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A breathtaking portrait of Alabama rivers.

From their primal seepages in the Appalachian highlands or along the broad Chunnenuggee Hills, Alabama’s rivers carve through the rocky uplands and down the Fall Line rapids, then ease across the coastal plain to their eventual confluence with the Gulf of Mexico.

Beth Maynor Young’s 155 full-color photographs constitute art through a lens; the colors, the light, and the angles all converge for a tender praise of her subject. Her stunning visuals are supported by tantalizing captions and introductory text from John C. Hall, a master field trip leader. Together, they tell a proud story of the native beauty and complexity of these Alabama watercourses that shepherd fully 20% of the nation’s fresh water to sea.

The intimate close-up of verdant mosses or pebbled beaches pulls one into their space just as surely as does a sweeping scene of a watershed valley or a sparkling sunset over water. We all become eager listeners and observers on this guided “paddle to the Gulf,” drinking in the peace, delight, and beauty offered by the experience. At the end, we know we won’t be the same as before beginning the journey.

In addition to being a celebration of their richness, Headwaters serves as a call to greater stewardship of these riverine resources. Conservation sidebars describe the current efforts in this direction and encourage further study and protection. This book tells us, in glorious color and instructive word, why we’ll always treasure these wonderful rivers.

The biography of one of Minnesota’s most beloved nature writers, from her career in the city to her rustic cabin on Gunflint Lake
 

During the late 1950s through the early 1970s, Helen Hoover’s stories and essays of life in the wilderness on northern Minnesota’s Gunflint Lake, published in popular magazines and several bestselling books (including The Gift of the Deer in 1966 and A Place in the Woods in 1969), found millions of fans and earned her accolades alongside nature writers like Sigurd Olson, Rachel Carson, Sally Carrighar, and Calvin Rutstrum. Hoover’s own unlikely history of leaving a corporate career in Chicago for a small cabin without electricity or running water—with no interest in hunting or fishing—is just one chapter of the remarkable life that David Hakensen describes in Her Place in the Woods. This first complete biography illuminates how Helen Hoover (1910–1984) made a place for herself and for countless readers in, as she put it, the world of her time.

Hoover defied convention. Self-trained and without an academic degree, she worked in the male-dominated metallurgical field as a researcher at International Harvester, where she solved a long-standing problem with the manufacture of discs for farm implements and earned a patent. She and her husband, Adrian, a commercial artist, had long dreamed of moving to a remote cabin in the woods. As they started the long return drive to Chicago after a summer spent on Gunflint Lake, they finally made the leap, quitting their jobs with a long-distance phone call from Grand Marais and figuring out the rest as they went.

The Hoovers were woefully unprepared for life off the grid and slowly learned how to convert sheds into chicken coops and fend off bears. Social encounters presented their own challenges, with Helen’s fiery personality leading to clashes with hunters and other Gunflint neighbors. Gradually, the Hoovers settled into the rhythms of their remote homestead, and Helen would craft a prolific literary livelihood from her keen observations of nature and encounters with animals in the surrounding woods.

Her Place in the Woods captures both an awakening to the power and fragility of the natural world and the efforts and talents of an extraordinary woman defining herself as a writer. Though Helen Hoover would move on from the secluded North Woods, as she wrote in her final book, The Years of the Forest, “From this time on it would be both here and with me wherever I might be, as long as I should live.”

Discover the stories behind Alabama’s timeless structures.

Robert Gamble outlines in detail the primary architectural currents and styles that have surfaced in Alabama over the years and defined the state's built landscape. The structures and styles, all well-illustrated,range from folk houses and early settlement buildings to railway terminals, churches, libraries, municipal and university buildings, palatial private mansions, and modest homes. Structures from every period and every major stylistic era—Federal, Greek Revival, Gothic Revival, Italianate, Romanesque and Mission Revival, and the Richardsonian—are documented meticulously, along with examples of early—Modern buildings, including Alabama's only Frank Lloyd Wright structure and skyscrapers from the Chicago school.

More than 200 photographs, supplemented by sketches, plans, and etchings, provide the general reader and the design professional with images of Alabama architecture in all its variety and range. Many illustrations offer rare views of buildings long since demolished. A substantial glossary of architectural terms and a thorough bibliography enhance this standard sure to be welcomed anew by any lover of old buildings, whether weekend rambler or serious student.

Winner, San Antonio Conservation Society Citation, 2011
Good Brick Award, Greater Houston Preservation Alliance, 2011
Julia Ideson Award, Friends of the Texas Room, 2011

Driven by an almost fanatical desire for whatever is new, "modern," and likely to make money, Houston is constantly in the process of remaking itself. Few structures remain from the nineteenth century, and even much of the twentieth-century built environment has fallen before the wrecking ball of "progress." Indeed, the demolition of older buildings in Houston can be compared to the destruction of cityscapes such as Berlin, Warsaw, and Tokyo in World War II. But because this wholesale restructuring of Houston's built environment has happened in peacetime, historically minded people have only recently sounded an alarm over what is being lost and the toll this destruction is taking on Houstonians' sense of place.

Houston Lost and Unbuilt presents an extensive catalogue of twentieth-century public and commercial buildings that have been lost forever, as well as an intriguing selection of buildings that never made it off the drawing board. The lost buildings (or lost interiors of buildings) span a wide range, from civic gathering places such as the Houston Municipal Auditorium and the Astrodome to commercial enterprises such as the Foley Brothers, Sears Roebuck, and Sakowitz department stores to "Theatre Row" downtown to neighborhoods such as Fourth Ward/Freedmen's Town. Steven Strom's introductions and photo captions describe each significant building's contribution to the civic life of Houston. The "unbuilt" section of the book includes numerous previously unpublished architectural renderings of proposed projects such as a multi-building city center, monorail, and people mover system, all which reflect Houston's fascination with the future and optimism that technology will solve all of the city's problems.

Reimagining watersheds as living hydrocommons through which artists and communities create more just and sustainable futures

Hydrocommoning explores how artists, activists, and curators coalesce around water in embodied efforts to contest entrenched and enduring forms of harm and degradation. Against the reduction of rivers, streams, and wetlands to mere resources to be managed, Hydrocommoning centers water as a living web of relations through which artists and communities forge creative means of reconnection by moving, weaving, pumping, eating, and listening.

By charting these aesthetic practices, Hydrocommoning shows how artists and organizers across Latin America oppose extractivism, unequal urbanization, ecological degradation, and the erasure of Indigenous water cultures. To cultivate widespread social attunement to vulnerable waters and raise the call for their defense and care, collectives in Brazil, Colombia, Guatemala, and Peru engage in communal meals, sound art, infrastructural interventions, and other practices that Lisa Blackmore theorizes as “hydrocommoning.”

Grounded in five years of experiential fieldwork, archival research, and curatorial projects in Latin America, Blackmore proposes a methodology to work with water as an analytical framework for collective action. Bridging the gap between theory, curating, and community-based practices, Hydrocommoning offers a promising vision of grassroots organizing that actively confronts some of today’s most urgent ecological threats.

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