The San Marcos

The San Marcos PDF Author: Jim Kimmel
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 9781585445424
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description
The San Marcos springs have flowed for around ten million years. In this ode to the river they form, Jim Kimmel brings us a picture of a watercourse brimming with life, past and present. Native, non-native, prehistoric, and modern-day plants, animals, and people have inhabited the river and its banks. Kimmel touches on them all with the affectionate and knowledgeable voice of one whose own life has been closely linked to the San Marcos. As readers journey with Kimmel from the river's headwater springs to its junction with the Guadalupe River, The San Marcos: A River's Story will capture the imagination and provide valuable information about the river and its crucial role in the ecological health of Texas. Original photographs by Jerry Touchstone Kimmel add a sense of the beauty and complexity of the river.

The San Marcos

The San Marcos PDF Author: Jim Kimmel
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 9781585445424
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 168

Get Book Here

Book Description
The San Marcos springs have flowed for around ten million years. In this ode to the river they form, Jim Kimmel brings us a picture of a watercourse brimming with life, past and present. Native, non-native, prehistoric, and modern-day plants, animals, and people have inhabited the river and its banks. Kimmel touches on them all with the affectionate and knowledgeable voice of one whose own life has been closely linked to the San Marcos. As readers journey with Kimmel from the river's headwater springs to its junction with the Guadalupe River, The San Marcos: A River's Story will capture the imagination and provide valuable information about the river and its crucial role in the ecological health of Texas. Original photographs by Jerry Touchstone Kimmel add a sense of the beauty and complexity of the river.

The Blanco River

The Blanco River PDF Author: Wes Ferguson
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 1623495105
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 183

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Book Description
For eighty-seven miles, the swift and shallow Blanco River winds through the Texas Hill Country. Its water is clear and green, darkened by frequent pools. Wes Ferguson and Jacob Botter have paddled, walked, and waded the Blanco. They have explored its history, people, wildlife, and the natural beauty that surprises everyone who experiences this river. Described as “the defining element in some of the Hill Country’s most beautiful scenery,” the Blanco flows both above and below ground, part of a network of rivers and aquifers that sustains the region’s wildlife and millions of humans alike. However, overpumping and prolonged drought have combined to weaken the Blanco’s flow and sustenance, and in 2000—for the first time in recorded history—the river’s most significant feeder spring, Jacob’s Well, briefly ceased to flow. It stopped again in 2008. Then, in the spring of 2015, a devastating flood killed twelve people and toppled the huge cypress trees along its banks, altering not just the look of the river, but the communities that had come to depend on its serene presence. River travelers Ferguson and Botter tell the remarkable story of this changeable river, confronting challenges and dangers as well as rare opportunities to see parts of the river few have seen. The authors also photographed and recorded the human response to the destruction of a beloved natural resource that has become yet another episode in the story of water in Texas. To learn more about The Meadows Center for Water and the Environment, sponsors of this book's series, please click here.

Muck City

Muck City PDF Author: Bryan Mealer
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0307888630
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Book Description
In a town deep in the Florida Everglades, where high school football is the only escape, a haunted quarterback, a returning hero, and a scholar struggle against terrible odds. The loamy black “muck” that surrounds Belle Glade, Florida once built an empire for Big Sugar and provided much of the nation's vegetables, often on the backs of roving, destitute migrants. Many of these were children who honed their skills along the field rows and started one of the most legendary football programs in America. Belle Glade’s high school team, the Glades Central Raiders, has sent an extraordinary number of players to the National Football League – 27 since 1985, with five of those drafted in the first round. The industry that gave rise to the town and its team also spawned the chronic poverty, teeming migrant ghettos, and violence that cripples futures before they can ever begin. Muck City tells the story of quarterback Mario Rowley, whose dream is to win a championship for his deceased parents and quiet the ghosts that haunt him; head coach Jessie Hester, the town’s first NFL star, who returns home to “win kids, not championships”; and Jonteria Willliams, who must build her dream of becoming a doctor in one of the poorest high schools in the nation. For boys like Mario, being a Raider is a one-shot window for escape and a college education. Without football, Jonteria and the rest must make it on brains and fortitude alone. For the coach, good intentions must battle a town’s obsession to win above all else. Beyond the Friday night lights, this book is an engrossing portrait of a community mired in a shameful past and uncertain future, but with the fierce will to survive, win, and escape to a better life.

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 Texas

Paddling Texas PDF Author: Shane Townsend
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1493016350
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
From the canyons of Big Bend to the cypress swamps of Pine Island Bayou, the waters of Texas have something for most every type of paddler and every paddling mood. One might float the diminutive Comal River, argued to be the shortest river in the world. Another might dig deep and follow the four-day, 260-mile route of the Texas Water Safari, which Canoe & Kayak Magazine referred to as “The World’s Toughest Canoe Race.” Whitewater is here too. Lakes are as well. And, the Texas Gulf Coast is home to sandy beaches, knobby mangroves, and sea grass flats. Meanwhile, Texas is home to some of the fastest growing cities in America. And, paddling is the fastest growing outdoor sport in the country. “Paddling Texas” is a guide for those who are new to either and all those who love both. Featured trips offer easy access, secure environments, good facilities, great fishing, superb wildlife viewing, and beautiful scenery. “Paddling Texas” gives recreational paddlers and anglers all the information they’ll need to paddle many of the best trips in Texas.

Freshwater Fishes of Texas

Freshwater Fishes of Texas PDF Author: Chad Thomas
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 9781585445707
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Containing habitat information, physical descriptions, photographs, and range maps for more than 150 species of freshwater fishes that can be found in Texas, this field guide is an indispensable reference and research tool for ichthyologists, professional fisheries biologists, amateur naturalists, and anglers alike. The introductory section offers an illustrated guide to the common counts and measurements used for fish identification; a brief explanation of fish phylogeny; and a scientific key to help identify the fish families in Texas. The book includes species accounts of native and introduced fishes found in the freshwaters of Texas. Each account covers the physical characteristics, habitat, and distribution of the fish, with additional comments of interest or importance to its life history and conservation status. With the largest collection to date of color photographs, including various color phases (breeding and non-breeding colors), the book also includes range maps within the species accounts. The closing pages of the book feature a glossary and reference section. In a time when the state’s water resources are beset by issues growing in both number and complexity, this book provides information for professionals and policy makers. It also contributes to the natural history education of the public. To learn more about The Meadows Center for Water and the Environment, sponsors of this book's series, please click here.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey

The Bridge of San Luis Rey PDF Author: Thornton Niven Wilder
Publisher: Aegitas
ISBN: 0369408888
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 75

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Book Description
The story is based on a fictional disaster that occurred in Peru on July 20, 1714. A rope bridge woven by the Incas on the road between Lima and Cuzco collapsed when five people were crossing it. They all fell into the river from a great height and were killed. Brother Juniper, a Franciscan friar who was about to cross the bridge himself, witnessed the tragedy. Being deeply pious, he saw in what happened a possible divine providence. Did the dead deserve to have their lives cut short in such a terrible way? The monk tries to learn as much as he can about the five victims, finding and questioning people who knew them. As a result of years of investigation, he compiles a voluminous book with all the evidence he has gathered that the beginning and end of human life are part of God's plan... The Bridge of San Luis Rey won the 1928 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel, and remains widely acclaimed as Wilder's most famous work. In 1998, the book was rated number 37 by the editorial board of the American Modern Library on the list of the 100 best 20th-century novels. Time magazine included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.

Sleeping by the Mississippi

Sleeping by the Mississippi PDF Author: Alec Soth
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 130

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Book Description
Evolving from a series of road trips along the Mississippi River, Alec Soth's Sleeping by the Mississippi captures America's iconic yet oft-neglected "third coast." Soth's richly descriptive, large format color photographs describe an eclectic mix of individuals, landscapes, and interiors. Sensuous in detail and raw in subject, his book elicits a consistent mood of loneliness, longing and reverie. "In the book's forty-six ruthlessly edited pictures," writes Anne Wilkes Tucker, "Soth alludes to illness, procreation, race, crime, learning, art, music, death, religion, redemption, politics, and cheap sex... The coherence of the project places Soth's book exactly within the tradition of Walker Evans' American Photographs and Robert Frank's The Americans." Like Frank's classic book, Sleeping by the Mississippi merges a documentary style with a poetic sensibility. The Mississippi is less the subject of the book than its organizing structure. Not bound by a rigid concept or ideology, the series is created out of a quintessentially American spirit of wanderlust. This is the third print run and third new cover of a book which has become one of the most highly collected and widely acclaimed photo-books of recent times.

One River

One River PDF Author: Wade Davis
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439126836
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 544

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Book Description
The story of two generations of scientific explorers in South America—Richard Evans Schultes and his protégé Wade Davis—an epic tale of adventure and a compelling work of natural history. In 1941, Professor Richard Evan Schultes took a leave from Harvard and disappeared into the Amazon, where he spent the next twelve years mapping uncharted rivers and living among dozens of Indian tribes. In the 1970s, he sent two prize students, Tim Plowman and Wade Davis, to follow in his footsteps and unveil the botanical secrets of coca, the notorious source of cocaine, a sacred plant known to the Inca as the Divine Leaf of Immortality. A stunning account of adventure and discovery, betrayal and destruction, One River is a story of two generations of explorers drawn together by the transcendent knowledge of Indian peoples, the visionary realms of the shaman, and the extraordinary plants that sustain all life in a forest that once stood immense and inviolable.

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.