Texas Books

Having seen the retrospective at the McNay art institute in San Antonio, The book does an incredible job of recreating the actual works. The paintings are very inspiring and transport you to a more peacful time and place

Extremely well-written retrospective of the artist's work. Embrey's work (especially his work with window images) is nicley captured through the full-color plates. The writer of this book took extreme care in developing a clear picture of the artist and his artistic vision.

Luisa Lang Owen's recounting of her childhood and the losses she and others experienced before, during and after the war, including three years in a concentration camp is, at once, both hauntingly beautiful and horrific. Her captors, in seeking to exterminate individuals and their culture ironically distilled, in this young woman, the essence of being. Her lush and loving attention to detail, her artistic perceptions were heightened and strengthened in those years, and what we sometimes refer to as the "strength of the human spirit" is clearly defined in the telling of this woman's coming of age under life-threatening conditions. Both fascinated and saddened by the telling, I felt as if I'd entered the spirit of someone who has always lived and continues to live fully and attentively in the world.

This book should be read by all Danube Swabians and their offsprings as well as all freedom-loving, truth seeking and fair minded people of this world.

The reviewer is right, but the book does come with a study guide for the entire book, not just the solutions.

This solutions manual is my bestest friend! Don't know what I'll do without it. Anyways, to the meat of it all, the solutions manual is actually on the website the book has (pdf format), so you don't really have to buy it, but if you really want a hardcopy then go ahead. I'd rather save $40 bucks. Hope this saves you guys some $$ (=

This book is a must read for anyone working with Chicano/Chicana students in schools. Prof. Pizarro's insights come from real experience "in the field," and his analysis is one that you'll want to consider.

I strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in learning about Chicana/o youth in education.

If you are unfamiliar with the glass arts of Chihuly, this colorful gem will fill you with awe and wonder. Chihuly's creative daring, skills and kinetic style with team artisans is world renowned and celebrated. HIs works are jewel-like with an explosion of color and this book puts it all before you in a very intimate size.

If you are unfamiliar with the glass arts of Chihuly, this colorful gem will fill you with awe and wonder. Chihuly's creative daring, skills and kinetic style with team artisans is world renowned and celebrated. His works are an explosion of shapes and color, and this book puts it all before you in a very intimate size.

good book about Chimney swifts, their habitat loss and constructing "Chimneys" for them to raise young in. The book describes the construction of these small towers using modern methods and materials. I think this book will be the definitive Chimney Swift work of our time. Buy it and build a tower. You and these gregarious little flying insect eaters will be better for it. Watching Chimney swifts reminds me greatly of watching a Quiditch match as described in the Harry Potter books.

Kyle and Georgean have put together "the book" on how to build a chimney swift tower. What I especially love about this book is that they provide a numb er of different designs - three different types of wooden towers as well as different types of masonry/cement block towers - so you have options. There are pictures - photographs and drawings throughout to help with the building and the materials/instructions are very clear. I haven't convinced my husband to build one (yet)and we already have swifts in our chimney but I am working with a local park and some eagles scouts to put one up. Another thing I really like about this book is that it goes beyond just putting up a swift tower. It also gives guidance on monitoring the tower (to include electronic monitoring like putting a camera inside) and report forms. It also has great pictures so that at a park, for example, you can create an educational evironment as well. Another neat thing is to also host a "swift night out" in the fall, where people gather to watch the swifts (babies all fledged and practicing their flight maneuvers)as they fly around the tower, dive in and more. Its so amazing to see them flying at incredible speeds and then dive into the chimney or tower. What a sight. I've also ready that when the young are learning to fly, if one is having trouble, the adults will flying in circles below them, creating an updraft to help lift them higher. They are such amazing birds, deserving of our attention and preservation. This book really helps us not only provide a nesting site but also opportunities for our own education.....as the saying goes....we conserve what we love, we love what we understand, we understand what we are taught.

This is the story of Susan Wilkins and Sterling Churchill, two people from very different backgrounds. Susan is a librarian who decides to have a baby and goes to a sperm bank to become artificially inseminated. Sterling is a millionaire who happened to have a vial in the sperm bank when he was doing fertiltiy testing with his ex-wife. Through a mix-up, his sperm is used and Susan becomes pregnant. Sterling insists on marrying her as he wants to provide for his child, but Susan is resistant. They do get married and Susan falls in love with Sterling, but he has a problem declaring his feelings because of his past history with his ex-wife.

A welcome addition to the series.

Cross writes about people who immediatedly engage your heart. They're warm, funny, strong and human, and I was rooting for them from the first. She didn't let me down. Give yourself a real treat! A wonderful follow-up to the first Texas Cattleman's Club book.

I prefer reading history books to novels and my favorite history books are often written in America. Michael Johns' "City of Mexico" is a fine example why American history often makes for such compelling reading. The book is a mix of excellent research, a engaging vision on the timeframe, and prose that offers a kaleidoscopical view on the city. Johns really achieves bringing back to life the Mexico City of 100 years ago, it's as if by reading this book, we walk through the streets of late 19th century Mexico city.

One of the superior qualities of the book, is that Johns has been able to present Mexico City in the Age of Diaz as a mirror of Mexico's history since the conquest by Cortes. The legacy of Mexico's repressive colonial and traumatic post-colonial history shines through every page of this book, and is illustrated by many fascinating, painful and sometimes hilarious anecdotes.

This book reminds me of another excellent book I read a couple of years ago, Jeffrey Pilcher's "Que vivan los tamales. Food and the making of Mexican identity", which is also a must-read.

I define a great book as one that changes and clarifies the way that I view the world. This one changed the way I viewed part of the world, and that's good enough for me to highly recommend it. I scarcely knew the history of the country on our southern border, and Diaz was simply a name with no context. This book is an eloquent geographical study of Mexico City during the turn of the 19th-20th century. Johns unravels cause and effect, patterns and trends, politics and society in what would seem to a visitor to be mere chaos. This academic book not only lays out the context and causes of the Revolucion, but provides some lessons in politics and power that play out even today. The only drawback is that the book brings us to the edge of the Mexican Revolution and then the book ends, like the first movie in a trilogy, teasing the reader for a sequel. But then I suppose the book would have lost its focus, so I am satisfied that is a self-contained and tight (and well-referenced) exploration of an intriguing place and time.

Amazingly, this is the first comprehensive work written on a key event in American labor history -- an event that was headline news in the mid 1940's, and that among many other things set the stage for the passage of Taft-Hartley and propelled Ronald Reagan into politics. While countless historians have left no stone unturned in examining the Hollywood Blacklist, the story of the Hollywood studio strikes has long been relegated to footnotes and chapters in more general works. With this work Gerald Horne has shined a relentless light of painstaking scholarship on what may well be the most neglected event in American labor history. The footnotes alone are worth the price of the book and will no doubt entice many readers to follow these myriad paths deeper into the hidden corners of Hollywood history.

This book belongs on the shelf of anyone interested in Hollywood history, labor history, the Hollywood Blacklist, American radical history, and the history of organized crime in America. It should especially be read by anyone who earns their living as a worker in the film and television industry or is a member of IATSE and wishes to know the true story of their union's dark history.

Reviewer Everitt's remarks capture the book's essential value. Several points however merit emphasis. First, Horne's book brings out the symbiotic relation between the studios' desire for non-independent company unions, on one hand, and organized crime's desire for corrupt unions, on the other. By taking in one another's washing during the tumultuous events of '45 - '47, these two representatives of private capital maintained an alliance that defeated efforts by the Conference of Studio Unions to emerge as an independent union of movie-making employees. Horne the historian is detailed about this sinister and under-reported alliance. Second, by using abundant primary sources, the author debunks the nurtured image of CSU as a communist-led movement, a scare tactic still in its infancy following the anti-fascist WWII and, as the book shows, a tactic used to increasing effect by the corporate-owned press of the day. Belated communist support for CSU strikers was willfully twisted by these flacks into communist domination. Third, the inability of the CSU to cross racial and gender lines of the day is emphasized. This had the unfortunate effect of reducing potential for attracting outside allies, especially among aggrieved African-Americans and women's groups, though it's hardly surprising that prejudices within the union would reflect those of the larger society from which it sprang. It's fascinating to follow this dark underside of the Hollywood dream factory, though I did find time shifts in the narrative confusing at times. Nonetheless, Horne has focused his word-camera on a worthy and neglected real life drama.

I grew up going to Galveston and have always loved this strange city. This book does a wonderful job of capturing the architecture that made Galveston unique. Clayton is definitly the definitave Galveston architect, he shaped the style of the city. Galveston was so lucky to have had him as their preeminant architect. I loved the historic pictures in the book and the text was facinating, I learned a great deal about a subject I thought I knew much about. I urge anyone who visits Houston to make it their mission to go take in Galveston and take this wonderful book with you.

Few people have shaped the face of Galveston and Houston as much as architect Nicholas Clayon. This book compiles the architect's works in Galveston during the boom of the Gilded Isle. This invaluable resource is filled with photographs and renderings of Clayton's projects, both commercial and residential. While many of his buildings remain, many more have been lost and this book helps recreate Galveston during Clayton's time. It also includes information on other architcts who were Clayton's contemporaries. A must for anyone interested in Galveston, architecture and how one was shaped by the other through Clayton's vision.