A combination of contemporary watercolors by Marlene McLoughlin and nature writing by the 19th-century French naturalist Jean-Henri Fabre. McLoughlin's watercolors vary from detailed illustrations of Fabre's subjects--birds, insects, flowers --to landscapes showing the France in which Fabre worked. Fabre's writing is similarly varied: at one moment he is giving vivid descriptions of eggs and fungi, at the next he is telling stories about his grandmother or his theories on heredity. Fabre's writings are excerpts from his 1879 Souvenirs Entomologiques. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

A handsome and informative book featuring Welty among her peers in painting, photography, and other arts during the 1930s

Eloquently interweaving ethnography and memoir, award-winning anthropologist Ruth Behar offers a new theory and practice for humanistic anthropology. She proposes an anthropology that is lived and written in a personal voice. She does so in the hope that it will lead us toward greater depth of understanding and feeling, not only in contemporary anthropology, but in all acts of witnessing.

For the past five decades the Texas Observer has been an essential voice in Texas culture and politics, championing honest government, civil rights, labor, and the environment, while providing a platform for many of the state’s most passionate and progressive voices. Included are ninety-one selections from Roy Bedichek, Lou Dubose, Ronnie Dugger, Dagoberto Gilb, Jim Hightower, Molly Ivins, Larry McMurtry, Maury Maverick Jr., Willie Morris, Debbie Nathan, and others. To mark the Observer’s fiftieth anniversary, Char Miller has selected a cross section of the best work to appear in its pages. Not only does the collection pay homage to an important alternative voice in Texas journalism, it also serves as a progressive chronicle of a half-century of life in the Lone Star State—a state that has spawned three presidents in the last forty years. If Texas is, as some say, a crucible for national politics, then Fifty Years of the Texas Observer can be read as a casebook for issues that concern citizens in all fifty states. Molly Ivins's foreword gives historical background for the Observer and sets the stage for the book.