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River of Contrasts
Writer and artist Margie Crisp has traveled the length of Texas’ Colorado River, which rises in Dawson County, south of Lubbock, and flows 860 miles southeast across the state to its mouth on the Gulf of Mexico at Matagorda Bay. Echoing the truth of Heraclitus’s ancient dictum, the river’s character changes dramatically from its dusty headwaters on the High Plains to its meandering presence on the coastal prairie. The Colorado is the longest river with both its source and its mouth in Texas, and its water, from beginning to end, provides for the state’s agricultural, municipal, and recreational needs. As Crisp notes, the Colorado River is perhaps most frequently associated with its m...
The Untold Story of the Lower Colorado River Authority
Arguably, no other institution has transformed the heart of Texas like the Lower Colorado River Authority. Born in the Great Depression of the 1930s, LCRA built a chain of dams and brought predictability to the cycles of extreme droughts and floods that had long plagued Austin and other communities. It also brought hydroelectric power—and with that, modern-day civilization—to the hard-scrabble regions of Central and South Texas. With those achievements, and the support of powerful political leaders like Lyndon Johnson, LCRA for years was touted as one of the state’s major success stories. But LCRA has never been a stranger to controversy, and while it continues to provide much of the e...
Flash Floods in Texas
How many times have you heard the television or radio alert, “We are now under a flash flood watch”? While the destructive force of flash flooding is a regular occurrence in the state and has caused a tremendous amount of damage and heartache over the years, no one until now has recorded in a single book the history of flash floods in Texas. After combing libraries and archives, grilling county historians, trekking to flood sites, and collecting scores of graphic photographs, Jonathan Burnett chose twenty-eight floods from around the state to create this narrative of a century of disastrous events. Beginning with the famous Austin dam break of 1900 and ending with the historic 2002 flood...
River of Promise, River of Peril
Snaking 2,540 miles from Montana to the Mississippi River, the Missouri is the longest waterway in the nation. Its basin—stretching 530,000 square miles—extends broadly into ten states and twenty-five Indian reservations. For millions of years the river and its tributaries meandered untamed. But that irrevocably changed with the passage of the Pick-Sloan Plan, part of the Flood Control Act of 1944. In River of Promise, River of Peril, John Thorson takes the first comprehensive look at how and why the Missouri River basin-now with six major dams and hundreds of miles of navigation canals-has become one of the most significantly altered drainage systems in the country. He also looks at the...
Goodbye to a River
In the 1950s, a series of dams was proposed along the Brazos River in north-central Texas. For John Graves, this project meant that if the stream’s regimen was thus changed, the beautiful and sometimes brutal surrounding countryside would also change, as would the lives of the people whose rugged ancestors had eked out an existence there. Graves therefore decided to visit that stretch of the river, which he had known intimately as a youth. Goodbye to a River is his account of that farewell canoe voyage. As he braves rapids and fatigue and the fickle autumn weather, he muses upon old blood feuds of the region and violent skirmishes with native tribes, and retells wild stories of courage and cowardice and deceit that shaped both the river’s people and the land during frontier times and later. Nearly half a century after its initial publication, Goodbye to a River is a true American classic, a vivid narrative about an exciting journey and a powerful tribute to a vanishing way of life and its ever-changing natural environment.
The Great Texas Wind Rush
From two environmental journalists, “the improbable story of how the oil and gas state became the nation’s wind-power leader” (The Texas Observer). In the late 1990s, West Texas was full of rundown towns and pumpjacks, aging reminders of the oil rush of an earlier era. Today, the towns are thriving as 300-foot-tall wind turbines tower above those pumpjacks. Wind energy has become Texas’s latest boom. How did this dramatic transformation happen in a state that fights federal environmental policies at every turn? In The Great Texas Wind Rush, environmental reporters Kate Galbraith and Asher Price tell the compelling story of a group of unlikely dreamers and innovators, politicos and pr...
Return to Aztlan
Return to Aztlan analyzes the social process of international migration through an intensive study of four carefully chosen Mexican communities. The book combines historical, anthropological, and survey data to construct a vivid and comprehensive picture of the social dynamics of contemporary Mexican migration to the United States.
Canoeing and Kayaking Houston Waterways
Within about seventy-five miles of downtown Houston, some 1,500 miles of rivers, creeks, lakes, bayous, and bays await discovery. Canoeing and Kayaking Houston Waterways, by longtime paddler Natalie Wiest, is the perfect companion for anyone who wants to experience Houston’s well-watered landscape from the seat of a kayak or canoe. Before introducing readers to the quiet, green world that lies within and around the heart of the city, Wiest gives some pointers on water safety (including swimming and boating); on weather, flood stages, and legal access; and on an often unseen but always present paddling companion—alligators. She also provides a gear checklist for a day trip, a brief guide ...
Understanding Central America
The fifth edition of Understanding Central America explains how domestic and global political and economic forces have shaped rebellion and regime change in Costa Rica, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. John A. Booth, Christine J. Wade, and Thomas W. Walker explore the origins and development of the region's political conflicts and its efforts to resolve them. Covering the region's political and economic development from the early 1800s onward, the authors provide a background for understanding Central America's rebellion and regime change of the past forty years. This revised edition brings the Central American story up to date, with special emphasis on globalization, evolving public opinion, progress toward democratic consolidation, and the relationship between Central America and the United States under the Obama administration, and includes analysis of the 2009 Honduran coup d'etat. A useful introduction to the region and a model for how to convey its complexities in language readers will comprehend, Understanding Central America stands out as a must-have resource.
