Red McCombs has, in his words, "dabbled in automobiles, cattle, oil and gas, broadcasting, insurance, racehorses, motion pictures, real estate, politics, minor league baseball, and pro football." The successful businessman is also the cofounder of Clear Channel Communications, the former owner of two professional basketball teams, and a noted philanthropist. Published by the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, Big Red is a candid first-person account of the life and times of this extraordinary Texan. Based on a series of oral history interviews with Dr. Don Carleton, the book begins with an account of McCombs's childhood in the West Texas town of Spur, where he first went into business for himself at the age of ten by selling peanuts to farmworkers. McCombs started selling cars in Corpus Christi in 1950, and before long he was one of the most successful Ford dealers in the country. He moved to San Antonio in 1958 and built a business empire, always looking for his next great deal. Through all of his wheeling and dealing, however, McCombs says he's signed only one lifetime contract--with his wife, Charline. McCombs's candid views on why U.S. automakers floundered, as well as his insights on the development of the highly successful Clear Channel Communications, are among the many behind-the-scenes accounts he relates about his remarkable life.

My name is Texas and this is my story. The daughter of a Southern Baptist pastor, I ran away from home when I was 17. For 28 years I traveled a path that took me to places from which few return. Unhealthy relationships and unbridled lusts corrupted my view of freedom and left me cornered in addiction--financed by crafty manipulation and drug dealing. My tainted knowledge of love and polluted desire for escape kept me on a treacherous treadmill that continually fed the heartache of those I loved. But, through it all, the One who loved me unconditionally remained. This is my unvarnished account of the years I spent running and what brought that season to its redeeming end.

Born on a farm near Anahuac, Texas, in 1875 and possessed of only a fourth-grade education, Ross Sterling was one of the most successful Texans of his generation. Driven by a relentless work ethic, he become a wealthy oilman, banker, newspaper publisher, and, from 1931 to 1933, one-term governor of Texas. Sterling was the principal founder of the Humble Oil and Refining Company, which eventually became the largest division of the ExxonMobil Corporation, as well as the owner of the Houston Post. Eager to "preserve a narrative record of his life and deeds," Ross Sterling hired Ed Kilman, an old friend and editorial page editor of the Houston Post, to write his biography. Though the book was nearly finished before Sterling's death in 1949, it never found a publisher due to Kilman's florid writing style and overly hagiographic portrayal of Sterling. In this volume, by contrast, editor Don Carleton uses the original oral history dictated by Ross Sterling to Ed Kilman to present the former governor's life story in his own words. Sterling vividly describes his formative years, early business ventures, and active role in developing the Texas oil industry. He also recalls his political career, from his appointment to the Texas Highway Commission to his term as governor, ending with his controversial defeat for reelection by "Ma" Ferguson. Sterling's reminiscences constitute an important primary source not only on the life of a Texan who deserves to be more widely remembered, but also on the history of Houston and the growth of the American oil industry.

In 1858, Jim Cobb is a young cadet entering Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Virginia. He's an earnest young man who has a natural ability with horses. Three years later Cobb grows up quickly. Reluctant to take sides in the impending war, he does not comprehend the staggering number of lives that will be lost during the coming conflict and that he will kill ten men. When North Carolina secedes, he joins the militia in his hometown. With a quick grasp of tactics and solid work ethic, Jim rises from company second lieutenant to third corps chief of staff and serves for two of the South's finest generals, Dorsey Pender and A.P. Hill. He commands the newly formed 78th North Carolina regiment at Petersburg, is captured, and is sent to Union prison. The misery of the tragic war is recounted through the eyes of Jim Cobb, Missy Morgan who loves him, and Sam Payne, a New York Tribune reporter Jim meets at John Brown's hanging. A work of historical fiction, "Memoirs of a Texan: War" follows Jim from his early days as a cadet, his war experiences, and the promise of a new beginning in Texas.--goodreads.com.

A retired Texas Ranger recalls a career that took him from shootouts in South Texas to film sets in Hollywood. When his picture appeared on the cover of Texas Monthly, Joaquin Jackson became the icon of the modern Texas Rangers. Nick Nolte modeled his character in the movie Extreme Prejudice on him. Jackson even had a speaking part of his own in The Good Old Boys with Tommy Lee Jones. But the role that Jackson has always played the best is that of the man who wears the silver badge cut from a Mexican cinco peso coin, a working Texas Ranger. Legend says that one Ranger is all it takes to put down lawlessness and restore the peace: one riot, one Ranger. In this adventure-filled memoir, Joaquin Jackson recalls what it was like to be the Ranger who responded when riots threatened, violence erupted, and criminals needed to be brought to justice across a wide swath of the Texas-Mexico border from 1966 to 1993. Jackson has dramatic stories to tell. Defying all stereotypes, he was the one Ranger who ensured a fair election—and an overwhelming win for La Raza Unida party candidates—in Zavala County in 1972. He followed legendary Ranger Captain Alfred Y. Allee Sr. into a shootout at the Carrizo Springs jail that ended a prison revolt and left him with nightmares. He captured “The See More Kid,” an elusive horse thief and burglar who left clean dishes and swept floors in the houses he robbed. He investigated the 1988 shootings in Big Bend’s Colorado Canyon and tried to understand the motives of the Mexican teenagers who terrorized three river rafters and killed one. He even helped train Afghan mujahedin warriors to fight the Soviet Union. Jackson’s tenure in the Texas Rangers began when older Rangers still believed that law need not get in the way of maintaining order, and concluded as younger Rangers were turning to computer technology to help solve crimes. Though he insists, “I am only one Ranger. There was only one story that belonged to me,” his story is part of the larger story of the Texas Rangers becoming a modern law enforcement agency that serves all the people of the state. It’s a story that’s as interesting as any of the legends. And yet, Jackson’s story confirms the legends, too. With just over a hundred Texas Rangers to cover a state with 267,399 square miles, any one may become the one Ranger who, like Joaquin Jackson in Zavala County in 1972, stops one riot. “A powerful, moving read . . . One Ranger is as fascinating as the memoirs of nineteenth-century Rangers James Gillett and George Durham, and the histories by Frederick Wilkins and Walter Prescott Webb—and equally as important.” —True West “A straight-shooting book that blow[s] a few holes in the Ranger myth while providing more ammunition for the myth’s continuation. . . . Reads more like a novel than [an] autobiography.” —Austin American-Statesman

Ottilie Fuchs Goeth was an alert seventy-nine years old when she completed her memoirs in the German language for her family. Born the year of the Texas revolution, 1836, she migrated with her family in 1845, eventually settling in the Cypress Mill community near the Pedernales River west of Austin. Daughter of the pastor of a parish church in Germany, Mrs. Goeth was nurtured in family life, literature and music and her writings reflect a keen observation of life in Texas from the beginning of statehood to past the turn of the century. The original German was published in 1915.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER AND NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST A lyrical and authentic book that recounts the story of a border-town family in Brownsville, Texas in the 1980's, as each member of the family desperately tries to assimilate and escape life on the border to become "real" Americans, even at the expense of their shared family history. This is really un-mined territory in the memoir genre that gives in-depth insight into a previously unexplored corner of America.