Edmund McGowan is a gifted naturalist whose life’s work is threatened by war. Mary Mott is a widowed innkeeper forced to rely on her own resources for survival. Mary’s 16-year-old son, Terrell, is a young man about to experience his first taste of love. Sprinkling in real-life figures such as James Bowie and Davy Crockett - Harrigan gives a human face to a true American legend. Told from the perspective of the Mexican attackers as well as the American defenders, this New York Times best seller recreates a time and a place where honor and gallant death shaped generations of people.

For Grady McClarty, an ever-watchful but bewildered five-year-old boy, World War II is only a troubling, ungraspable event that occurred before he was born. But he feels its effects all around him. He and his older brother Danny are fatherless, and their mother, Bethie, is still grieving for her fighter-pilot husband. Most of all, Grady senses it in his two uncles: young combat veterans determined to step into a fatherhood role for their nephews, even as they struggle with the psychological scars they carry from the war.

Every nation needs its creation myth, and since Texas was a nation before it was a state, it's no surprise that its myths bite deep. There's no piece of history more important to Texans than the Battle of the Alamo, when Davy Crockett and a band of rebels went down in a blaze of glory fighting for independence from Mexico, losing the battle but setting Texas up to win the war.

Here is a must-listen history of the Lone Star State, together with an insider's look at the people, politics, and events that have shaped Texas from the beginning right up to our days. Never before has the story been told with more vitality and immediacy. Fehrenbach re-creates the Texas saga from prehistory to the Spanish and French invasions to the heyday of the cotton and cattle empires. He dramatically describes the emergence of Texas as a republic, the vote for secession before the Civil War, and the state's readmission to the Union after the War.

God Save Texas is a journey through the most controversial state in America. It 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 has produced extraordinary growth, but also striking income disparities. Texas looks a lot like the America that Donald Trump wants to create. 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.

Texas: a land of sprawling diversity and unparalleled richness; a dazzling chapter in the history of our nation; a place like no other on Earth. Through the remarkable lives of four families, this epic saga spans four centuries and two continents and charts the dramatic formation of several great dynasties from the age of the conquistadors to the present day. A richly compelling novel of a proud people eager to meet the challenge of the land, Texas is James Michener's most magnificent achievement.

In this classic from the Lone Star State, John Graves learns that the river he knew and loved as a youth, the Brazos in north-central Texas, is slated to be dammed at multiple points - and he understands that things will never be the same. Goodbye to a River is a poignant narrative of one man's journey by canoe down the river of his memories. Along the way, he describes the colorful Texas landscape and recounts its rich history.

This is the story of the rise to national power of a desperately poor young man from the Texas Hill Country. The Path to Power reveals in extraordinary detail the genesis of the almost superhuman drive, energy, and ambition that set LBJ apart. It follows him from the Hill Country to New Deal Washington, from his boyhood through the years of the Depression to his debut as Congressman, his heartbreaking defeat in his first race for the Senate, and his attainment, nonetheless, at age 31, of the national power for which he hungered.

Hated and hailed, excoriated and revered, Abraham Lincoln was at the pinnacle of American power when secessionists gave no quarter in a clash of visions bound up with money, race, identity, and faith. In him we can see the possibilities of the presidency as well as its limitations. This book tells the story of Lincoln from his birth on the Kentucky frontier to his leadership during the Civil War to his tragic assassination: his rise, his self-education, his loves, his bouts of depression, his political failures, his deepening faith, and his persistent conviction that slavery must end.

Today’s Republican party is not a “normal” political party in the American tradition. It has become an autocratic movement masquerading as a political party. As Stuart Stevens argues in The Conspiracy to End America, if we look away from that truth, we greatly increase the likelihood that the America we love will slip away, never to return.

The Texas Rangers came to life in 1823, when Texas was still part of Mexico. Nearly 200 years later, the Rangers are still going - one of the most famous of all law enforcement agencies. In Cult of Glory, Doug J. Swanson has written a sweeping account of the Rangers that chronicles their epic, daring escapades while showing how the white and propertied power structures of Texas used them as enforcers, protectors, and officially sanctioned killers.

For decades, Charlie Flagg has eked out a living by raising cattle and sheep on his modest Texas ranch. Hardworking and old-fashioned, he distrusts federal programs that claim to help struggling farmers and ranchers. But as rainless years continue and others sell their souls for federal handouts, Charlie finds himself under increasing pressure to compromise his principles - and surrender his freedom.

At the beginning of his career, Joseph Campbell developed a lasting fascination with the cultures of the Far East, and explorations of Buddhist and Hindu philosophy later became recurring motifs in his vast body of work. However, Campbell had to wait until middle age to visit the lands that inspired him so deeply. In 1954, he took a sabbatical from his teaching position and embarked on a year-long voyage through India, Thailand, Cambodia, Burma, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and finally Japan.

Part epic of Texas, part classic coming-of-age story, part unflinching examination of the bloody price of power, The Son is a gripping and utterly transporting novel that maps the legacy of violence in the American west with rare emotional acuity, even as it presents an intimate portrait of one family across two centuries. Eli McCullough is just twelve-years-old when a marauding band of Comanche storm his Texas homestead and brutally murder his mother and sister, taking him as a captive.

The Second World Wars examines how combat unfolded in the air, at sea, and on land to show how distinct conflicts among disparate combatants coalesced into one interconnected global war. Drawing on 3,000 years of military history, Victor Davis Hanson argues that despite its novel industrial barbarity, neither the war's origins nor its geography were unusual. Nor was its ultimate outcome surprising. The Axis powers were well prepared to win limited border conflicts, but once they blundered into global war, they had no hope of victory.

Edmund McGowan is a gifted naturalist whose life’s work is threatened by war. Mary Mott is a widowed innkeeper forced to rely on her own resources for survival. Mary’s 16-year-old son, Terrell, is a young man about to experience his first taste of love. Sprinkling in real-life figures such as James Bowie and Davy Crockett - Harrigan gives a human face to a true American legend. Told from the perspective of the Mexican attackers as well as the American defenders, this New York Times best seller recreates a time and a place where honor and gallant death shaped generations of people.

Here is a must-listen history of the Lone Star State, together with an insider's look at the people, politics, and events that have shaped Texas from the beginning right up to our days. Never before has the story been told with more vitality and immediacy. Fehrenbach re-creates the Texas saga from prehistory to the Spanish and French invasions to the heyday of the cotton and cattle empires. He dramatically describes the emergence of Texas as a republic, the vote for secession before the Civil War, and the state's readmission to the Union after the War.

Texas: a land of sprawling diversity and unparalleled richness; a dazzling chapter in the history of our nation; a place like no other on Earth. Through the remarkable lives of four families, this epic saga spans four centuries and two continents and charts the dramatic formation of several great dynasties from the age of the conquistadors to the present day. A richly compelling novel of a proud people eager to meet the challenge of the land, Texas is James Michener's most magnificent achievement.

Hardly were the last shots fired at the Alamo before the Texas Revolution entered the realm of myth and controversy. French visitor Frederic Gaillardet called it a "Texian Iliad" in 1839, while American Theodore Sedgwick pronounced the war and its resulting legends "almost burlesque."

Exiled to Texas with his grown daughter, sculptor Francis “Gil” Gilheaney is commissioned to create a statue for a man who recently lost his son in World War I. But as work on the statue progresses, secrets slowly reveal themselves and Gil’s fragile family threads begin to fray.

Three Roads to the Alamo is the definitive work about the lives of David Crockett, James Bowie, and William Barret Travis - the legendary frontiersmen and fighters who met their destiny at the Alamo in one of the most famous and tragic battles in American history - and about what really happened in that battle.

God Save Texas is a journey through the most controversial state in America. It 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 has produced extraordinary growth, but also striking income disparities. Texas looks a lot like the America that Donald Trump wants to create. 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.

After the Robinsons - a minister, his wife, and their 4 young sons - are shipwrecked on a desert island, they must adapt to their new environment, which includes exotic birds and animals, but none of the comforts they enjoyed in their native Switzerland. Without modern conveniences or even clocks and calendars, the Robinsons must use common sense to build a home, find food, and tame the island's wild animals.

There's nothing particularly unusual for a legendary gunman to be summoned to the lawless, bullet-riddled territory of Arizona. But when Frank Morgan, aka the Last Gunfighter, rides into Tucson, he finds himself ambushed and kidnapped by ruthless Mexican bandit Ramirez's army of thugs. The only way out is for Frank's son, Conrad Browning, heir to the vast Browning fortune, to ransom his father free. But Conrad isn't giving up one cent. He's got a far deadlier currency in mind.

In this, the first novel of the best-selling Incarnations of Immortality series, Piers Anthony combines a deeply moving examination of the meaning of life and death with a gripping story of romance and loyalty, all set in a world of magic and technical wizardry.