On November 13, 1969, ten students at Texas State University were suspended for participating in a peaceful protest against the Vietnam War. They had kept vigil in front of the Huntington Mustangs, bearing signs that read, "Vietnam Is an Edsel" and "44,000 U.S. Dead, For What?" while an increasingly hostile anti-protest crowd chanted, "Love it or leave it!" and "Let's string 'em up!" It was a day after news of the My Lai massacre broke. Part of a coordinated, nationwide Vietnam Moratorium effort that confounded and infuriated the Nixon White House, the "San Marcos 10" challenged their suspension, taking their case all the way to the United States Supreme Court. Author E.R. Bills offers this fascinating glimpse into the 1960s antiwar movement in Texas, the extraordinary measures to quell it and the broader social activism in which it participated.

On February 2, 1963, a tanker with thirty-nine men aboard departed Beaumont and never returned. In the mid-spring of 1882, Billy the Kid's friend, foe, and equal escaped Huntsville Penitentiary and vanished. On December 9, 1961, a young boy in Wichita Falls disappeared without a trace. On November 18, 1936, a father and son were swallowed by a "Walled Kingdom." On December 23, 1974, three girls went to a Fort Worth mall and were never seen or heard from again. This collection explores twenty baffling disappearances that investigators have studied for decades, to no avail. Homicide, patricide, filicide, genocide, devil worship, the Devil's Triangle, the Devil's River, the assassination of JFK, UFO abductions, legal limbo-- oblivion. Award-winning author E.R. Bills drags the facts of these mystifying cases back from the void. --page [4] of cover.

Some of these quirky true stories might surprise even the most proud Texan. Austin sat the first all-woman state supreme court in the nation in 1925. A utopian colony thrived in Kristenstad during the Great Depression. Bats taken from the Bracken and Ney Caves and Devil's Sinkhole were developed as a secret weapon that vied with the Manhattan Project to shorten World War II. In Slaton in 1922, German priest Joseph M. Keller was kidnapped, tarred and feathered amid anti-German fervor following World War I. Author E.R. Bills offers this collection of trials, tribulations and intrigue that is sure to enrich one's understanding of the biggest state in the Lower Forty-eight.

Robert Dallek's brilliant two-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson has received an avalanche of praise. Michael Beschloss, in The Los Angeles Times, said that it "succeeds brilliantly." The New York Times called it "rock solid" and The Washington Post hailed it as "invaluable." And Sidney Blumenthal in The Boston Globe wrote that it was "dense with astonishing incidents." Now Dallek has condensed his two-volume masterpiece into what is surely the finest one-volume biography of Johnson available. Based on years of research in over 450 manuscript collections and oral histories, as well as numerous personal interviews, this biography follows Johnson, the "human dynamo," from the Texas hill country to the White House. We see LBJ, in the House and the Senate, whirl his way through sixteen- and eighteen-hour days, talking, urging, demanding, reaching for influence and power, in an uncommonly successful congressional career. Then, in the White House, we see Johnson as the visionary leader who worked his will on Congress like no president before or since, enacting a range of crucial legislation, from Medicare and environmental protection to the most significant advances in civil rights for black Americans ever achieved. And we see the depth of Johnson's private anguish as he became increasingly ensnared in Vietnam. In these pages Johnson emerges as a man of towering intensity and anguished insecurity, of grandiose ambition and grave self-doubt, a man who was brilliant, crude, intimidating, compassionate, overbearing, driven: "A tornado in pants." Gracefully written and delicately balanced, this

This book provides a sophisticated introduction to the life and work of Cormac McCarthy appropriate for scholars, teachers and general readers.