Around 11,000 years ago, a Paleoindian culture known to us as "Clovis" occupied much of North America. Considered to be among the continent's earliest human inhabitants, the Clovis peoples were probably nomadic hunters and gatherers whose remaining traces include camp sites and caches of goods stored for utilitarian or ritual purposes.
This book offers the first comprehensive study of a little-known aspect of Clovis culture—stone blade technology. Michael Collins introduces the topic with a close look at the nature of blades and the techniques of their manufacture, followed by a discussion of the full spectrum of Clovis lithic technology and how blade production relates to the production of other stone tools. He then provides a full report of the discovery and examination of fourteen blades found in 1988 in the Keven Davis Cache in Navarro County, Texas.
Collins also presents a comparative study of known and presumed Clovis blades from many sites, discusses the Clovis peoples' caching practices, and considers what lithic technology and caching behavior can add to our knowledge of Clovis lifeways. These findings will be important reading for both specialists and amateurs who are piecing together the puzzle of the peopling of the Americas, since the manufacture of blades is a trait that Clovis peoples shared with the Upper Paleolithic peoples in Europe and northern Asia.
The memoir of a scientist and the wild silk moths he studiesBiologist Michael Collins has been studying wild silk moths since he was a boy. This family — which includes the largest and most colorful of the North American moths — led Collins into a long career as a scientist, and has provided him with significant insights into the process by which new species evolve. Moth Catcher is Collins’s engaging account of his development as a scientist and of his groundbreaking research. The canyon and pass environments of the American West offer a setting in which, since the last Ice Age, organisms have adapted to new surroundings and where many have formed new species. Collins has discovered in the Sierra Nevada that geneticists call a “hybrid zone” where two species interbreed. This hybrid zone is unusual because both sexes are fertile, unlike lab-bred hybrids between the same silk moth species. Collins explains how such hybrid populations serve as laboratories in nature where the process of speciation can be observed and studied. This book offers a fascinating view into the work of a field scientist and the ways that evolution continues to operate around us. Collins’s colorful accounts of his fieldwork will delight any reader who loves the outdoors and is captivated by the diversity and interrelations of the life forms found there. And his passion for his research and the fragile, exquisite creatures that he studies will inspire a new appreciation of the wonders of the natural world and the myriad life forms that occupy it.
Chicagoan Helen Price, a dying woman, recounts her life while driving toward an oncology appointment. She attempts to take her own life, survives, then dies under tragic circumstances.
In death, Helen bequeaths the family home to her only son, gay playwright Norman Price. Father to an adopted Chinese child, and recently broken up with his partner, Norman’s life is in crisis. Helen also bequeaths a series of tapes to Nate Feldman, a Vietnam draft dodger ensconced in the far reaches of Canada, and the son of Helen’s former boss, Theodore Feldman. Nate’s return to America to claim the tapes occasions confronting a history of animus between father and son, but also the nature of the relationship between Helen Price and Theodore Feldman.
Told from moving cars, the journeys of Norman Price and Nate Feldman converge toward unexpected mysteries and revelations that uncover not so much lies as understandings of life that no longer hold under the scrutiny of the present
From the New York Times review of the Dallas Opera's performance of Orlando furioso and the international symposium on Baroque opera: ". . . it was a serious, thoughtful, consistent and imaginative realization of a beautiful, long-neglected work, one that fully deserved all the loving attention it received. As such, the production and its attendant symposium made a positive contribution to the cause of Baroque opera . . . . "
Baroque opera experienced a revival in the late twentieth century. Its popularity, however, has given rise to a number of perplexing and exciting questions regarding literary sources, librettos, theater design, set design, stage movement, and costumes—even the editing of the operas.
In 1980, the Dallas Opera produced the American premier of Vivaldi's Orlando furioso, which met with much acclaim. Concurrently an international symposium on the subject of Baroque opera was held at Southern Methodist University. Authorities from around the world met to discuss the operatic works of Vivaldi, Handel, and other Baroque composers as well as the characteristics of the genre. Michael Collins and Elise Kirk, deputy chair and chair of the symposium, edited the papers to produce this groundbreaking study, which will be of great interest to music scholars and opera lovers throughout the world.
Contributors to Opera and Vivaldi include Shirley Wynne, John Walter Hill, Andrew Porter, Eleanor Selfridge-Field, Howard Mayer Brown, William Holmes, Ellen Rosand, and the editors.
Donald Jay Grout’s widely praised edition of the work of a key figure in the history of opera provides the most reliable version of the score for each opera, appending a translation of the libretto. These volumes are “at once practical and unquestionably scholarly” in the words of Opera Journal.
A tale of love and honor in the opera seria tradition, Tigrane was first performed at Naples in 1715. This edition of it will please performance groups and music historians alike.
Profiles in Power offers concise biographies of fourteen twentieth-century Texans who wielded significant political power and influence in Washington, D.C. First published in 1993 by Harlan Davidson, it has been revised and updated with new chapters on John Nance Garner and Henry Gonzalez and expanded chapters on Lyndon Johnson, Barbara Jordan, Ralph Yarborough, Jim Wright, and John Tower. Demonstrating the validity of a biographical approach to history, the book as a whole covers all the major political issues of the twentieth century, as well as the pivotal role of Texans in defining the national agenda.
PNBA Novel of the Year
New York Times Notable Book of the Year
Haunted by the deaths of his parents and uncle, Frank Cassidy journeys north to dispute a cousin's claim to the family farm, where he meets a stranger who might resolve mysteries about Frank's past.READERS
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