San Antonio College Library

Presents a collection of essays, articles, and poems from a variety of religious and spiritual traditions, including the writings of Toni Morrison, Wendell Berry, Brett Lott, Czeslaw Milosz, and Alicia Ostriker.

This book recounts the story of gun manufacturer Samuel Colt and his wife, Elizabeth, who together turned a company into an empire and a name into a legend. It is a tale of two lives caught up in profound social and economic change, of a great fortune amassed and expended, of the rise of a new industry, and the transformation of an American city. Beginning with an account of Sam Colt's early failures as both inventor and businessman, William Hosley...

Significant beyond tragic oil spills and hurricanes, the Gulf has historically been one of the world's most bounteous marine environments, supporting human life for millennia. Based on the premise that nature lies at the center of human existence, Davis takes readers on a compelling and, at times, wrenching journey from the Florida Keys to the Texas Rio Grande, along marshy shorelines and majestic estuarine bays, both beautiful and life-giving, though...

George Washington, says Barry Schwartz, was "neither brilliant nor self-confident, and his experience (which did not include leadership of large armies) was not precisely suited to the needs of his time... other leaders of the Revolution were at least as well endowed with talent and charm as he." Yet before a single shot was fired under Washington's command, America had begun to transform the man into a unifying, larger-than-life legend. How can this...

In 1836 in East Texas, nine-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker was kidnapped by Comanches, raised by the tribe, and eventually became the wife of a warrior. Twenty-four years after her capture, she was reclaimed by the U.S. cavalry and Texas Rangers and restored to her white family, to die in misery and obscurity. Cynthia Ann's story has been told over generations to become a foundational American tale. The myth gave rise to operas and one-act plays, and...

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Richard Rhodes, the first major biography of John James Audubon in forty years, and the first to illuminate fully the private and family life of the master illustrator of the natural world. Rhodes shows us young Audubon arriving in New York from France in 1803, his illegitimacy a painful secret, speaking no English but already drawing and observing birds. We see him falling in love, marrying the wellborn English...

A scholarly biography explores the path of Richard Rorty's thought in the context of his life and social experiences in order to trace the intellectual and professional journey that led him to prominence.

Madam C. J. Walker is reputed to be America's first self-made woman millionaire. Born to former slaves in the Louisiana Delta in the aftermath of the Civil War, married at fourteen, and widowed at twenty, Walker spent the first decades of her life as a laundress. By the time of her death in 1919, however, Walker had refashioned herself into one of the most famous African American figures in the nation: the owner and president of a hair-care empire...

This title combines prose with scholarship to provide the complete inside story of how 'Singin' in the Rain' was made, marketed, and received.

"In this volume, we travel back to the European roots of a family who crossed the ocean from Lithuania with little baggage but their religious faith and a young man's ambitions. "I'm going to bake matzos this year ... We'll see how it goes." One bright spring morning in 1888 a young immigrant father named Behr makes this offhand announcement to his modest wife Nesha. Within record time, the ambitious young Talmudic scholar has a burgeoning bakery...