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Only months before Hurricane Katrina hit, our firm, Ross & Baruzzini, commissioned a survey of 200 emergency response leaders from municipalities, seaports and airports to find out where they stood [...]

How the blood of an Englishman-turned-Texan and the vision of a Gulf Coast misfit have rejuvenated the science-fiction universe. Walking the dealers room floor at the Fifty-fifth World-Con Science Fiction […]

Most hotel guests at the Hilton in Vancouver, Wash. probably don't know they are staying in a green hotel. What they are likely to notice is the hotel's pedestrian-friendly, central [...]

AS THOUGH THEY WERE VYING to be the poster children of Texas summer fiction, serial killers are front and center in a pair of smartly rendered novels from Lubbock's Stephen […]

WHEN WE WERE DOPEY COLLEGE KIDS--BEFORE we encountered the scary world of careers and children--we measured ourselves against giants and made plans to shake the earth and leave great footprints […]

WRITING WELL MIGHT NOT BE THE most difficult challenge a novelist faces in this media-saturated age. Writers who persevere through the creative process and run the gauntlet of editors and […]

IN EARLY 1998 IN BATON Rouge, Louisiana, young authors Michael Griffith and Josh Russell were asked by their close friend Matt Clark, the coordinator of Louisiana State University's graduate writing […]

ENVY, SANDRA BROWN'S LATEST THRILLER-WITH-A-SIDE-ORDER-OF-HOT-PANTS-ROMANCE, went on sale on August 28 and immediately became the number six best-selling book on Amazon.com. By week's end, it occupied the number two slot […]

What are sphagnum moss, peat moss and coir peat? Peat moss is derived from naturally decomposed sphagnum moss and other materials, and has a finer texture, like compost. Both peat moss and sphagnum moss have a low pH (3.3-4), making them a useful soil amendment when growing acid-loving plants such as camellias, azaleas and blueberries. [Extracted from the article]

Re 'Anatomy of a Blockbuster Conference' (M&C, June): I appreciate the attention you paid the annual SXSW conference and festivals, but your assessment that SXSW welcomes pirate vendors is flat-out [...]

The Forgetting: Alzheimer's: Portrait of an Epidemic DAVID SHENK Doubleday 292 Pages According to Shenk, Alzheimer's disease is reaching epidemic proportions and could affect as many as 15 million Americans [...]

BILLY BOY: A NOVEL, BY BUD SHRAKE (SIMON AND SCHUSTER, OCTOBER 2001), AND THE MONEY-WHIPPED STEER-JOB THREE-JACK GIVE-UP ARTIST: A NOVEL, BY DAN JENKINS (DOUBLEDAY). Bud Shrake knows golf--he co-authored […]

SARAH BIRD'S STUNNING NEW NOVEL LEAVES HER USUAL TEXAS LOCALES TO DRAW ON HER EARLIER LIFE AS AN AIR FORCE BRAT IN JAPAN. AS THE CROW FLIES, IT'S 6,500 MILES […]

A GRAND GUY: THE ART AND LIFE OF TERRY SOUTHERN, BY LEE HILL. (HARPER COLLINS) Admit it--while trying to decode the cover of "Sgt. Pepper's," you were always stumped when […]

Jan Burke Flight: A Novel of Suspense SIMON AND SCHUSTER FLASH BACK TO A GRISLY double-homicide--father and daughter slain aboard a yacht in California. Freeze the image of the teenage […]

PICADOR USA THE IVY-COVERED HALLS OF higher learning are neither hallowed nor hushed in The Lecturer's Tale, Austinite James Hynes's wicked satire of high and low professorial ambitions at a […]

WHEN GREGORY LEE JOHNSON burned an American flag while demonstrating outside the 1984 Republican National Convention in Dallas, the police hauled him in for violating a 1973 flag protection law. […]

Dan McGraw First and Last Seasons DOUBLEDAY IN 1999 DAN MCGRAW TOOK leave from his post as a Fort Worth-based senior editor at U.S. News and World Report and headed […]

TURN OUT THE LIGHTS (UNIVERSITY of Texas Press), a collection of articles by Gary Cartwright, arrives in stores this month. Cartwright, a senior editor at Texas Monthly, has written for […]

Bruce Sterling Zeitgeist: A Novel of Metamorphosis BANTAM SPECTRA AUSTINITE BRUCE STERLING'S keen eye for global Sturm und Drang has served him well in futuristic novels such as Holy Fire […]

COMPILING THE MUG SHOTS, last meals, and criminal vitae of 222 inmates executed by the State of Texas is not great literature. As high concept, social commentary, and true crime, […]

Texan Jazz (University of Texas Press, 1996). Dave Oliphant claims the definitive (well, the only) treatise on the pervasive influence of Texas' sons and daughters on the jazz world. His […]

Scars of Sweet Paradise: The Life and Times of Janis Joplin (Metropolitan Books, 1999). A mere eleven years after Holly's fatal plane crash, another Texas rock icon went to the […]

Last Cavalier: The Life and Times of John A. Lomax (University of Illinois Press, 1996). Lomax receives reverential, if bloodless, treatment in Nolan Porterfield's bio. It is a thorough--though at […]

Rave On: The Biography of Buddy Holly (Simon and Schuster, 1996). The world cried out, "Who capped Holly's teeth?" and noted biographer Philip Norman came to the rescue with this […]

The Life and Legend of Leadbelly (Harper Collins, 1992). Folk-song collector John A. Lomax discovered Leadbelly in Louisiana's Angola prison and masterminded the singer-guitarist's 1935 introduction to the world (via […]

HOW BIG IS TEXAS' CONTRIBUTION to the world of music? Big enough to overwhelm Dallasite Rick Koster's attempt to contain the sprawl between two covers; his Texas Music (St. Martin's, […]

If you're able to make hotel reservations online, you probably ought to thank John Davis III of Dallas. But please--no tipping. "DALLAS, TX, MARCH 7, 1996. The world's chains today […]

Briefly Noted IF THE GODS HADN'T MEANT us to laugh, they wouldn't have given us Jim High-tower. The rabidly populist Austinite (and former Texas ag commissioner) inspires chuckles all around […]

AMARILLO'S KIMBERLY WILLIS Holt commands attention with her youth novel When Zachary Beaver Came to Town (Henry Holt), which has been nominated for a National Book Award. Zachary, the "fattest […]

Bravo, Archbishop Timothy Dolan, for 'The Catholic Schools We Need' (9/13). My diocese, Rochester, is a perfect example of what can happen when Catholic schools have little or no priority [...]

Since publishing his first novel, in 1976, the prolific author has won five Spur Awards in the western genre and four Shamus Awards for his mysteries. His sixty-fifth book zeroes [...]

Just Don't Call Me Ma'am's subtitle--How I Ditched the South for the Big City, Forgot My Manners, and Managed to Survive My Twenties With (Most of) My Dignity Still Intact--might [...]

MURDER CITY: CIUDAD JUAREZ AND THE GLOBAL ECONOMY'S NEW KILLING FIELDS offers a brutally frank snapshot of the descent of this major metropolis--just across the Rio Grande from downtown El [...]

In TEXAS TOUGH, the Yale-trained historian looks at the explosion in modern America's prison population. He finds the Texas penal system setting the pace in both the number of prisoners [...]

The founder of the Texas Innocence Network, who is also the litigation director at the Texas Defender Service and a professor at the University of Houston Law Center, uses his [...]

The Nobel Prize-winning physicist's second collection of essays, LAKE VIEWS, covers a range of topics, from religion and Armageddon to the 'Future of Science, and the Universe.' A professor in [...]

The award-winning dramatist (Signs of Life: Six Comedies of Menace) looks to the Texas roots of novelist Patricia Highsmith to explain the traits and compulsions that informed her life. In […]

The Massachusetts-born journalist has never been afraid to rankle the establishment: In 1971 he obtained the infamous Pentagon Papers from Daniel Ellsberg, which uncovered the government's secret history of the […]

NEAR DEATH IN THE DESERT: TRUE STORIES OF DISASTER AND SURVIVAL is the fourth and final book in a series of anthologies about high adventures that devolve into life-or-death situations [...]

The San Antonio author has exhibited an impressive sense of worldliness with his literary mysteries, the settings of which range from seventeenth-century Amsterdam to twentieth-century Florida. THE DEVIL'S COMPANY, his […]

The former music editor for the Dallas Observer was just another Texas teen when metal rockers Pantera emerged from Arlington in the nineties and went on to sell millions of […]