The Texas coast attracts everyone--children playing in the surf and building sand castles; high school and college students partying at spring break; adults easing workaday stresses by beachcombing, birding, fishing, or just watching the waves roll in one after another. In the coast's elemental landscape of low dunes, sandy beaches, salt water, and sea breezes, life itself seems simpler. There's time to watch the seagulls fighting over a fish, bodysurf in the waves, pick up shells on the beach, and reconnect with the healing rhythms of nature.

This beautiful book combines Laurence...

Big Bend National Park is one of the few places left in America where a person can literally get away from it all. Nestled in the great bend of the Rio Grande that forms one of the most distinctive features of the silhouette of Texas, the park is several hundred miles from any large city. Within its 1,250 square miles of mountains, canyons, desert, and river, Big Bend National Park offers visitors respite from the stresses of urban living--a place for taking stock and charting new courses. That's one reason why many people return to the park year after year.

This book is the first...

Many people know the Rio Grande as a recreational river--a place for float trips through the canyons of Big Bend; for fishing at Lakes Amistad and Falcon; for archaeological study of ancient pictographs at the river's confluence with the Pecos; or for hiking the river in New Mexico and Colorado. Yet these pleasant interludes on the Rio Grande in its more scenic stretches are only part of its story. The other parts include controversies over water rights and water quality, terrorism threats both real and imagined, and the smuggling of drugs and humans across the international border. In...

Those who fought great battles, negotiated historic treaties, and wrote the laws that brought Texas into being lie at rest in the Texas State Cemetery in Austin. So do a host of writers and educators, astronauts and athletes, Texas Rangers and elected officials. Even some rogues and scoundrels have a resting place at the State Cemetery. Texas is the only state with a cemetery dedicated to its heroes and public officials, and all of the State Cemetery's honored dead helped make Texas what it is today.

This book tells the stories of the Texas State Cemetery and of many noteworthy...