As I studied workplace stress and burnout I discovered the common theme among the causes is communications.If you have every said "He just doesn't seem to get it ..." then this book is for you. We assume everyone wants to be talked to in the manner which we do. This simply is not true. We need to adapt our communication style to that of others whether we are talking personal relationships, sales or a working team.This book provides you with the skills needed to be an effectiv...

Mimi: The Perilous Journey of a Free-Spirited Texas Woman tells the extraordinary true story of a Texas debutante who lived a life few could imagine.A niece of Texas Senator John Tower, Mimi’s journey takes her from tragedy and privilege to the dangerous heart of the Mexican drug trade.After losing her mother at a young age and surviving a horrific lake accident, Mimi pursued her studies in California before settling in Dallas with her first husband. She earned deg...

Celia Smith Hill’s journal provides a glimpse of hardscrabble life in far West Texas during the first half of the twentieth century. Hill’s family moved to Texas from Tennessee in the late 1800s. After her death, Bill Wright and Marianne Wood researched the history of the area and interviewed family and friends to provide context for Hill’s colorful tale of endurance in an unforgiving landscape. Hill’s family suffered lean times during the Depression before cinnabar—mercury ore—was discove...

In the vast, sparsely populated area of West Texas known as the Big Bend, life takes place on a different scale. The nearest neighbor can be forty miles away, perhaps located not just in another town but another country, the border historically less obvious than it is today. In the small-town, bicultural atmosphere of the Big Bend, musicians from both sides of the Rio Grande come together, creating music that spans genre, culture, and international borders.From Ojinaga, Mexico, to ...

Bills Life story was his desire for his children and grandchildren to know him and even more than that, he wanted them to know Jesus as their personal savior. He studied the Bible and was very concerned about the liberal teachings coming from new translations and our governments lack of respect of Gods Word. Bill never knew his father because his father was killed, as he tells in his story, at the very young age of two. Although Bill was always around during the lives of his children, ther...

Winner, Southwest Book Award, Border Regional Library Association, 2015The Texas of vast open spaces inhabited by independent, self-reliant men and women may be more of a dream than a reality for the state’s largely urban population, but it still exists in the Big Bend. One of the most sparsely settled areas of the United States, the Big Bend attracts people who are willing to forego many modern conveniences for a lifestyle that proclaims “don’t fence me in.” Marci...

Fresno Ranch, an abandoned horse and mule operation located in a remote stretch of the Rio Grande River bordering Mexico, gives evidence of a human presence spanning centuries. The ranch saw a period of entrepreneurial mule breeding and ranching, and ownership by Texas artist and publishing heiress Jeanne Norsworthy, who built an off-the-grid, hand-constructed adobe studio on the premises.Photographer and freelance writer E. Dan Klepper spent seven years, off and on, living and wor...

Anecdotes about Maggie Smith abound, but Bill Wright’s The Whole Damn Cheese is the first book devoted entirely to the woman whose life in Big Bend country has become the stuff of legend. For more than twenty years—from 1943 until her death in 1965—Maggie Smith served folks on both sides of the border as doctor, lawyer, midwife, herbalist, banker, self-appointed justice of the peace, and coroner. As she put it, she was “the whole damn cheese” in Hot Springs, Texas. She was also an...