Southwest Books - Page 3

Texas Politics

Richard H. Kraemer, Charldean Newell, David F. Prindle

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

Textbook format 3 out of 5 stars.
7 of 9 people found this review helpful.

This book is a comprehensive look at Texas politics which in itself is somewhat confusing, but the style of the book tends to cloud the issue even more. It sometimes uses examples that are not exactly on point and if you don't live in Texas than you may not fully understand the point of reference it comes from. Overall though, it is a detailed and comprehensive. The book offers some great study questions at the end of each chapter. This book tends to really very frank with it's criticism of the Texas political machine and on occasion it leans to the right somewhat, but heck, this is Texas, what did you expect.

Editorial Review:

TEXAS POLITICS is a comprehensive text that explicitly and critically compares the reality of Texas government and politics to democratic theory through the exploration of three main themes: democratic ideals, conservatism, and conflict. Boxed features in every chapter bring the text to life by providing human examples of abstract principles, including a "You Decide" box where you can consider the pros and cons of important issues. The text's lively presentation of material engages you in controversial issues and encourages classroom debate. The authors' conversational writing style and use of humor make the text a pleasure to read. The new tenth edition offers an appealing full-color design and includes numerous new photos, cartoons, tables, and figures.

Country Houses of John F. Staub (Sara and John Lindsey Series in the Arts and Humanities)

Stephen Fox

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

In the early 1920s, architect John F. Staub, a native of Knoxville, Tennessee, who had studied at MIT and worked in New York, came to the burgeoning city of Houston as an assistant to nationally prominent architect Harrie T. Lindeberg. Staub was charged with administering construction of three houses designed by Lindeberg for members of the city's rapidly emerging elite. He would go on to establish one of the most influential architectural practices in Houston, where he would remain until his death in 1981.

Over four decades, Staub designed grand houses in such communities as Shadyside, Broadacres, and, perhaps most notably, River Oaks. His clients included the Hoggs, for whom he created Bayou Bend; the Mastersons, his clients for Rienzi; and members of the Wiess, Cullen, Farish, Welder, Fay, and Elkins families. Although Staub also completed commissions for clients elsewhere in Texas and the United States, it was primarily in Houston that his work and influence took root.

This ambitious study of Staub's work by architectural historian Stephen Fox goes beyond a description of Staub's houses. Fox analyzes the roles of space, structure, and decoration in creating, defining, and maintaining social class structures and expectations and shows how Staub was able to incorporate these elements and understandings into the elegant buildings he designed for his clients. In the process, he contributes greatly to a fuller understanding of Houston's emergence as a premier American city.

Stunning color images by architectural photographer Richard Cheek, combined with Fox's well-grounded and expansive thesis, create a volume that will enchant, inform, and entertain. Students and aficionados of American domestic architecture of the 1920s, '30s, '40s, and '50s will appreciate the wealth of material, and the volume's contribution to architectural history and the sociology of architecture will commend itself to readers across the nation.

Ancient Ruins of the Southwest: An Archaeological Guide (Arizona and the Southwest)

David Grant Noble

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Ancient New Mexico and Arizona 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

When visiting Arizona and New Mexico, Ancient Ruins of the Southwest is a valuable tool. This is an excellent reference
to the magnificent early civilizations of this area. The book
gives excellent, precise directions to each site and the history
of each. My last trip to New Mexico was greatly enhanced by this book.

Good Overview 3 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

I'm not qualified to review a book. However, I did read every page and found the book gave me a good overview of many ruins in the southwest. I would call it more of a "1 minute quick look" at the ruins since most articles were short. I'm not sure I could have followed all the (brief) directions to the sites.

Overall, buy the book if you want a quick introduction to a site you plan to visit.

Mike Honeycutt

Well Written 4 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

This is a well written, well organized book for touring the SW ruins. It gives brief overviews of the various cultures and then provides travel/hike guidance. Very good first book to go to when planning a ancient SW civilizations based SW tour.

Editorial Review:

While visiting New Mexico, eleven-year-old Kathy comes across a mysterious jawless skull, an ancient Indian artifact, discovers the Cave of Knowing, and is told that she is the Chosen One to solve an old conflict.

A Land as God Made It: Jamestown and the Birth of America

James Horn

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Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Excellent insight into early American history 5 out of 5 stars.
6 of 7 people found this review helpful.

I found this book to be most informative and interesting. Horn paints a picture of a dysfunctional settlement that barely endured long enough to become a colony. The conventional wisdom is that the Jamestown settlers were adventurers and younger sons of nobility who sought easy riches and refused to do the work necessary to sustain a settlement such as building and planting. In contrast, the Puritans in New England were hard working, pious, and a much better model for American colonization. I don't know whether the Puritan myth is true, but Horn seems to agree that Jamestown's myth is fairly accurate.

He seems to be ambivalent about John Smith: while he doesn't seem to like Smith much, he describes him as one of the few seeking to get the settlement self-sustaining rather than putting up with idleness and depending on the Indians for food. In this portrayal Smith is very arrogant and makes some serious mistakes, but no more than others, and he does try to establish productive relations with the Indians, which subsequent leaders failed to do.

I particularly liked the author's liberal use of quotations from source material. They made the narrative more lively and more personal. I hope Dr. Horn keeps writing.

Editorial Review:

Although it was the first permanent English settlement in North America, Jamestown is too often overlooked in the writing of American history. Founded thirteen years before the Mayflower sailed, Jamestown's courageous settlers have been overshadowed ever since by the pilgrims of Plymouth. But as historian James Horn demonstrates in this vivid and meticulously researched account, Jamestown-not Plymouth-was the true crucible of American history. Jamestown introduced slavery into English-speaking North America; it became the first of England's colonies to adopt a representative government; and it was the site of the first white-Indian clashes over territorial expansion. As we approach the four-hundredth anniversary of Jamestown in 2007, A Land As God Made It offers the definitive account of the colony that give rise to America.

Understanding the Arizona Constitution

Toni McClory

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Required reading for everyone living in Arizona 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 2 people found this review helpful.

Outstanding. Readable and understandable for laymen (and laywomen). It should be required reading for every voter in Arizona. High Schools and colleges should have courses with this as the text.

Editorial Review:

A definitive guide to Arizona government that is as comprehensive as it is easy to understand. It provides a thorough explanation of the state's constitution and shows the impact that its unique features have had on the everyday operation of the state's political system. Much of the information it contains is based on original research compiled by the author from primary sources and draws on her direct experience with government processes, officials, and events. For lawyers and business people, it makes available a brief yet sophisticated synopsis of state government along with a wealth of citations and supporting detail. For concerned citizens, it offers topics of special interest to voters--including facts about initiatives and referenda and a chapter on local government--and contains references to online government resources.

"It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own": A New History of the American West

Richard White

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Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

It's all our misfortune ... 4 out of 5 stars.
42 of 66 people found this review helpful.

Recently, movements such as the Sagebrush Rebellion in Nevada have sprung up in the West pitting ranchers, mining companies, and developers against federal government agencies in charge of managing the land. It's been a long held myth that the government agencies, especially the Forest Service and BLM, have enacted rules to hasten the end of these economic interests in the Western US. This is one of the first books to accurately dispel many western myths such as the lone individual expressing a lifestyle of freedom, land and neighbors be damned! Read this book and learn before automatically siding with groups whose sole motivation is greed at any cost to our precious land, land that will take centuries to recouperate if left alone. These "interests" hide their motives behind "noble" state rights issues, insisting that American taxpayers turn over to state politicians (who receive the bulk of their campaign funds from these special interests) what's left of western wilderness so cattle can graze, ranchers can grow surplus crops such as alfalfa, foreign mining companies can rape the land and pay a pittance to the US Treasury, and developers can hasten the destruction of what's left of our western lands. We need more books like this one to combat the misinformation these special interests spread. Remember that in the end all american taxpayers pony up the money for these groups either through ridiculously low grazing and mining fees to subsidized water systems. This is big business, not mom and pop operations nor is it the Marboro man riding into the sunset. And after reading this book, read Cadillac Desert (Marc Reisner) to better understand how these special interest groups are threatening our beloved west.

Charles Goodnight, Cowman and Plainsman

J. Evetts Haley

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Some of the best Panhandle History available 5 out of 5 stars.
14 of 14 people found this review helpful.

This book is not only about Charles Goodnight, but it is an excellent source on the history of the Panhandle, especially the settlement of the Palo Duro Canyon. You'll learn about the land, the wildlife, and the men who came to tame them both. It's an excellent biography, and should be required reading for anyone who lives within a hundred mile radius of the Palo Duro canyon.

Very interesting. Haven't finished it yet., but will soon. 5 out of 5 stars.
7 of 10 people found this review helpful.

Being a shirtail relative of Charles Goodnight, Ihave been anxious to learn more of him. My mother was a Goodnight, but not a direct descendant. More like a great-great niece. Would like to here from anyone who may be related. The book is very informative. I have an early copy from about the 1940's.

ONE OF THE OLD TIME PIONEERS 5 out of 5 stars.
6 of 7 people found this review helpful.

My first indication this book existed was a chapter, entitled The Making of a Scout, that Ole Hosstail (Joe Austell Small) ran in TRUE WEST magazine back around August, 1966.

Charles Goodnight was many things in the Texas Panhandle, pioneer, ranchman, Indian fighter, homesteader, leader and all around man 'with the bark on. One of the outstanding things he did, among all his other activities, was his work with the Bison (buffalo) saving a herd but also in achieving the 'cattalo' a cross between range cattle and the bison.

This book was already 20 some years old when it crossed my trail, and though I have a good hardcover copy, it is a second printing. But no matter which copy one may have, it is definately a prime source of information and no small classic in its own right.

In September, 2007, the University of Oklahoma will publish a newer biography of Charles Goodnight by William T. Hagan. Though having much fewer pages it will no doubt be worth having on a reader's western shelf as well.

No matter what your western reading interest concerning the west, Charles Goodnight is almost a must read.

Semper Fi.

Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten History of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (The Lamar Series in Western History)

Samuel Truett

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Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Published in Cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest StudiesIn the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Mexicans and Americans joined together to transform the U.S.–Mexico borderlands into a crossroads of modern economic development. This book reveals the forgotten story of their ambitious dreams and their ultimate failure to control this fugitive terrain.
Focusing on a mining region that spilled across the Arizona–Sonora border, this book shows how entrepreneurs, corporations, and statesmen tried to domesticate nature and society within a transnational context. Efforts to tame a “wild” frontier were stymied by labor struggles, social conflict, and revolution. Fugitive Landscapes explores the making and unmaking of the U.S.–Mexico border, telling how ordinary people resisted the domination of empires, nations, and corporations to shape transnational history on their own terms.  By moving beyond traditional national narratives, it offers new lessons for our own border-crossing age.

Manifest Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American Race

Laura Gomez

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Editorial Review:

Watch the Author Interview on KNME

In both the historic record and the popular imagination, the story of nineteenth-century westward expansion in America has been characterized by notions of annexation rather than colonialism, of opening rather than conquering, and of settling unpopulated lands rather than displacing existing populations.

Using the territory that is now New Mexico as a case study, Manifest Destinies traces the origins of Mexican Americans as a racial group in the United States, paying particular attention to shifting meanings of race and law in the nineteenth century.

Laura E. Gómez explores the central paradox of Mexican American racial status as entailing the law's designation of Mexican Americans as "white" and their simultaneous social position as non-white in American society. She tells a neglected story of conflict, conquest, cooperation, and competition among Mexicans, Indians, and Euro-Americans, the region’s three main populations who were the key architects and victims of the laws that dictated what one’s race was and how people would be treated by the law according to one’s race.

Gómez’s pathbreaking work—spanning the disciplines of law, history, and sociology—reveals how the construction of Mexicans as an American racial group proved central to the larger process of restructuring the American racial order from the Mexican War (1846–48) to the early twentieth century. The emphasis on white-over-black relations during this period has obscured the significant role played by the doctrine of Manifest Destiny and the colonization of northern Mexico in the racial subordination of black Americans.

To the End of the Earth: A History of the Crypto-Jews of New Mexico

Stanley M. Hordes

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Total reviews: 12 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

A good history of crypto Jews in New Mexico 4 out of 5 stars.
14 of 15 people found this review helpful.

A couple of years ago I went to a lecture that Dr. Stanley Hordes presented to the New Mexico Genealogy Society. He discussed his then upcoming book about crypto-Jews in New Mexico titled "To the End of the Earth." What intrigued me about Dr. Hordes lecture was that he found proof that the colony of Nuevo Leon, Nuevo Espana ( present day Mexico) probably was populated with crypto-Jews. This same colony en masse tried to illegally colonize New Mexico in 1591, and a few of these people were also part of the official New Mexico colony in 1598. Dr. Hordes' makes a very good argument that there were crypto-Jews in New Mexico during the first years of colonization and that their descendants continued practicing Judaism up until the present day.

A crypto-Jew is a person who converted or whose ancestors converted to Christianity yet still secretly practices Judaism. As with many other Christian countries, Jews were persecuted in Spain during the Middle Ages. In 1390 many Jews converted to Christianity after an especially devastating pogrom. In 1492, after King Fernando and Queen Isabel conquered the last vestige of Muslim Spain in Granada, the Christian monarchs officially expelled the Jews from Spain. All who stayed in Spain were required to convert to Catholicism. Many went to Portugal where they too were forced to convert.

The Spanish Inquisition persecuted many of these New Christians as apostates and heretics. Many were accused of going back to their old religion. In order to avoid prosecution many New Christians went to the New World. Dr. Hordes shows how one such colony from Portugal under the leadership of Luis de Carvajal y de la Cueva were almost definitely New Christians, and most likely crypto-Jews.

Carvajal was given permission by the King Philip II of Spain to found a colony in Nuevo Leon. The king gave specific instructions to officials not to question the ethnicity of the people in this colony. Dr. Hordes contends that these people were probably New Christians since at the time New Christians prohibited from going to the New World. The king's instructions would have made it easier for them to cross over to Mexico. As further proof Hordes notes that Carvajal's son was later prosecuted by the Inquisition. During the younger Carvajal's arrest Gaspar Castano de Sosa lead the entire colony to New Mexico. Hordes contends that he probably did this in order to escape being prosecuted himself as a judaizer. However Castano de Sosa was arrested anyway for trying to illegally colonize New Mexico.

Hordes uses church and government records to demonstrate the possibility that New Christians practiced Judaism throughout New Mexico history. His argument is strongest with the early years of the colony when Inquisition records documented investigations into possible judaizers. He also uses genealogy to show how certain assumed crypto-Jewish families intermarried within culture. However, his arguments are weaker when it comes to the present day. Although there is some proof that certain present day Hispano New Mexican families continue the practice of crypto-Judaism, there are questions as to whether certain evidence truly demonstrates this practice. Hordes does not completely dispel these questions, although he comes closer than others who have tried to prove this theory.

Dr. Hordes' book is well researched and was a fascinating read. Any person interested in Hispanic New Mexican history and genealogy should read this book. One then can make up his or her mind whether Dr. Hordes proves that crypto-Judaism indeed was practiced throughout New Mexico's history.

Editorial Review:

Stanley M. Hordes explores the remarkable story of crypto-Jews and the tenuous preservation of Jewish rituals and traditions in Mexico and New Mexico over the past five hundred years. He follows the crypto-Jews from their origins in medieval Spain and Portugal to their efforts to escape persecution by migrating to the New World and settling in the far reaches of the northern Mexican frontier. Drawing on individual biographies, family histories, Inquisition records, letters, and other primary sources, Hordes provides a richly detailed account of the economic, social, and religious lives of crypto-Jews during the colonial period and after the annexation of New Mexico by the United States in 1846. He concludes with a discussion of the reemergence of crypto-Jewish culture and the reclamation of Jewish ancestry within the Hispano community.