A Journey Round My Room

A Journey Round My Room
Author: Xavier de Maistre
Publisher:
Total Pages: 176
Release: 1871
Genre: French fiction
ISBN:

In 1790, Xavier de Maistre was 27 years old, and a soldier in the army of the Sardinian Kingdom, which covered swathes of modern-day Northern Italy and Southern France. He was placed under house-arrest in Turin for fighting an illegal duel. It was during the 42 days of his confinement here that he wrote the manuscript that would become Voyage autour de ma chambre. Inspired by the works of Laurence Sterne, with their digressive and colloquial style, de Maistre decided to make the most of his sentence by recording an exploration of the room as a travel journal. de Maistre’s book imbues the tour of his chamber with great mythology and grand scale. As he wanders the few steps that it takes to circumnavigate the space, his mind spins off into the ether. It parodies the travel journals of the eighteenth-century (such as A Voyage Around the World by Louis de Bougainville, 1771), and could be read today as an early take on the modern vogue for “psychogeography” — each tiny thing that he encounters sends de Maistre into rhapsodies, and mundane journeys become magnificent voyages.

Geological Society of America Field Guide 14, 2008 Joint Annual Meeting, Houston, Texas, 5-9 October 2008

Geological Society of America Field Guide 14, 2008 Joint Annual Meeting, Houston, Texas, 5-9 October 2008
Author: G. Moore
Publisher: Geological Society of America
Total Pages: 55
Release: 2008-10-01
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0813700140

Edited by G. Moore, these four field guide chapters were prepared for the 2008, Houston, Texas, joint meeting between The Geological Society of America, Soil Science Society of America, American Society of Agronomy, Crop Science Society of America, Gulf Coast Association of Geological Societies with the Gulf Coast Section of SEPM, and the Houston Geological Society.

Big Woods

Big Woods
Author: May Cobb
Publisher: Llewellyn Worldwide
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2018-07-08
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0738759236

"Stephen King's Stand by Me collides with Gillian Flynn's Sharp Objects in this exceptional thriller. Gutsy, gripping—and pitch-perfect in its resurrection of an era long gone."—A. J. Finn, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Woman in the Window When her sister disappears, the only clue Leah has is a cryptic message: Underground. By the Woods. It's 1989 in the sleepy town of Longview, Texas, when ten-year-old Lucy disappears. Her parents, the police, and the community all brace for the worst, assuming her body will soon be found in Big Woods. Just like the other unsolved kidnappings. But then Lucy's fourteen-year-old sister, Leah, starts having dreams about Lucy—dreams that reveal startling clues as to what happened. Leah begins her own investigation, and soon she meets a reclusive widow who may hold the key to finding Lucy...if only she can find the courage to come forward. Delving into the paranoia surrounding satanic cults in the 1980s, Big Woods is an emotionally wrought, propulsive thriller about the enormity of grief, the magical bond between sisters, and a small town's dark secrets. Praise: "Big Woods is perfectly timed to take advantage of the 1980s horror revival. Its historic details are excellent, down to the songs on Leah's car stereo. Cobb paints in Day-Glo and brings terrors of the night to life."—Foreword Magazine "Readers will be grabbed by Big Woods and sucked into the mysterious story. Hold on tight—it's worth it."—Criminal Element "Cobb's intense, heart-wrenching debut introduces a courageous, determined teen who must find her lost sister amid a disturbing atmosphere of paranoia and fear, crafting a compelling, suspenseful story reminiscent of William Kent Krueger's Ordinary Grace."—Library Journal (starred review) "Big Woods is a nuanced family story and also a heart-stopping thriller with surprising twists. Cobb taps into the fabulous '80s sensibility of Stranger Things and also into our deepest fears about safety, evil, trust, and the power of faith in what we don't understand. I couldn't put it down."—Amanda Eyre Ward, author of The Nearness of You and The Same Sky "Compulsively readable."—Rosamund Lupton, New York Times bestselling author of Sister "Big Woods is brilliant! Cobb has crafted a haunting thriller that dives deep into grief, family connections, and the dreadful power of fear. The novel succeeds as a rich exploration of emotion and a not-so-distant time while also shining as a riveting page-turner."—Owen Egerton, author of Hollow and writer/director of horror-comedy Bloodfest "Big Woods is such a blast—a page-turning thriller with '80s hair, like a Texan Stranger Things."—Amy Gentry, author of Good as Gone "Literally the best thriller I've read in years. Intensely gripping, so evocative of the late '80s, and a brilliant, original storyline. It's blinding."—Clare Empson, author of Him

Daddy-O's Book of Big-Ass Art

Daddy-O's Book of Big-Ass Art
Author: Bob Wade
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2020-11-17
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1623498694

Recipient of three National Endowment for the Arts grants and with works exhibited at the prestigious Biennale de Paris, New York’s Whitney Museum, the de Menil Collection in Houston, and other venues, Bob “Daddy-O” Wade started “keeping it weird” in 1961 when he arrived in Austin with his ’51 custom Ford hot rod and his slicked-back hair. Primed to study art at the University of Texas, Wade’s coif and dragster earned him his trademark moniker, and the abstract, welded sculptures he fashioned from automobile bumpers in his frat house basement laid the foundations for the distinctive, larger-than-life art pieces that would eventually make him famous. Daddy-O is the creator of the forty-foot iguana that perched atop the Lone Star Café in New York City, the immense cowboy boots (entered in the Guinness Book of World Records) outside San Antonio’s North Star Mall, and Dinosaur Bob, who graces the roof of the National Center for Children’s Illustrated Literature in Abilene, Texas. He is widely recognized as one of the progenitors of the “Cosmic Cowboy Culture” that emerged in Texas during the 1970s. Daddy-O’s Book of Big-Ass Art features images of more than a hundred of Wade’s most famous pieces, complete with the wild tales that lie behind the art, told in brief essays by both Wade and more than forty noted artists and writers familiar with Wade’s work.

Dinosaur Highway

Dinosaur Highway
Author: Laurie E. Jasinski
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
Total Pages: 445
Release: 2008-10-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0875654738

Where the Paluxy River now winds through the North Texas Hill Country, the great lizards of prehistory once roamed, leaving their impressive footprints deep in the limy sludge of what would become the earth’s Cretaceous layer. It wouldn’t be until a summer day in1909, however, when young George Adams went splashing along the creekbed, that chance and shifting sediments would reveal these stony traces of an ancient past. Young Adams’s first discovery of dinosaur tracks in the Paluxy River Valley, near the small community of Glen Rose, Texas, came more than one hundred million years after the reign of the dinosaurs. During this prehistoric era, herds of lumbering “sauropods” and tri-toed, carnivorous “theropods” made their way along what was then an ancient “dinosaur highway.” Today, their long-ago footsteps are immortalized in the limestone of the riverbed, arousing the curiosity of picnickers and paleontologists alike. Indeed, nearly a century after their first discovery, the “stony oddities” of Somervell County continue to draw Saturday-afternoon tourists, renowned scholars, and dinosaur enthusiasts from across the nation and around the globe. In her careful, and colorful, history of Dinosaur Valley State Park, Jasinski deftly interweaves millennia of geological time with local legend, old photographs, and quirky anecdotes of the people who have called the valley home. Beginning with the valley’s “first visitors”—the dinosaurs—Jasinski traces the area’s history through to the decades of the twentieth century, when new track sites continued to be discovered, and visitors and locals continued to leave their own material imprint upon the changing landscape. The book reaches its culmination in the account of the hard-won battle fought by Somervell residents and officials during the latter decades of the century to secure Dinosaur Valley’s preservation as a state park.

Freedom Colonies

Freedom Colonies
Author: Thad Sitton
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2005-03-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0292706421

In the decades following the Civil War, nearly a quarter of African Americans achieved a remarkable victory—they got their own land. While other ex-slaves and many poor whites became trapped in the exploitative sharecropping system, these independence-seeking individuals settled on pockets of unclaimed land that had been deemed too poor for farming and turned them into successful family farms. In these self-sufficient rural communities, often known as "freedom colonies," African Americans created a refuge from the discrimination and violence that routinely limited the opportunities of blacks in the Jim Crow South. Freedom Colonies is the first book to tell the story of these independent African American settlements. Thad Sitton and James Conrad focus on communities in Texas, where blacks achieved a higher percentage of land ownership than in any other state of the Deep South. The authors draw on a vast reservoir of ex-slave narratives, oral histories, written memoirs, and public records to describe how the freedom colonies formed and to recreate the lifeways of African Americans who made their living by farming or in skilled trades such as milling and blacksmithing. They also uncover the forces that led to the decline of the communities from the 1930s onward, including economic hard times and the greed of whites who found legal and illegal means of taking black-owned land. And they visit some of the remaining communities to discover how their independent way of life endures into the twenty-first century.

The Rough Riders

The Rough Riders
Author: Theodore Roosevelt
Publisher: New York : C. Scribner's Sons
Total Pages: 408
Release: 1899
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

Based on a pocket diary from the Spanish-American War, this tough-as-nails 1899 memoir abounds in patriotic valor and launched the future President into the American consciousness.

ARO: Architecture Research Office

ARO: Architecture Research Office
Author: Stephen Cassell
Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2003-02-28
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9781568983677

"The process of investigation, analysis, and testing makes Architecture Research Office (ARO) as much a laboratory as a design firm. For Stephen Cassell, Adam Yarinsky, and their team, the starting point of each commission is not the development of an abstract "idea" for the project, but an intensive, hands-on occupation with a project's conditions, with its physical, economic, and social contexts. This practical approach to making architecture, to shrinking the distance between thinking and building, is much evident in their work, which manages to be simultaneously thoughtful and sensual." "The seven projects featured in this, the first monograph on the work of this firm, range from self-directed research (ARO's paper wall project), to private living spaces (the SoHo Loft), to commercial interiors (the Qiora Store and Spa), to the popular U.S. Armed Services Recruiting Station in Times Square, to the stunning Colorado House in Telluride. All of these projects challenge design conventions, while delighting the senses with their unusual materials, careful detailing, and unexpected spatial discoveries." "With essays by Stan Allen, Philip Nobel, Guy Nordenson, and Sarah Whiting."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved