Bøger udgivet af Texas Christian University Press

Betsy Colquitt has long been recognized as one of Texas' finest poets. With the publication of this collection, readers can see for the first time the full range of her work. The "Eve" poems, which give the volume its title, are new in substance and tone. This exciting sequence traces the life of the first woman from her creation by the "Great Mother," through the years in the Garden of Eden, where Eve helps bring Adam out of the mud of Mother Earth, down to the present, as Eve looks at life and comments from the perspective of wise and eternal Woman. At the end of the sequence, Eve is seen in the Big Bend of Texas, a land different, yet strangely like, the first Garden. The second section of the book includes poems published in Colquitt's 1980 collection, Honor Card, and the third section, "New and Uncollected Poems," explores subjects ranging from art and architecture to home and family.

In the middle of the nineteenth century more than 7,000 Germans migrated to Central Texas-most to Comal, Gillespie, and Llano Counties. For the next three quarters of a century, the Germans of Central Texas retained much of their ethnicity: they were taught German in the schools, there were German-language newspapers, and ties to the Fatherland remained strong. But with the coming of World War I, many of the Hill Country Germans began slipping away from the old ways. The generation that grew up between the two world wars became more and more Americanized. In Tales from the Sunday House, Minetta Altgelt Goyne gives us glimpses into the real lives of this between-the-wars generation. Sometimes incomplete, sometimes apparently pointless, sometimes merely addenda to previously told tales, these eleven stories are the kind of tales family members told other-often younger-members of the family as they sat by the fireside or on the porches of their "Sunday Houses," structures peculiar to the German Texans, built on lots so that rural farmers and their families would have a place to rest when conducting business in town, looking after medical needs, or attending church services. Tales from the Sunday House immerses us in the personal, private, and sometimes public lives of the Kreutz and Bracht families. By the final chapter, these quiet and simple stories have given us an insight into the culture established by the early German immigrants and altered by the growing Americanization of younger generations.

Few people who know him or read his Sunday column in the San Antonio Express-News are neutral about Maury Maverick, Jr., not only one of the twentieth century's most outspoken iconoclasts but an individualist who helped shape American constitutional history. Many of Maverick's columns continue his efforts to achieve civil rights guarantees for the disadvantaged. They draw heavily on what he learned from his previous professional careers as a politician, a teacher, and, more significantly, a successful civil-rights lawyer. The legal issues which deeply interest Maverick are free speech, due process of law, separation of church and state, world peace, and preservation of human dignity. But occasionally Maverick gets tired of politics, and then he writes about pinto beans, poetry, music, birds, abandoned dogs, and gardening. He has a special fondness for stray dogs, many of whom he adopts, and Purple Martin shelters, which he urges people to build. Allan O. Kownslar has selected Express-News columns to reveal Maverick's views on a variety of topics, from heroes to the Red Scare, Maverick relatives to war. The result is a look at important events in history and selected individuals.

It is humble. Unassuming. Everyday and ordinary to millions of Texans. Yet, the complex network of twisted tributaries that is the Trinity River thunders, ambles, even crawls over 550 miles of Texas landscape and has shaped the destinies of Native Americans, outlaws, outcasts, dreamers, desperadoes, millionaires, military men, and many others over thousands of years. Luther Smith's series of more than fifty photographs taken over seven years of various stages and locations on the Trinity captures the river's many personalities: the meandering West Fork in Archer County, the pollution-littered shore where the West Fork runs through Fort Worth, the flooding which occasionally spills into cities and over highways. Mike Nichols' essay on the river provides an insightful and nostalgic look into the Trinity's shaping and being shaped by generations of Texans. Thomas W. Southall's essay, "Reflections on a River's Convergence," discusses landscape photography and, more specifically, the photography of Smith. Though Smith is active in efforts to preserve the natural environment, this series is both a call to environmental consciousness and a reminder of the quiet, humble wilderness that still exists but is often unseen. His photographs embody the natural simplicity of often unnoticed parts of the Texas landscape. Each photograph is a mood, a face of the time-shaping river. And each is its own story.

Amidst the pantheon of Mexican heroes, writer-revolutionary Praxedis Guerrero (1882-1910) is a man often overlooked. His importance to a full understanding of Mexico's turbulent pre-revolutionary years, however, is undeniable. To Die on Your Feet examines Guerrero's involvement in a broad anarchist movement - led in part by Ricardo Flores Magon - that helped to provoke the Mexican Revolution against the government of Porfirio Diaz. Self-schooled in the bucolic teachings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and William Godwin, as well as the more activist theories of Mikhail Bakunin and Pyotr Kropotkin, Guerrero combined thinking and doing. Though raised as the son of a wealthy hacendado, he was a champion of the downtrodden. Guerrero despised greed, ignorance and despotism and used his pen as his primary weapon against such oppressions, writing incendiary essays for three liberal newspapers, Revolucion, Regeneracion and Punto Rojo in which he promoted socialist and anarchist ideals. People on both sides of the Mexico-United States border took note. Though he considered himself a writer, he was not adverse to direct action. He joined the ranks of the revoltoso martyrs when he was killed in guerrilla action against federal forces at Janos, Chihuahua, in 1910. He died on his feet.

On March 30, 1992, Tom Dodge lost his stepfather and inherited the duty of caring for his mother, a woman he confesses he never got to know. Suddenly he was confronted with the extent to which she had slipped into the fog of Alzheimer's. During his childhood, Dodge was never allowed to bring up the topic of his birth, but his mind whirled with questions: Who was my real father? Where was he? Who am I? Now, even if he summoned the courage to ask for the truth, would she be able to tell him? This memoir, interweaving the twin themes of adult responsiblity for a parent suffering from Alzheimer's and the search for a birth parent, is a painful account, raw with emotion, of an alienated adolescence. But it is also a nostalgic look back at life in small-town Texas in the 1940s and 1950s, a life where young boys frolicked in the swimming hole and worked in the family garden. Oedipus Road is a timeless and timely, funny and heart-breaking, evocative account of one man's journey down the road of self-discovery.

Hyenas are among God's strangest creatures. Both scavenger and predator, they prey on the old, the weak, and the helpless, and even on their fellow predators in the jungle, the lions. Even though they are braver and more dignified, lions must always contend with packs of hyenas that dog their paths. Lions live their entire lives locked in deadly competition with hyenas. Like the lions, the people in Robert Flynn's short stories learn to make accommodations to the hyenas and to a society and culture that tolerates hyenas. Whether they find themselves in Vietnam or rural Texas, Flynn's characters are often heroes in the most personal sense of the word and by standards which matter only to them. Flynn's stories make us look again at ourselves as they probe familiar if difficult subjects - the innate cruelty children inflict on each other, our detached fascination with those who are physically handicapped and deformed, the difficulty of giving and receiving gifts, our intolerance of and lack of compassion for the elderly.

Colonel Samuel Ryan Curtis, engineer, lawyer, and graduate of West Point, arrived in Mexico in July of 1846 as commander of the 3rd Ohio Volunteer Regiment to find a volatile and chaotic situation in occupied towns along the Rio Grande. American civilians of the lowest sort - men and women - mingled with Mexican townspeople, robbing, murdering, and raping. Neither civil nor military law made provisions for governing municipalities under such conditions. Nor was the U.S. military prepared for a struggle against Mexican guerrilla forces and desperate bandits. Colonel Curtis was a diary keeper, and this record of his experiences in Mexico gives a clear picture of his efforts to restore and maintain order under nearly impossible conditions: of death and suffering in his regiment from disease, not fighting, and of the tedium of army camp life. A reflective man as well as an educated one, Curtis was a keen observer. He documented social and economic circumstances, flora and fauna, and the weather, even as he chronicled political conditions and martial unrest. The resulting diary is a major contribution to studies of the Mexican War.

The year is 1944, in the middle of World War II, and German prisoners of war held in rural areas of the South and Southwest are put to work in the agricultural and logging industries.Twelve-year-old Mac Johnson lives in the Piney Woods of East Texas, where his father has a logging operation. Already angry with "those evil Nazis" who killed his brother, Donald, a pilot, young Mac's desire for revenge intensifies when his father is assigned POWs to help cut lumber-and one of the Germans looks exactly like Donald. Together, Mac and his best friend, Arlen, plot for revenge, but as plan after plan fails, Mac's frustration and anger grow, along with his hatred.When Mac gets a chance to be the whistle punk-to blow his whistle when a log is loaded on the skidder and the workers are safely away-he comes up with a foolproof plan to get even. Caught between his own desire for revenge and the friendliness of the German POW, Mac faces the most difficult decision of his life.German POWs were stationed in East Texas, did work in the logging camps, and were, like the POWs in this novel, model prisoners who posed no threat to citizens. Whistle Punk is the story of what might have been between one American family and a group of POWs.Chapin and Alice Ross grew up in East Texas during World War II; neither knew about the German POWs working in the region's logging camps, but both remember Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy, whose radio programs are so important to Mac and Arlen.

After one brother is killed by Confederate vigilantes, Louisa, youngest daughter in a German American family living in Texas, sets off to rescue another brother from a Union prison camp.

In the summer of 1941, Congressman Lyndon Baines Johnson ran for the U.S. Senate in a special election. He lost. It was the only political race LBJ ever lost, and he always claimed that W. Lee "Pappy" O'Daniel had stolen the office from him. In the summer of 1948, Johnson ran again for the Senate. This time his chief opponent in the Democratic primaries was former Texas Governor Coke Stevenson. After much counting and recounting of ballots, Johnson was declared the winner of the runoff, or second primary, by just eighty-seven votes out of millions cast, votes that Stevenson claimed Johnson bought in deep South Texas - the stomping grounds of George Parr, "the Duke of Duval County". Joe Phipps signed on as a volunteer player in this summer stock production, taking a role as general aide and "go-fer" for the Congressman. Then a young World War II veteran with experience in radio broadcasting, Phipps did not imagine that he would assume a major part in an election that would change not only the face of Texas politics but the way campaigners were promoted then and the way campaigns would be prosecuted in the future. Not only were the short radio broadcasts Phipps produced innovative, but Johnson's method of campaigning was new to voters. Rather than concentrate on urban areas, Johnson acquired a helicopter - an exotic new flying object at the time - and took his message to people all across Texas. It may well have been the votes garnered by LBJ in the rural counties that kept him in the race and eventually sent him to the United States Senate. Much of the drama of the summer of '48 is well known and has been told many times by political historians and Johnson biographers. Unlike previouswriters, however, Joe Phipps was there for most of the hectic campaign, working closely with Lyndon Johnson, the consummate politician - complex and contradictory, yet a simple man - on a daily basis as aide and confidant. Phipps sat in radio studios with the candidate, flew in the helicopter on the stump, met with the Congressman in Johnson's home at Austin, and confided with him in hotel rooms on the road. Joe Phipps' narrative graphically exposes the human side of the pivotal events of the summer of '48.

Near Goliad, Texas, in 1857, twelve-year-old Josefina Gonzalez fears for her father's safety when a number of other Mexican cart drivers are killed.

During the heyday of McCarthyism, the Chicago Tribune, offended by something he had written, contemptuously dismissed Paul Boller as "an obscure professor" - he was then teaching at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Some forty-five years later, reflecting on the incident, Boller wrote an essay on what it was like to be an obscure professor at one of America's less publicized campuses in a conservative community during the late 1950s and early 1960s. That essay became the foundation for this collection of autobiographical selections reflecting the interests and pursuits of a man who gained national recognition, both inside the academic community and beyond, but still values his obscurity. Whether it is a study of the much-maligned Calvin Coolidge or an account of his Navy service as a translator of Japanese during World War II, Boller brings to his writing a fresh approach and a lively and wry wit.

The adventures of a young greenhorn cowpoke in Texas after the Civil War.