Bookcover: Pride of Place: A Contemporary Anthology of Texas Nature Writing

Pride of Place: A Contemporary Anthology of Texas Nature Writing

David Taylor — editor.

February, 2006

Published

224

Pages

14 illus. Index.

Features

Recommended Text

Ideal for Classrooms

$16.95-$29.95

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About Taylor's Pride of Place

Since Roy Bedichek’s influential Adventures with a Texas Naturalist, no book has attempted to explore the uniqueness of Texas nature, or reflected the changes in the human landscape that have accelerated since Bedichek’s time. Pride of Place updates Bedichek’s discussion by acknowledging the increased urbanization and the loss of wildspace in today’s state. It joins other recent collections of regional nature writing while demonstrating what makes Texas uniquely diverse. These fourteen essays are held together by the story of Texas pride, the sense that from West Texas to the Coastal Plains, we and the landscape are important and worthy of pride, if not downright bravado.

This book addresses all the major regions of Texas. Beginning with Roy Bedichek’s essay “Still Water,” it includes Carol Cullar and Barbara “Barney” Nelson on the Rio Grande region of West Texas, John Graves’s evocative “Kindred Spirits” on Central Texas, Joe Nick Patoski’s celebration of Hill Country springs, Pete Gunter on the Piney Woods, David Taylor on North Texas, Gary Clark and Gerald Thurmond on the Coastal Plains, Ray Gonzales and Marian Haddad on El Paso, Stephen Harrigan and Wyman Meinzer on West Texas, and Naomi Shihab Nye on urban San Antonio.

This anthology will appeal not only to those interested in regional history, natural history, and the environmental issues Texans face, but also to all who say gladly, “I’m from Texas.”

“David Taylor has put together an engaging, heartfelt anthology about Texas that I would want to read and would recommend to others. Clearly he is a man on a mission to help his readers both reclaim their connection to their particular landscape and to transform their vision of what Texas was, is, and can be.” —Dorinda G. Dallmeyer, author of Elemental South: An Anthology of Southern Nature Writing

Classroom Adoption

Pride of Place: A Contemporary Anthology of Texas Nature Writing is a recommended text for use in classrooms where the following subjects are being studied: Environmental Studies.

Fourteen writers, including Roy Bedichek, John Graves, Stephen Harrigan, Wyman Meinzer, and Naomi Shihab Nye, explore the uniqueness of Texas nature in all the major regions of the state. Pride of Place updates Bedichek’s Adventures with a Texas Naturalist by acknowledging the increased urbanization and the loss of wildspace in today’s state. It joins other recent collections of regional nature writing while demonstrating what makes Texas uniquely diverse.

Adopted By

[“Abilene Christian University for "Environmental Thought"”]

About the Editor

DAVID TAYLOR is the Academic Advisor in the Honors College at the University of North Texas and teaches in the Philosophy and English Departments. His previous works include South Carolina Naturalists: An Anthology, 1700-1860 and Lawson’s Fork: Headwaters to the Confluence. He lives in Denton, Texas.

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