Many years ago, John Graves said goodbye to a wild river that tumbled out of the Hill Country and was forever changed by dams and people. In this book we say hello to that same river farther down its course, in the valley that carries its name. When naming the signature landscapes of Texas, if you have never said “Brazos Valley” in the same breath as “Hill Country” or “Big Bend,” this book could change your mind. In the fine, penetrating photography of D. Gentry Steele and the revealing, affectionate reflections of M. Jimmie Killingsworth, the Brazos Valley has found its champions in two adopted sons who have learned to love its quiet, uncelebrated beauty. In words and pictures, Killingsworth and Steele remind us that this valley was the birthplace of a republic, was once the agricultural heart of Texas, and was the ancestral home of a great alluvial river. Here, the Brazos is—and isn’t—John Graves’s river, the one with clear-running waters flowing beneath limestone cliffs. A little south of Waco, the river gets bigger, slower, muddier. In its middle reaches it creates a wide swath of bottomlands and prairies where, if you take the time to look, you will discover the natural virtues of this place: peaceful glens, watered forests, flowers, birds, and backyard wildlife. This book will inspire all who live and work here—and those who just visit—to see the Brazos Valley anew and form a fuller appreciation of what it offers.

A significant collection of Texas paintings and prints hangs humbly and inconspicuously throughout the offices, conference rooms, and hallways of Texas A&M University Press. These works comprise the Frank H. Wardlaw Collection of Texas Art, named in honor of the Press’s founding director, who was one of the genuine publishing icons of his day. Established in 1983 at the dedication of the new headquarters of Texas A&M University Press on the campus of Texas A&M, the collection began with twenty inaugural contributions that came as gifts from respected Texas artists whose art appeared in the books Wardlaw had shepherded to publication at the Press. Since then, the collection—which continues to be linked to artists published by the Press—has grown to house more than one hundred paintings, photographs, and illustrations. Among the noted artists featured in the collection are E. M. (Buck) Schiwetz, Otis Dozier, Michael Frary, Everett Spruce, Emily Guthrie Smith, Jerry Bywaters, and, among more recent additions, Dorothy Hood and Richard Stout. Through interviews with longtime staff and research into the Press’s book files and correspondence, William and Linda Reaves have uncovered the captivating history of this unlikely collection. In A Book Maker’s Art, they present the freshly assembled story of the Wardlaw collection, from its modest yet unique beginning to its present-day status as one of the university’s excellent collections of Texas art, reflecting the exceptional bond of arts and letters that has come to distinguish Texas A&M University Press.

"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.

Blending memoir, cultural history, and a literary perspective, Facing It bears witness to controversies like Tellico and Chernobyl, global warming and local drought. But rather than merely drowning readers in waves of ecological angst, M. Jimmie Killingsworth seeks alternative images and episodes to invoke presence without crippling the hope for survival and sustenance in places and communities of value. In deft, highly accessible prose, Killingsworth takes the reader through a Cold-War childhood, an adolescence colored by anti-war and ecological activism, and an adulthood darkened by terrorism and climate change. Inviting us on walks through tame suburbias (riddled with environmental abuse) and wild deserts and mountains (shadowed by industrial development), he celebrates the survival of natural beauty and people living close to the earth while questioning truisms associated with both economic advancement and environmental purity. Above all, this book invites the reader to face it: to look with wide-open eyes on a new nature that will never be the same, but that continues to offer opportunities for renewal and advancement of life.

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.

Examines the rhetorical role of images in communicating environmental ideas.

Today, country music enjoys a national fan base that transcends both economic and social boundaries. Sixty years ago, however, it was primarily the music of rural, working-class whites living in the South and was perceived by many Americans as “hillbilly music.” In Smile When You Call Me a Hillbilly, Jeffrey J. Lange examines the 1940s and early 1950s as the most crucial period in country music’s transformation from a rural, southern folk art form to a national phenomenon. In his meticulous analysis of changing performance styles and alterations in the lifestyles of listeners, Lange illuminates the acculturation of country music and its audience into the American mainstream. Dividing country music into six subgenres (progressive country, western swing, postwar traditional, honky-tonk, country pop, and country blues), Lange discusses the music’s expanding appeal. As he analyzes the recordings and comments of each of the subgenre’s most significant artists, including Roy Acuff, Bob Wills, Bill Monroe, Hank Williams, and Red Foley, he traces the many paths the musical form took on its road to respectability. Lange shows how along the way the music and its audience became more sophisticated, how the subgenres blended with one another and with American popular music, and how Nashville emerged as the country music hub. By 1954, the transformation from “hillbilly” music to country music was complete, precipitated by the modernizing forces of World War II and realized by the efforts of promoters, producers, and performers.