A delightful book with many resplendent photographs and drawings of the "King of the Songbirds" that are certain to capture your heart. Not only is this an informative book which delves into the history and habits of this charming creature of nature, but has bits of eloquent prose and poetry tossed in as well. After you read it, you're sure to fall in love with these remarkable birds and their rapturous melodies.

Covers the endangered animals and plants of Texas, and the issues surrounding them.

Americans, and probably many foreigners, carry a very definite image of Texas in their heads. It's not a place like Delaware or Saskatchewan, known mostly to those who live there. We know Texas from the Westerns and the soaps, from "Giant", the novels of Larry McMurtry, and dozens of films, songs, and paintings. We "know" Texas to be a warm-hearted, big-talking place of oil, cattle, vast landscapes, barbeque, chilli con carne, laissez faire capitalism, violence, and life sentences for carrying a little pot. It's a place, in other words, full of contradictions. AT HOME IN TEXAS amazes us because the original image of Texas, at least in the words of those who wrote about it between 1820 and 1870, was entirely different, but never small.

"Our ability to know the world in an unconscious or taken-for-granted sense is the heart of the experience of being at home. It is that feeling of being familiar and comfortable in a place or situation. The passage of time is necessary or the experience of place. The individual develops a feeling of ease by repeated interactions with his or her world...." Imagination and perception are important to understanding human attachment to the land. We should recognize the role of attitudes and values in shaping the American landscape. This is the often-stated, enormous theme of Doughty's book. I feel that the author did not really come close to proving or establishing anything that resembles this. We do not find "how settlers developed their view of Texas as home" in a volume of 145 pages. The book cannot focus on the topic because he bit off more than he could chew, if I may express myself so boldly. We read descriptions by people at many moments in Texas history, but few show how those people changed over time. Thus "development" is difficult to show since we are dealing with separate people at separate times. They arrived in Texas with ideas shaped by their particular times. However, it is still an interesting book which may stimulate a lot of thought as to how such a theme could be developed.

What we do get here is an interesting glimpse of Texan history---the development of the image of Texas in the world, if not in the minds of Texans. The original Anglo settlers saw Texas as untamed wilderness. Doughty notes the Puritan value still alive in America then of "man's destiny to redeem the wilderness". Stephen Austin's writings may be taken as exemplary here. After the wilderness was somewhat tamer, the now-familiar look of the landscape was emphasized by books, newspapers, journal articles, and travel guides which were read throughout eastern America and Europe. Writers started likening Texas to a garden, a bounteous land---almost a virgin to be impregnated by the arriving colonists. As time passed, the image of Texas came to be "Mediterranean", Texas compared favorably with Italy, Greece or Egypt ! Boosters picked up this image, emphasizing health and fertile soil, and used it to attract immigrants, though another reality soon impinged on new arrivals. The decline and total disappearance of this 'Classical" image is worth more than the few lines the author devotes to it.

If you come to this book with the intention of learning how settlers became attached to the land in Texas, I fear you may be disappointed. (Hence 3 stars) But, if you just want to read something interesting about Texas and about the process of writing history---definitely give AT HOME IN TEXAS a try.