John Graves and the Making of Goodbye to a River

John Graves and the Making of Goodbye to a River PDF Author: John Graves
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781589070011
Category : Authors, American
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
A keepsake cloth limited edition published on the occasion of the Texas Book Festival 2000 as a tribute to Mr. Graves. This book includes correspondence with Alfred Knopf, Sr., Carl Hertzog, renowned book designer, and J. Frank Dobie covering the period between 1957-1960. Included is a definitive, annotated bibliography prepared by Mr. Graves and a foreword by First Lady of Texas Laura W. Bush.

John Graves and the Making of Goodbye to a River

John Graves and the Making of Goodbye to a River PDF Author: John Graves
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781589070011
Category : Authors, American
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
A keepsake cloth limited edition published on the occasion of the Texas Book Festival 2000 as a tribute to Mr. Graves. This book includes correspondence with Alfred Knopf, Sr., Carl Hertzog, renowned book designer, and J. Frank Dobie covering the period between 1957-1960. Included is a definitive, annotated bibliography prepared by Mr. Graves and a foreword by First Lady of Texas Laura W. Bush.

Goodbye to a River

Goodbye to a River PDF Author: John Graves
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307773353
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
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.

Exploring the Brazos River

Exploring the Brazos River PDF Author: Jim Kimmel
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 1603444807
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
"Come with us to learn about a great Texas river ... We will explore ... camp on its banks ... and look for places of excitement, beauty and learning - some of them surprising." From its ancient headwaters on the semiarid plains of eastern New Mexico to its mouth at the Gulf of Mexico, the Brazos River carves a huge and paradoxical crescent through Texas geography and history.

Paddling the Guadalupe

Paddling the Guadalupe PDF Author: Wayne H. McAlister
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 9781603440219
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
For more than forty years, Wayne H. McAlister has canoed the Guadalupe River, sometimes called the “top recreational river in Texas.” In Paddling the Guadalupe, he guides readers down this 400-mile river whose waters spring from the limestone of the Hill Country in Kerr County, meander across the broad Coastal Plain, and finally empty into the Gulf of Mexico at San Antonio Bay. With the expertise of a life and career immersed in nature, he introduces readers to the places, people, plants, and animals—large and small, aquatic and terrestrial—that depend on the Guadalupe for either their livelihoods or their existence. With affection and humor (and sometimes aggravation), he wryly comments on the development and human activity along the river’s course, from the headwaters west of Kerrville to its mouth near Tivoli, just east of Refugio. For the traveler, either on the river or along its course, McAlister’s knowledge of the grists, sawmills, dams, bridges, swimming holes, and reservoirs bring the history of familiar towns—Comfort, Canyon Lake, New Braunfels, Seguin, Gonzales, Cuero, and Victoria among them—to life. His love of the natural world, which shares the river’s bounty, will inspire and enhance anyone’s experience of the Guadalupe, from the serious canoer to the family vacationer. Photographs taken over many years provide an intimate perspective, and sixteen maps help orient those interested in getting to know the river on a more personal basis. To learn more about The Meadows Center for Water and the Environment, sponsors of this book's series, please click here.

A John Graves Reader

A John Graves Reader PDF Author: John Graves
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 9780292727960
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
Gathers a selection of the National Book award nominated author's short stories, excerpts, and essays reflecting his life, career, and recurring literary themes

Texas Heartland

Texas Heartland PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 114

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Book Description
The changing seasons make grandly visible not only nature's recurring miracle of life, death, and rebirth which enfolds and nurtures us all but also the special character of a particular region observed over time, its secret beauties and sudden terrors, the coursing life of the place itself. Jim Bones' magnificent photographic record of a year in the Texas Hill Country chronicles that sequence of natural details which mark the year's passing in a part of Texas many Texans have come to revere as a kind of heartland. Complementing the photographs, John Graves's essay on the region tells the history of the land and those who have lived on it, evoking both the special qualities of the Hill Country and the nature of man's kinship with his soil. Stretching to the north within the curve of the Balcones Escarpment, the Hill Country lies close to the center of the state, but something other than geography engenders the heartland aura. Its carved limestone cliffs, its scrubby eroded hills, its gushing springs and clear-flowing streams and its abundant wildlife hold strong appeal for Texans from more fertile but flatter land east and more spectacular but barren land west. Man's hand upon this earth has not always been gentle, but change has come slowly to the Hill Country. It is rough terrain, not rich enough in soil or minerals to have tempted much exploitation, and this, together with its remarkable varied natural beauty, explains its special power over the heart and mind. Finding unique patterns of the place in the seasonal changes of weather, water, and light, of the land, its plants and its animals, Bones' photographs capture those fleeting phenomena which define the permanent meaning and value of the natural world and reveal the singular charm of this small and relatively undisturbed part of it. His work eloquently affirms a truth too often forgotten in an increasingly mechanized and urban world--that in making peace with nature we make peace with ourselves. Most of the photographs were taken while Bones was resident fellow at Paisano, a 254-acre ranch along Barton Creek that belonged to J. Frank Dobie and now serves as a place where Southwestern artists and writers can live and work. The Dobie-Paisano Fellowship is offered annually by the Texas Institute of Letters and the University of Texas at Austin. A refugee from technical fields more concerned with exploiting than preserving nature.

Oil Notes

Oil Notes PDF Author: Rick Bass
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0803240406
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Originally published: Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989.

John Graves, Writer

John Graves, Writer PDF Author: Mark Busby
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292783469
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
Runner-up, Violet Crown Award, Writer's League of Texas, 2008 Renowned for Goodbye to a River, his now-classic meditation on the natural and human history of Texas, as well as for his masterful ability as a prose stylist, John Graves has become the dean of Texas letters for a legion of admiring readers and fellow writers. Yet apart from his own largely autobiographical works, including Hard Scrabble, From a Limestone Ledge, and Myself and Strangers, surprisingly little has been written about Graves's life or his work. John Graves, Writer seeks to fill that gap with interviews, appreciations, and critical essays that offer many new insights into the man himself, as well as the themes and concerns that animate his writing. The volume opens with the transcript of a revealing, often humorous symposium session in which Graves responds to comments and stories from his old friend Sam Hynes, his former student and contemporary art critic Dave Hickey, and co-editor Mark Busby. Following this is a more formal interview of Graves by Dave Hamrick, who draws the author out on issues relating to each of his major works. John Graves's friends Bill Wittliff, Rick Bass, Bill Broyles, John R. Erickson, Bill Harvey, and James Ward Lee speak to the powerful influence that Graves has had on fellow writers. In addition to these personal observations, nine scholars analyze essential aspects of Graves's work. These include the place of Goodbye to a River within environmental literature and how its writing was a rite of passage for its author; Graves as a prose stylist and a literary, rather than polemical, writer; the ways in which Graves's major works present different aspects of a single narrative about our relationship to the land; the question of gender in Graves's work; and Graves's sometimes contentious relationship with Texas Monthly magazine. Mark Busby introduces the volume with a critical overview of Graves's life and work, and Don Graham concludes it with a discussion of Graves's reception and literary reputation. A bibliography of works by and about Graves rounds out the book. John Graves, Writer confirms Graves's stature not only within Texas letters, but also within American environmental writing, where Graves deserves to be more widely known.

God Save Texas

God Save Texas PDF Author: Lawrence Wright
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0525520112
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Looming Tower—and a Texas native—takes us on a journey through the most controversial state in America. • “Beautifully written…. Essential reading [for] anyone who wants to understand how one state changed the trajectory of the country.” —NPR Texas is a red state, but the cities are blue and among the most diverse in the nation. Oil is still king, but Texas now leads California in technology exports. Low taxes and minimal regulation have produced extraordinary growth, but also striking income disparities. Texas looks a lot like the America that Donald Trump wants to create. Bringing together the historical and the contemporary, the political and the personal, Texas native Lawrence Wright gives us a colorful, wide-ranging portrait of a state that not only reflects our country as it is, but as it may become—and shows how the battle for Texas’s soul encompasses us all.

Running the River

Running the River PDF Author: Wes Ferguson
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 1623491274
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 162

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Book Description
Growing up near the Sabine, journalist Wes Ferguson, like most East Texans, steered clear of its murky, debris-filled waters, where alligators lived in the backwater sloughs and an occasional body was pulled from some out-of-the-way crossing. The Sabine held a reputation as a haunt for a handful of hunters and loggers, more than a few water moccasins, swarms of mosquitoes, and the occasional black bear lumbering through swamp oak and cypress knees. But when Ferguson set out to do a series of newspaper stories on the upper portion of the river, he and photographer Jacob Croft Botter were entranced by the river’s subtle beauty and the solitude they found there. They came to admire the self-described “river rats” who hunted, fished, and swapped stories along the muddy water—plain folk who love the Sabine as much as Hill Country vacationers love the clear waters of the Guadalupe. Determined to travel the rest of the river, Ferguson and Botter loaded their gear and launched into the stretch of river that charts the line between the states and ends at the Gulf of Mexico. To learn more about The Meadows Center for Water and the Environment, sponsors of this book's series, please click here.