect from the structures, to the archaeology, people (both anglos and native american), the battle, the occupations, etc. Great info on the archaeology, including ammunition, guns, dinnerware (plates etc), blacksmithing,etc. I learned much about the battle, the times, the people, the construction of the trading post, who, why, when, how.
Highest recommendation!

This is one of the best books on Adobe Walls, ( the other being the life of Billy Dixon). It takes you all the way through, from start to finish. The last half of the book is about the archeology that was done in the 70's. It gives a real insite into the hide hunters and store keepers lives during the six month's at the Walls.

This is a fascinating book about a subject too few people know anything about. The book is extremely well written by a very thoughtful author. It's history but it reads like a novel. Excellent!

I re-read this book not long ago, and on a recent trip to Belgium, I made a point of taking a day to visit the places where the author was active during the war. This book made it all come alive.

I am only 3/4 through in 5 hours last evening. Will continue this evening! A page turner, and interesting learning: as Dr. Bodson learns, we too, learn. Recommend for ALL readers! Dr. Bodson was a professor of mine in college and his writing is as he speaks - concise and not to be forgotten after a first read (or listen.)

I borrowed the book from a family friend and could not put it down! I hung on every suspenseful turn. Mr. Bodson's account was brutally honest and extremely informative. I learned a great deal about the true face of the war and many detailed events I never would have imagined. I recommend this book to anyone with an interest in underground tactics or a love of war stories. An incredible journey!

Molly Baker and Carson Rhodes are perfect for each other. Carson knows that--has know it since he first saw Molly.

But Molly is engaged to the wrong man, an engagement she breaks just before she and Carson head north to take pictures and write copy for a project together. As they travel, Molly finds more to like about the talented Carson.

This is a darling love story that warms the heart and makes the reader feel good.

Molly and Carson's friendship and eventually love begins to grow with each mile they travel in "All the Way from Texas." Carolyn Brown makes the reader want to hop in the car and continue the travels with her in her many romances and historical romances with Avalon Books.

If you ever wanted to read a story about traveling, then you should reach for this book. From the first page all the way to the last you will be surrounded by a road trip that Carolyn Brown has given her readers moments to pause as they travel from Texas to Canada and back. Even a trip to Alaska as Carolyn paints us the whale with the snow and gray skies in the back ground. It was breathtaking when we read about Niagara Falls but when the couple get to Alaska, the moments of pause and beauty are picturesque. Ms Brown delivers another wonderful story from the beginning about the 'cow patty' to Carson losing a bet at pool to cooking breakfast. This book is terrific. The conversation between Molly and Carson draws you right in their midst.
I loved the part where every time they traveled and stopped, they were asked where they were from by the difference in the way they spoke. Who doesnt't get that when they travel?
From the long awaited kiss after the mind bantering while they were eating the Taco's was wonderful. Not to mention how their muscles ached from all their traveling. You are there with the two every step of the way.
Beth and Darrin deserved to be together. A lot of people like that in this world. Molly never needed anyone like that man in her life.
Carson and Molly will be characters in my mind always whenever I travel the open roads.
Ms Brown shared the open road in picturesque beauty with the characters and moments that she wrote in this another wonderful book that deserves a ten plus. It's a keeper!!!

Amazing Grace received the 2003 Western Heritage Award (Poetry Category) from the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum.

Amazing Grace received the prestigious 2003 Western Heritage Award (poetry category) from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame and Western Heritage Center, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

The sixty-four poems in this collection, the second book from up-and-coming Texas poet Larry D. Thomas, probe the complex interrelations between the land and the creatures that inhabit it. The book won the 2001 Texas Review Poetry Prize and it is easy to see why these lean, sharp-edged poems were selected by the judges. Geographically and thematically, Amazing Grace encompasses all that is integral to Texas and Texans, while at the same time transcending the merely regional to explore universal human truths.

The collection is divided into four sections, each of which anatomizes a particular region of the state. The first quarter of the book, Their Heaven of Bleakness, is set in West Texas. It is the most tightly-knit of the four sections. Opening with a poem entitled "`Of Dust Thou Art'" and closing with "`And to Dust Thou Shalt Return,'" these twenty pieces are linked by interwoven themes of living and dying-the springing from the soil of life, death's return to the land, the miracle of rebirth from earth's dark womb-and by the ever-present tie between the dry West Texas country and its drought-resistant denizens. The imagery of these powerful lyric poems is as rugged as the Guadalupe Mountains and their language cuts like a blue norther, bone-deep. Here be turkey vultures, rattlesnakes, claret cup cactus, cattle, and above all an unconquerable people who "take to their gritty beds, / ease the quilts of grandmas / over their leathery bodies / like slabs of red earth, and they pray."

The setting for the second quarter of the collection, Near the Big Thicket, moves east across the Balcones Escarpment into the shadow of the Piney Woods. The dark shadows of the pines are echoed in these twenty pieces by a deeper darkness that underlies so much of the human experience. In "The Slough," Thomas interweaves concrete natural imagery of death's rank decay with the figurative putrefaction of original sin so that the poem becomes an extended metaphor whose vehicle is the dark bayou and whose tenor is the human condition. The viewpoint character of the piece "can hear / the muffled steady engine of its rot" as the slough "works its timeless wonders / under still, dark waters. Its film / has already claimed his pale, blue eyes."

In the third quarter of the collection, At the Jetty's End, Thomas revisits the Gulf coast that he portrayed with such poignancy in his debut collection, The Lighthouse Keeper (Timberline Press 2001). The ten pieces in this section are filled with a tone of longing that contrasts nicely with the dark tone of the poems in section two. The land-dwelling speakers and viewpoint characters of these bittersweet lyrics seek with varying degrees of success to merge themselves with the sea. "Mooring Line," a piece reprinted from Thomas's debut collection, addresses the difficulty of making this connection-and its tenuousness once the connection is achieved. The controlling image of the poem, the mooring line of the title, lies half-buried in sand, "sponging the screams and fleeting / shadows of the gulls, / tethering uselessness / to the slow, consuming pull / of ruin."

The fourth quarter of the book, A Short Distance from the Border, circles back to far West Texas like one of the hawks Thomas uses so effectively in these high desert poems. The fourteen pieces in this final section celebrate the diversity of the West Texas and Northern Mexico country and its people with subjects ranging from bikers and tattoo artists to young boxers to the "chocolate eyes of young mothers / so comfortable with death / they candy its skulls / for the tongues of bronze children." In "El Camino del Rio," Thomas employs the Rio Grande as a metaphor for the geography the river has carved and the cultures and peoples it has nourished. Some, like the Apaches, have gone to "the places of no return" so that "Only / the screams of hawks, bouncing / ad infinitum off the canyon walls, / sound as if they belong."

As promised in the title, the poems of Amazing Grace are rendered with a poise that almost belies the strength of the language and images from which they are made. Thomas has captured the spirit that underlies the physical geography of the land and the hearts of the people who have helped to shape it. In the dust from which his characters spring, and the "rich / red fields / of deep lineage" that so patiently await their return, lie the beginning and end of us all.

This is a really great book of poems, an unknown masterpiece!
-quintin nadig
Chicago, IL

These are the sounds and images we need from poetry, and find too seldom -- finely wrought passages of beautiful yearning, with a flat naturalism that is compelling and achingly true. Accessible on multifarious levels, these poems show us life on the inside of man -- a haunting look at times, but affirming in its struggle to survive on its own terms. "American Crawl" is fine storytelling -- and finer art.

I've seen a few of Paul Allen's poems before, and have looked forward to a collection. Finally, this volume provides us the chance to experience the range of this poet's gifts. Allen is very much a story teller in the Southern narrative poetic tradition that produced Warren, Dickey, and Bottoms. This is not, of course, to pigeon-hole Allen as a type of poet, but only to point up the fact that narrative poetry is a difficult feat, especially when the poet so effortlessly works in concrete images of such stunning power. But perhaps the most captivating quality in Allen's writing is its deep religious character, not in the ordinary sense, but in the sense that poetry is really about our desperate attempts to save our benighted souls. Allen catches those moments when we are aware of just how lost we are and just how frail are our efforts to get home. But there is hope, and that lies in the poetic sense. Allen's narrative style make his poems easy to read, but imossible to forget.

This Mexican problem is not new. About every thirty years the xenophobes come out of the woodwork to try to turn back the tide. You need to read this book. Why? Because you ignore your history at your own peril. Witness Iraq, just thirty years after Vietnam.
This is not a novel. It will require a bit of motivation. It is a serious sociological/historical treatise, but it is not dense. It is well worth the effort. The focus is south Texas, but it is relevant all across the territories taken from Mexico by war: Texas, New Mexico (New Mexico, Colorado and Arizona), and California.
Learn about good Mexicans and bad Mexicans, clean Mexicans and dirty Mexicans, dead Mexicans, lazy Mexicans and stupid Mexicans, and other variations on the theme. Find out how Mexicans who threw in with Anglos to secure the independence of Texas ended up dispossessed, disfranchised, disenfranchised, dangling from the end of a rope or digging ditches. Learn what it takes to whiten a Mexican where even heroism in war will not suffice, and see how Mexicans squabbling among themselves for crumbs from the master's table delay their own progress.
Don't be afraid. Montejano is dispassionate as a historical sociologist should be. It is 1987 and he is hopeful. He cannot see what the future will bring. If your mind is already made up and you don't wish to be confused with facts, and you're already well caught up in the hysteria, then I don't recommend it. On the other hand, if you sincerely believe that the Mexican problem is susceptible to something other than the final solution, and you have an interest in averting this country's slipping into some shameful reenactment of a tawdry chapter in its history, then you could do a lot worse than to invest a bit of time and money in this book.

I read this book some years ago (about 1994 or 5) and it stays with me every day. What Montejano has done for Texas in telling its social and racial history sheds light into the complex contemporary tensions of the southwest. He skillfully uncovers the racial and class subordination of people with Mexican ancestry. I found this book to be extraordinarily enlightening and useful in interpreting California history. What he does best in the book is isolate the racism of Anglos in the Southwest targeting Mexicans and Mexican-Americans. If you're looking for a quick snippet to get a feel for the book, I recommend chapter 10 on "Segregation". I can only hope that Montejano will grace us with more books.

I can not tell you how many copies of this book I have given away. Why? Because if you're visiting Texas, or have just moved here, and you don't "get" it (& why would you?), or have lived here a while but have been only subjected to the official story, you MUST read this book. But it's not only Texans -- new and veteran -- who need to read this. If you are interested in Southwestern U.S. history, you need to read it, and if you're interested in a very good case study of how "race" and class work together, against each other, and are intertwined in very complicated ways, you need to read this. And any student of civil rights movements will benefit from Montejano's analysis.

Montejano's writing is clear and direct, without being oversimplified. You'll be grateful you read this book, and probably keep coming back to it....things that may not make sense at first will become clearer with time. If only more history was written this well.

I consider myself fortunate to have stumbled upon this book a few years ago. I have since bought several copies to give away. Fargas is a luminous poet, along the lines of Jane Hirshfield but more humane and engaged with the world; she views the created world with joy, humor and awe, often through the lens of western and eastern spiritual traditions. The poem "Barely Husbanding Their Own Bodies" is a miniature masterpiece. I can't recommend this book highly enough -- I want more from this poet!

I'm afraid I'm one of those people who's always been "afraid" of poetry. This book has made feel that there's nothing to be afraid of, that poetry can be simple and meaningful at the same time; that it can it can touch something inside without my realizing why or how. It's a lovely book.

On the sixth day of the biblical creation story, God created humans as distinct from animals. Modern readers regard humans as part of the animal kingdom. The title epitomizes Laura Fargas's gift for synthesis in imagery. Subtle phrasing of rhythm and voice combine with her images to make An Animal of the Sixth Day an experience rather than simple reading. I highly recommend it.

If the charming, graceful, and intelligent Appaloosa has won your heart, then make sure Haine's masterpeice has a place on your bookshelf. Concise yet extraordinarily detailed text is complimented by exquisite art depicting spotted horses through time. An amazing peice of Appaloosa literature, and written by one of the founders of the ApHC, no less! Absolute necessity for all Appaloosa lovers.

A magnificent book, full of gorgeous full color photos of ancient and modern artwork depicting the appaloosa. This book is also a well-written history of the evolution of the appaloosa and the attitudes towards the color. For example, did you know that spotted Lippizans and Lusitanos used to be prized and not prohibited? Highly recommend for those who love spotted horses!

Written by one of the founding fathers of the Appaloosa Breed, this book provides a great historical narrative of this colorful American breed. Illustrated with marvelous color prints, it recounts the travels of Appaloosas across the world from early times to the present. A must for any Appaloosa fancier!