Finalist, 2019 Outstanding Publications Award, sponsored by the Texas Chapter of the Wildlife SocietyDama gazelles, the largest of the gazelles, were once a common sight in Northern Africa, with a habitat ranging from the Atlantic Ocean east almost to the Nile River. Today, these animals are critically endangered as their populations have dropped precipitously due to the effects of expanding agrarian practices, overhunting, violent human conflict, and climate change on their native...

The most comprehensive and user-friendly photographic field guide to the world’s wildcats and hyenasFrom the Leopard Cat of Asia, the Black-footed Cat of Africa, and the Amur Tiger of Siberia to South America’s Ocelots and North America’s Bobcats, the wildcats known as felids are among the most fascinating and spectacular of all animals. This stunningly illustrated book is the most comprehensive and user-friendly guide to the world’s felids and their often misunder...

Research in the field of keyboard studies, especially when intimately connected with issues of performance, is often concerned with the immediate working environments and practices of musicians of the past. An important pedagogical tool, the keyboard has served as the ’workbench’ of countless musicians over the centuries. In the process it has shaped the ways in which many historical musicians achieved their aspirations and went about meeting creative challenges. In recent decades interest...

In the early morning of April 19, 1995, Timothy McVeigh drove into downtown Oklahoma City in a rented Ryder truck containing a deadly fertilizer bomb that he and his army buddy Terry Nichols had made the previous day. He parked in a handicapped-parking zone, hopped out of the truck, and walked away into a series of alleys and streets. Shortly after 9:00 A.M., the bomb obliterated one-third of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, killing 168 people, including 19 infants and toddlers. McVe...

Charles Rosen is one of the world's most talented pianists -- and one of music's most astute commentators. Known as a performer of Bach, Beethoven, Stravinsky, and Elliott Carter, he has also written highly acclaimed criticism for sophisticated students and professionals.In Piano Notes, he writes for a broader audience about an old friend -- the piano itself. Drawing upon a lifetime of wisdom and the accumulated lore of many great performers of the past, Rosen shows why th...

Arizona never experienced a summer like this, as snipers Dale Hausner and Sam Dieteman took aim at anything?and everything?in their path. Phoenix was a city in terror as the deadly spree ultimately claimed 37 vicitims, people and pets? until one detective began to put the pieces together to nail the murderous duo.

A beautifully illustrated, totally engrossing celebration of the piano, and the composers and performers who have made it their own.With honed sensitivity and unquestioned expertise, Stuart Isacoff—pianist, critic, teacher, and author of Temperament: How Music Became a Battleground for the Great Minds of Western Civilization—unfolds the ongoing history and evolution of the piano and all its myriad wonders: how its very sound provides the basis for emotional expression and ...

Few music lovers realize that the arrangement of notes on today’s pianos was once regarded as a crime against God and nature, or that such legendary thinkers as Pythagoras, Plato, da Vinci, Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, Newton and Rousseau played a role in the controversy. Indeed, from the time of the Ancient Greeks through the eras of Renaissance scientists and Enlightenment philosophers, the relationship between the notes of the musical scale was seen as a key to the very nature of the uni...

Praise for KINGS OF TEXAS"Kings of Texas is a fresh and very welcome history of the great King Ranch. It's concise but thorough, crisply written, meticulous, and very readable. It should find a wide audience."-Larry McMurtry, author of Sin Killer and the Pulitzer Prize--winning Lonesome Dove"This book is about the King Ranch, but it is about much more than that. A compelling chronicle of war, peace, love, betrayal, birth, and death in the region where the Texas-Mexic...

At 3:17 p.m. on March 18, 1937, a natural gas leak beneath the London Junior-Senior High School in the oil boomtown of New London, Texas, created a lethal mixture of gas and oxygen in the schools basement. The odorless, colorless gas went undetected until the flip of an electrical switch triggered a colossal blast. The two-story school, one of the nations most modern, disintegrated, burying everyone under a vast pile of rubble and debris. More than 300 students and teachers were killed, and h...

New Mexico is �The Land of Enchantment,� offering a fascinating blend of Native American, Spanish Colonial, and Western American cultures. The travelers from the East knew they had arrived in the great Southwest when they entered New Mexico�the towns along Route 66 were ablaze in neon, and the motels lured travelers with Western themes, Pueblo Revival architecture, and Native American trading posts. An adventure still awaits the traveler today who takes the time to exit I-40 and leave the ...

Off the Record is a revealing exploration of piano performing practices of the high Romantic era. Author and well-known keyboard player Neal Peres Da Costa bases his investigation on a range of early sound recordings (acoustic, piano roll and electric) that capture a generation of highly-esteemed pianists trained as far back as the mid-nineteenth-century. Placing general practices of late nineteenth-century piano performance alongside evidence of the stylistic idiosyncrasies of le...