THE NEXT MAN IN TEXAS


Book Description

BOOTS & BOOTIES Riding, Roping and Ranching are part of cowboy life. Diapers, Pacifiers and Baby Bottles are not! Don't fall in love with a cowboy, baby Mac's mother had told Grace Daniels. The woman's dying wish was for Grace to take her baby boy to his father. The only problem was that "Daddy" could be any one of the four McLintock brothers. The eldest, Jack, was the sexiest, most handsome man Grace had ever met. But since Jack had spent the past fifteen years raising his brothers, the last thing he wanted was another baby…or the woman who came with it. Too late Grace realized she was no good at following advice….




Last Chance in Texas


Book Description

A powerful, bracing and deeply spiritual look at intensely, troubled youth, Last Chance in Texas gives a stirring account of the way one remarkable prison rehabilitates its inmates. While reporting on the juvenile court system, journalist John Hubner kept hearing about a facility in Texas that ran the most aggressive–and one of the most successful–treatment programs for violent young offenders in America. How was it possible, he wondered, that a state like Texas, famed for its hardcore attitude toward crime and punishment, could be leading the way in the rehabilitation of violent and troubled youth? Now Hubner shares the surprising answers he found over months of unprecedented access to the Giddings State School, home to “the worst of the worst”: four hundred teenage lawbreakers convicted of crimes ranging from aggravated assault to murder. Hubner follows two of these youths–a boy and a girl–through harrowing group therapy sessions in which they, along with their fellow inmates, recount their crimes and the abuse they suffered as children. The key moment comes when the young offenders reenact these soul-shattering moments with other group members in cathartic outpourings of suffering and anger that lead, incredibly, to genuine remorse and the beginnings of true empathy . . . the first steps on the long road to redemption. Cutting through the political platitudes surrounding the controversial issue of juvenile justice, Hubner lays bare the complex ties between abuse and violence. By turns wrenching and uplifting, Last Chance in Texas tells a profoundly moving story about the children who grow up to inflict on others the violence that they themselves have suffered. It is a story of horror and heartbreak, yet ultimately full of hope.




Make Your Bed


Book Description

Based on a Navy SEAL's inspiring graduation speech, this #1 New York Times bestseller of powerful life lessons "should be read by every leader in America" (Wall Street Journal). If you want to change the world, start off by making your bed. On May 17, 2014, Admiral William H. McRaven addressed the graduating class of the University of Texas at Austin on their Commencement day. Taking inspiration from the university's slogan, "What starts here changes the world," he shared the ten principles he learned during Navy Seal training that helped him overcome challenges not only in his training and long Naval career, but also throughout his life; and he explained how anyone can use these basic lessons to change themselves-and the world-for the better. Admiral McRaven's original speech went viral with over 10 million views. Building on the core tenets laid out in his speech, McRaven now recounts tales from his own life and from those of people he encountered during his military service who dealt with hardship and made tough decisions with determination, compassion, honor, and courage. Told with great humility and optimism, this timeless book provides simple wisdom, practical advice, and words of encouragement that will inspire readers to achieve more, even in life's darkest moments. "Powerful." --USA Today "Full of captivating personal anecdotes from inside the national security vault." --Washington Post "Superb, smart, and succinct." --Forbes




Leaving Cheyenne


Book Description

“If Chaucer were a Texan writing today . . . this is how he would have written and this is how he would have felt.”— New York Times In Leaving Cheyenne (1963), which anticipates Lonesome Dove more than any other early novel, the stark realities of the American West play out in a mesmerizing love triangle. Stubborn rancher Gideon Fry, resilient Molly Taylor, and awkward ranch hand Johnny McCloud struggle with love and jealousy as the years pass.




God Save Texas


Book Description

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.




Looks Like Rain


Book Description

Mickey Newbury (1940–2002) grew up in Houston and moved to Nashville in the early 1960s, following his muse. He wrote top hits for many well-known artists, including Don Gibson, Andy Williams, Kenny Rogers, Tom Jones, and others. He is probably best known, however, for being name-checked in the song “Luckenbach, Texas (Back to the Basics of Love)” by Waylon Jennings. Newbury has been cited by Jennings, Kris Kristofferson, Townes Van Zandt, and many other eminent singer-songwriters as a primary influence. In his own independent fashion, Newbury helped to loosen the grip maintained for decades by the Nashville studio system, thus paving the way for later innovators like Willie Nelson, David Allan Coe, and others. He is still the only songwriter to produce hits on four different charts in the same year in 1968: “Just Dropped In (to See What Condition My Condition was In)” on the pop/rock charts, “Sweet Memories” on easy listening, “Time Is a Thief” on the R & B charts, and “Here Comes the Rain, Baby” in country. Following the successful pattern established in his previous works on Townes Van Zandt and Ray Wylie Hubbard, veteran music journalist Brian T. Atkinson has interviewed artists such as Kris Kristofferson, Bobby Bare, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Steve Earle, Rodney Crowell, and many others to learn how Newbury’s influence continues to shape the musical and artistic approach of both seasoned and newer performers. Forewords by Larry Gatlin and Don McLean set the stage for a fascinating look back at one of the most revered songwriters and musicians of recent decades.




Thalia: A Texas Trilogy


Book Description

One of Entertainment Weekly’s "Most Beautiful Books of the Year" The renaissance of Larry McMurtry, “an alchemist who converts the basest materials to gold” (New York Times Book Review), continues with the publication of Thalia. Larry McMurtry burst onto the American literary scene with a force that would forever redefine how we perceive the American West. His first three novels— Horseman, Pass By (1961),* Leaving Cheyenne (1963), and The Last Picture Show (1966)— all set in the north Texas town of Thalia after World War II, are collected here for the first time. In this trilogy, McMurtry writes tragically of men and women trying to carve out an existence on the plains, where the forces of modernity challenge small- town American life. From a cattleranch rivalry that confirms McMurtry’s “full- blooded Western genius” (Publishers Weekly) to a love triangle involving a cowboy, his rancher boss and wife, and finally to the hardscrabble citizens of an oil- patch town trying to keep their only movie house alive, McMurtry captures the stark realities of the West like no one else. With a new introduction, Thalia emerges as an American classic that celebrates one of our greatest literary masters. *Just named in 2017 by Publishers Weekly the #1 Western novel worthy of rediscovery.




The Best Way Out is Up


Book Description




Tomorrow's First Light


Book Description

Marrying a stranger to keep the woman's siblings out of an orphanage is one thing, but when more children than expected pour out of the stagecoach, what’s a man to do? Nervous about meeting her fiancé for the first time, Ellie Spritzer’s lifelong hope of finding love is about to end—or rather, begin. She never imagined her quest for love would take her to the other side of the country with all eight of her siblings in tow, but after her mother dies unexpectedly, what choice does she have? At least the man she’s been writing for the past year is still willing to marry her and take in her siblings… or so she thinks until she arrives in the dusty town of Twin Rivers, Texas. Growing up an orphan, Sam Owens never had a place to call home or a family to love. So if his wife-to-be needs to bring three of her siblings with her, he has no complaints about having a ready-made family. But his mail-order-bride doesn’t arrive with three. She arrives with eight. Sam can’t make himself turn away children in need. But as a beginning rancher, he doesn’t have the resources to care for so many people. When sinister forces threaten the things Sam and Ellie both hold dear, can they figure out how to keep their fledgling family together, or will they lose the very things they cherish most? Tomorrow’s First Light is the first book in the Texas Promise Series by bestselling Christian romance author Naomi Rawlings. If you like tender marriage-of-convenience stories, you’ll love this heartwarming tale filled with hope and new beginnings. Texas Promise Series Book 1—Tomorrow’s First Light (Sam and Ellie) Book 2—Tomorrow’s Shining Dream (Daniel and Charlotte--available 2020) Book 3—Tomorrow’s Constant Hope (Wes and Keely--available 2020) Book 4—Tomorrow’s Steadfast Prayer (Harrison and Alejandra) Book 5—Tomorrow’s Lasting Joy (Cain and Anna Mae)




Lone Stars


Book Description

"Desperately affecting." —The New York Times “Generous and epic...takes us through generations of a singular family, whose loves and losses also tell us a story about America itself." —Eliot Schrefer, National Book Award finalist, author of Endangered Justin Deabler's Lone Stars follows the arc of four generations of a Texan family in a changing America. Julian Warner, a father at last, wrestles with a question his husband posed: what will you tell our son about the people you came from, now that they're gone? Finding the answers takes Julian back in time to Eisenhower's immigration border raids, an epistolary love affair during the Vietnam War, crumbling marriages, queer migrations to Cambridge and New York, up to the disorienting polarization of Obama's second term. And in these answers lies a hope: that by uncloseting ourselves—as immigrants, smart women, gay people—we find power in empathy.




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