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  Once Upon a Time in Texas - A...

  David Richards

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  A prominent lawyer colorfully recounts a lost and lamented era in Texas politics: “Fascinating . . . Vivid, insightful commentary.” —Houston Chronicle   Once upon a time in Texas, there were liberal activists of various stripes who sought to make the state more tolerant (and more tolerable). David Richards was one of them.   In this fast-paced, often humorous memoir, he remembers the players, the strategy sessions, the legal and political battles, and the wins and losses that brought significant gains in civil rights, voter rights, labor law, and civil liberties to the people of Texas from the 1950s to the 1990s. In his work as a lawyer, Richards was involved in cases addressing the historic exclusion of minority voters; inequity in school funding; free speech violations, and more. In telling these stories, he vividly evokes the glory days of Austin liberalism, when a who’s who of Texas activists plotted strategy at watering holes such as Scholz Garden and the Armadillo World Headquarters or on raft trips down the Rio Grande and Guadalupe Rivers.   Likewise, he offers vivid portraits of liberal politicians from Ralph Yarborough to Ann Richards (his former wife), progressive journalists such as Molly Ivins and the Texas Observer staff, and the hippies, hellraisers, and musicians who all challenged Texas’s conservative status quo. Written with an insider’s insights, this book records “a sweeter time when a free-associating bunch of ragtag Texans took on the establishment.”   “An invaluable memoir of the time.” —Journal of Southern History  Includes photos

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  All Over the Map

  Laura Fraser

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  On a trip to Oaxaca, Mexico, to celebrate her fortieth birthday, Laura Fraser confronts the unique trajectory of her life. Divorced and childless in her thirties, she found solace in the wanderlust that had always directed her heart-and found love and comfort in the arms of a dashing Frenchman. Their Italian affair brought her back to herself-but now she wonders if her passion for travel (and for short-lived romantic rendezvous) has deprived her of what she secretly wants most from life: a husband, a family, a home. When her Parisian lover meets her in Oaxaca and gives her news that he's found someone new, Laura is stunned and hurt. Now, it seems, she has nothing but her own independence for company-and, at forty, a lot more wrinkles on her face and fewer years of fertility. How is Laura going to reconcile what seem to be two opposite desires: for adventure, travel, great food, and new experiences, but also a place to call home-and a loving pair of arms to greet her there? So she globe hops. What else is a travel writer to do? From Argentina to Peru, Naples to Paris, she basks in the glow of new cultures and local delicacies, always on the lookout for the "one" who might become a lifelong companion. But when a terrible incident occurs while she's on assignment in the South Pacific, Laura suddenly finds herself more aware of her vulnerability and becomes afraid of traveling. It seems as if she might lose the very thing that has given her so much pleasure in her life, not to mention the career she has built for herself as a world traveler and chronicler of far-flung places. Finding herself again will be both more difficult and more natural than she imagined. Ultimately, Laura realizes the most important journey she must take is an internal one. And the tale of how she reaches that place will captivate every woman who has ever yearned for a different life.

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  Wilderness - A Journal of Quiet...

  Rockwell Kent

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  The artist and adventurer chronicles his seven-month excursion to a remote cabin on Alaska’s Fox Island with his nine-year-old son. In August 1918 Rockwell Kent and his nine-year-old son settled into a primitive cabin on an island near Seward, Alaska. Kent, who during the next three decades became America’s premier graphic artist, printmaker, and illustrator, was seeking time, peace, and solitude to work on his art and strengthen ties with his son. This reissue of the journal chronicling their seven-month odyssey describes what Kent called “an adventure of the spirit.” He soon discovers how deeply he is “stirred by simple happenings in a quiet world” as man and boy face both the mundane and the magnificent: satisfaction in simple chores like woodchopping or baking; the appalling gloom of long and lonely winter nights; hours of silence while each works at his drawings; crystalline moonlight glancing off a frozen lake; killer whales cavorting in their bay. Richly illustrated by Kent’s drawings, the journal vividly re-creates that sense of great height and space—both external and internal—at the same time that it celebrates a wilderness now nearly lost to us.Including Extensive Hitherto Unpublished Passages from the Original Journal.“Twenty-nine years after his death, [Rockwell] Kent has returned with a vengeance. Not since the height of his pre-McCarthyism popularity has so much of his work been available to the public.” —Scott Ferris, Smithsonian“Conservationists and ecologists should rejoice at the reappearance of this splendid diary telling of the winter of 1918-1919, during which the late Rockwell Kent and his nine-year-old son exulted in the beauties of Alaska’s remote Fox Island. Kent’s strong woodcuts and sketches perfectly complement an unaffected text that tells in an authentic and most effective way of unspoiled nature in all its glory. . . . This book has considerable merit as an account of rugged life in Alaska, as a paean to the glories of nature, and as a record of Kent’s graphic work.” —Library Journal

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  Sports Byline: Shirley Babashoff

  Ron Barr

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  Shirley Babashoff owns 8 Olympic swimming medals and has a part in 39 national records. Widely regarded as one of the best female swimmers of all time, she received the Olympic Order and was inducted into the International Swimming Hall of Fame. She discusses her book, Making Waves: My Journey to Winning Olympic Gold and Defeating the East German Doping Program, her Olympic experiences, and how her childhood affected her career.

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  Pujol - More Than the Game

  Scott Lamb, Tim Ellsworth

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  “He matches in his personal life the excellence that he demonstrates on the diamond. You will love this book and will love Pujols if you don’t already.” —Mike Huckabee, forty-fourth Governor of Arkansas, host of the Huckabee show 
   
  After a decade starring for the St. Louis Cardinals, Albert Pujols is already compared with names in the highest reaches of baseball’s pantheon: Ruth, Gehrig, Aaron, Mays. Slugging his way toward the Hall of Fame, Pujols has raised the game’s standard for greatness beyond any statistical measure. But the standard by which Pujols measures himself has less to do with baseball performance than with honoring God and exemplifying his faith for the millions who follow him. 
   
  From his birthplace in the Dominican Republic to his high-school days in Kansas City, from a single season in the minor leagues to the World Series and nine All-Star Games, Pujols has developed his immense talents on the baseball diamond, all the while focusing his direction—and the direction of his family—with the belief that a higher power is behind every achievement. 
   
  Authors Scott Lamb and Tim Ellsworth spare no tale of this growing baseball legend, all the while accentuating “the unseen hand of divine providence” that has shaped the man Albert Pujols has become. It’s a story that will inspire, and a reminder of the human quality behind superhuman achievement. 
   
  A story—still in the making—of allowing God’s strength to guide one man’s path to be the best his game has ever seen. 
   
  “Lamb and Ellsworth lucidly describe both the season-by-season baseball exploits of Pujols and the impact he’s having on some lives for eternity.” —Marvin Olasky, Editor-in-Chief, World

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  A Sixth Sense - The Life and...

  Michael Oristaglio, Alexander...

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  The true story of the French engineer and inventor who developed a mine detector for the US Army during WWII—and then went on to transform the oil industry.   In March 1940, with Europe at war, French army lieutenant Henri-Georges Doll came to the U.S. embassy in Paris to give a deposition. Doll was an artillery commander, a graduate of France’s grandes écoles of science, engineering, and service. He had been mobilized to the front at the start of the war, then quickly recalled to Paris to work on a secret device for detecting the deadly land mines being planted by the German army on a vast new scale. But Doll’s deposition that day had nothing to do with the war. He had come to testify in a patent lawsuit pending in Houston, Texas.   The case was Schlumberger Well Surveying Corporation v. Halliburton Oil Well Cementing Company: it marked one of the first great industrial battles for control of the technology of oil and gas exploration. When the German army marched into Paris three months later, Doll escaped to America, where he developed his new mine detector for the U.S. army, then settled in a small Connecticut town to become one of the most prolific inventors of the twentieth century. His sixth sense for applied science would help create the modern technology of seeing underground using electrical signals and sound waves—technology that would enable the explosive growth of oil production, and of Schlumberger, after the war. This biography tells his remarkable story.

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