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, the people and the 
landscape are bold and unique.

    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 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.



What people are saying about this book

"The strength of the selections lies both in the skill of the writers 
and the variety of their subject matter. . . . In a particularly powerful 
piece, Stephen Harrigan describes a trip with his daughter to the 
peak of Enchanted Rock, a place that Native Americans held to be 
sacred and where, he says, a part of the original Texas still exists: 
it 'had not been wholly digested somehow, and in some places . . . 
you could still feel its insistent identity.'"—Publishers Weekly 

"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