The Spirit of Tequila

The Spirit of Tequila
Author:
Publisher: Trinity University Press
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2017-11-01
Genre: Cooking
ISBN: 1595348247

Agave dates back to the Aztec civilization as an important crop in Mexico. Since the 1600s, the people of western Mexico have cultivated blue agave from the red volcanic soil that blankets the region, to make what we know as tequila. The Spirit of Tequila celebrates the tradition, culture, and myth of this iconic drink. Joel Salcido traveled across the state of Jalisco capturing images of distilleries and artisanal tequileras, including blue agave fields at sunset, the agave's pineapple-like centers (piñas), elegantly shadowed barrel rooms (añejos), and, of course, the agave farmers themselves. Nearly ninety photographs, taken with a medium format camera—some in full-color, some in duotone—reveal not only the tequila making process but also the region’s traditions of culture and religion. Haunting and beautiful, a church spire is juxtaposed with a firework celebration in honor of the Virgen de Guadalupe. A Mexican charro rides through the streets of Arandas. Near Atotonilco, a horse pulls a traditional plow through the fields to irrigate. Exploring the rooms and techniques hidden in the distilleries of legendary tequilas Herradura, Sauza, Jose Cuervo, Don Julio, and others, The Spirit of Tequila celebrates a craft that is rooted deep in the culture of Mexico.

Spirits of San Antonio and South Texas

Spirits of San Antonio and South Texas
Author: Docia Schultz Williams
Publisher: Taylor Trade Publishing
Total Pages: 228
Release: 1993
Genre: Fiction
ISBN:

The number one tourist destination in Texas may also be one of the most haunted cities in the entire state. Steeped in history and tradition, San Antonio has many locations that are claimed as home for some interesting and intriguing spirits. Docia Williams has spent years tracking down the spirits of San Antonio and has found them in such interesting places as the Alamo, the Institute of Texan Cultures, numerous hotels and restaurants, the city library, the choir loft of a Methodist church, the Midget Mansion, and the haunted Sea Captain's house.

Legends of Texas Barbecue Cookbook

Legends of Texas Barbecue Cookbook
Author: Robb Walsh
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2002-04
Genre: Cooking
ISBN: 9780811829618

Walsh delivers both a practical cookbook and a guided tour of Texas barbecue lore, giving readers straightforward advice right from the pit masters themselves. Their time-honored tips, along with 85 closely guarded recipes, reveal a lip-smacking feast of smoked meats, savory side dishes, and an awesome array of mops, sauces, and rubs. Photos.

Big Wonderful Thing

Big Wonderful Thing
Author: Stephen Harrigan
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 944
Release: 2019-10-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0292759517

The story of Texas is the story of struggle and triumph in a land of extremes. It is a story of drought and flood, invasion and war, boom and bust, and of the myriad peoples who, over centuries of conflict, gave rise to a place that has helped shape the identity of the United States and the destiny of the world. “I couldn’t believe Texas was real,” the painter Georgia O’Keeffe remembered of her first encounter with the Lone Star State. It was, for her, “the same big wonderful thing that oceans and the highest mountains are.” Big Wonderful Thing invites us to walk in the footsteps of ancient as well as modern people along the path of Texas’s evolution. Blending action and atmosphere with impeccable research, New York Times best-selling author Stephen Harrigan brings to life with novelistic immediacy the generations of driven men and women who shaped Texas, including Spanish explorers, American filibusters, Comanche warriors, wildcatters, Tejano activists, and spellbinding artists—all of them taking their part in the creation of a place that became not just a nation, not just a state, but an indelible idea. Written in fast-paced prose, rich with personal observation and a passionate sense of place, Big Wonderful Thing calls to mind the literary spirit of Robert Hughes writing about Australia or Shelby Foote about the Civil War. Like those volumes it is a big book about a big subject, a book that dares to tell the whole glorious, gruesome, epically sprawling story of Texas.

God Save Texas

God Save Texas
Author: Lawrence Wright
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2018-04-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 0525520112

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Looming Tower—and a Texas native—takes us on a journey through the most controversial state in America. • “Beautifully written…. Essential reading [for] anyone who wants to understand how one state changed the trajectory of the country.” —NPR Texas is a red state, but the cities are blue and among the most diverse in the nation. Oil is still king, but Texas now leads California in technology exports. Low taxes and minimal regulation have produced extraordinary growth, but also striking income disparities. Texas looks a lot like the America that Donald Trump wants to create. Bringing together the historical and the contemporary, the political and the personal, Texas native Lawrence Wright gives us a colorful, wide-ranging portrait of a state that not only reflects our country as it is, but as it may become—and shows how the battle for Texas’s soul encompasses us all.

Spirit of Gonzales

Spirit of Gonzales
Author: Betsy Wagner
Publisher: Mary E. Wagner
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2019-03-19
Genre:
ISBN: 9780578438801

The story of a young pioneer girl who settled in Gonzales, Texas, just in time for the revolution. There is a spirit of vigor and courage in Texas. It inspired the early settlers, and it unified them during rough times. That spirit of determination rallied the men who defended the Alamo and fortified the volunteers who followed Sam Houston to San Jacinto. In 1831, Sydnie Gaston's family had that spirit. Like many other families, they left the comforts of their home in the United States to brave the wilds in what was then Mexico. They settled in a village on the Guadalupe River and were soon swept up in the hardships of pioneer life. They overcame Indians and nature, and they helped to fight in a war against a deceitful government. Sydnie was one of many authentic women who fought for a better life in what became the Republic of Texas. And it all started with the Spirit of Gonzales.

Spirit

Spirit
Author: Anthony Head
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
Total Pages: 528
Release: 2019-03-07
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1623497108

As he lay bleeding in a Vietnamese rice paddy, his right arm shredded by shrapnel, artist Jesse Treviño realized that he wanted to honor and preserve his family and his cultural heritage through his artwork. After receiving a Purple Heart and undergoing two years of rehabilitative therapy and the amputation of his right forearm—including his painting hand—Treviño enrolled in San Antonio College, determined to learn how to draw and paint with his left hand. In 1974 he produced the impressive La Historia Chicana, a one hundred-foot-long work embracing six centuries of Mexican American heritage now on display inside the Sueltenfuss Library at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio. Since then, Treviño has completed many more paintings and public artworks, including Spirit of Healing, the nine-story hand-cut tile mosaic that graces Christus Santa Rosa Children’s Hospital in downtown San Antonio. His work has been collected by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum, and the San Antonio Museum of Art. Anthony Head’s sensitive and elegant biography now offers readers an intimate view of the artist’s life. Head captures Treviño’s determination, artistic vision, and the deep pride in his Chicano heritage that he transmits to the world through his creations. Spirit: The Life and Art of Jesse Treviño promises to engage and inspire readers with its vivid portrayal of this triumph of art and the human spirit.

Texas BBQ, Small Town to Downtown

Texas BBQ, Small Town to Downtown
Author: Wyatt McSpadden
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 160
Release: 2018-06-01
Genre: Photography
ISBN: 9781477316702

In Texas BBQ, Wyatt McSpadden immortalized the barbecue joints of rural Texas in richly authentic photographs that made the people and places in his images appear as timeless as barbecue itself. The book found a wide, appreciative audience as barbecue surged to national popularity with the success of young urban pitmasters such as Austin’s Aaron Franklin, whose Franklin Barbecue has become the most-talked-about BBQ joint on the planet. Succulent, wood-smoked “old school” barbecue is now as easy to find in Dallas as in DeSoto, in Houston as in Hallettsville. In Texas BBQ, Small Town to Downtown, Wyatt McSpadden pays homage to this new urban barbecue scene, as well as to top-rated country joints, such as Snow’s in Lexington, that were under the radar or off the map when Texas BBQ was published. Texas BBQ, Small Town to Downtown presents crave-inducing images of both the new—and the old—barbecue universe in almost every corner of the state, featuring some two dozen joints not included in the first book. In addition to Franklin and Snow’s, which have both occupied the top spot in Texas Monthly’s barbecue ratings, McSpadden portrays urban joints such as Dallas’s Pecan Lodge and Cattleack Barbecue and small-town favorites such as Whup’s Boomerang Bar-B-Que in Marlin. Accompanying his images are barbecue reflections by James Beard Award–winning pitmaster Aaron Franklin and Texas Monthly’s barbecue editor Daniel Vaughn. Their words and McSpadden’s photographs underscore how much has changed—and how much remains the same—since Texas BBQ revealed just how much good, old-fashioned ’cue there is in Texas.

It Can Be This Way Always

It Can Be This Way Always
Author: David Johnson
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2021-03-30
Genre: Photography
ISBN: 9781477323441

For fifty years, music fans, hippies, artists, and songwriters have converged each spring on Quiet Valley Ranch in the Texas Hill Country. They are drawn by the thousands to the annual Kerrville Folk Festival, a weeks-long gathering of musical greats and ordinary people living in an intentional community marked by radical acceptance and the love of song. At the festival, David Johnson is known as Photo Dave, the guy who lugs around a large-format camera and captures the moments that make Kerrville special. It Can Be This Way Always collects eighty images from the past decade. Portraits of attendees and volunteers accompany scenes of stage performances, campfire jam sessions, and vans repurposed into coffee stands. In these images we see the temporary, makeshift world that festivalgoers create, a place where eccentricities are the norm and music is the foundation of friendship and unity. “It can be this way always” is a popular saying at Kerrville: simultaneously optimistic and wistful like a good folk song—or a photograph from your best life.

The Face of Texas

The Face of Texas
Author:
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2014-10-15
Genre: Photography
ISBN: 9780292763135

The Face of Texas celebrates the individuality and independent spirit of Texas through compelling portraits of its people by Michael O'Brien, one of America's premier portrait photographers. In this acclaimed photo essay, he assembles a gallery of noteworthy Texans both native and naturalized, ranging from former president George W. Bush and first ladies and Laura Bush and Lady Bird Johnson, to famous figures such as Willie Nelson, Larry McMurtry, George Strait, Tim Duncan, Kinky Friedman, and Beyoncé, to ordinary folks who've made their mark on Texas as ranchers and farmers, cheerleaders and beauty queens, conservationists, church members, bar and restaurant owners, Odd Fellows, schoolteachers, artists and writers, business owners, and athletes. For this new edition of The Face of Texas, O'Brien has added seventeen new portraits and six updated photographs of people from the first edition. Writer and former Life reporter Elizabeth O'Brien offers insightful verbal vignettes to accompany the new portraits and also brings us up to date with the lives of the rest of the subjects. This winning combination of images and stories about a fascinating, eclectic mix of Texans is a fitting homage to a unique state and an essential addition to every Texas bookshelf.