From frontier to empire, a dynasty of Texas cattlemen clashes with history.

Kings of Texas is the sprawling saga of the larger-than-life characters who founded, built, and expanded the most famous cattle ranch in American history. Renowned Texas scholar, writer, and storyteller Don Graham weaves a compelling multigenerational family drama into the complex social history of South Texas.

Follow the Kings through generations of conflict, from the Mexican War to the Civil War, and beyond. Witness their rise from humble beginnings to the pinnacle of ranching power, facing off against rival ranchers, border bandits, and the changing tides of society. From humble frontier jacales to the sleek offices of a multinational corporation, Kings of Texas tells an unforgettable story of vision, violence, greed, loyalty, and betrayal, set on a stage as vast as the American dream.

From frontier to empire, a dynasty of Texas cattlemen clashes with history.

Kings of Texas is the sprawling saga of the larger-than-life characters who founded, built, and expanded the most famous cattle ranch in American history. Renowned Texas scholar, writer, and storyteller Don Graham weaves a compelling multigenerational family drama into the complex social history of South Texas.

Follow the Kings through generations of conflict, from the Mexican War to the Civil War, and beyond. Witness their rise from humble beginnings to the pinnacle of ranching power, facing off against rival ranchers, border bandits, and the changing tides of society. From humble frontier jacales to the sleek offices of a multinational corporation, Kings of Texas tells an unforgettable story of vision, violence, greed, loyalty, and betrayal, set on a stage as vast as the American dream.

Don Graham's Giant is a larger-than-life narrative of the making of the classic film, marking the rise of America as a superpower, the ascent of Hollywood celebrity, and the flowering of Texas culture as mythology.

Featuring James Dean, Rock Hudson, and Elizabeth Taylor, Giant is an epic film of fame and materialism, based around the discovery of oil at Spindletop and the establishment of the King Ranch of south Texas. Isolating his star cast in the wilds of West Texas, director George Stevens brought together a volatile mix of egos, insecurities, sexual proclivities, and talent. Stevens knew he was overwhelmed with Hudson's promiscuity, Taylor's high diva-dom, and Dean's egotistical eccentricity. Yet he coaxed performances out of them that made cinematic history, winning Stevens the Academy Award for Best Director and garnering nine other nominations, including a nomination for Best Actor for James Dean, who died before the film was finished.

In this compelling and impeccably researched narrative history of the making of the film, Don Graham chronicles the stories of Stevens, whose trauma in World War II intensified his ambition to make films that would tell the story of America; Edna Ferber, a considerable literary celebrity, who meets her match in the imposing Robert Kleberg, proprietor of the vast King Ranch; and Glenn McCarthy, an American oil tycoon; and Errol Flynn lookalike with a taste for Hollywood. Drawing on archival sources Graham's Giant is a comprehensive depiction of the film's production showing readers how reality became fiction and fiction became cinema.

It's 1969, and America's youth is reveling in new freedoms. But for California native Don Graham, like so many other men his age, the future feels anything but unfettered. Once a staunch patriot, he does not want to kill or be killed in what he sees as the country's unjust war in Vietnam. Yet his options for avoiding the draft are few and frightening. Suddenly, the graduate study he's planned no longer yields deferment; he's married, but without the children that would also keep him at home. At 23, Don stands at a crossroads where every one of the signposts-pointing toward prison, exile, self-injury, or a far-away field of combat-foretells danger to body and soul.

Ultimately, he reports for induction as ordered. Before he leaves for Vietnam a gifted intuitive gives him hope for a safe return; while there, another unexpected message foretells an imminent release from warfare. How can this be?

Coming Home Whole is a firsthand look at the Vietnam War era, the conflicts that helped shape it at home and abroad, and the experiences of one man caught amid its contradictions. It is at once a wry, warm and wise coming-of-age story...a celebration of the two remarkable women at the heart of a young man's life...and a meditation on the way that unseen forces take us in directions we could never have imagined, in ways we can hardly believe.

This book explores the work and career of Michael Wilding, one of the most significant literary figures in modern Australia. His oeuvre includes eleven volumes of short stories, several novels and memoirs, important editions of both Australian and English authors, and critical works on writers ranging from John Milton to Christina Stead. Through a close study of Wilding's short stories, novels, and memoirs this book traces the development of a complex aesthetic of instant experience or immediate experience. . After moving from England to Australia as a young man, Wilding abandoned the high formalism of Henry James, an early influence, for a more fluid, informal, immediate, vernacular prose more in line with Jack Kerouac. The Jamesian influence was strongest in his first volume of fiction, Aspects of the Dying Process (1972). The Kerouacian influence dominated in some of the stories in The West Midland Underground (1975) and in novels such as Scenic Drive (1976). During those years Wilding produced fiction about the contemporary scene as it was happening around him, in the lively protest/counter culture environment of Sydney in the Sixties and Seventies. That meant writing, in part, about sexual relations in frank, open terms, and Wilding and his circle opened up Australian fiction, moving it away from the wide brown land tradition to a more urban, contemporary, experimental scene. Many of Wilding's stories were either written for someone or at someone. Those written at someone were often directed at a recurring figure such as a character named variously Joe, Wendell, or Holmes, Wilding's names for his friend and fellow writer, Frank Moorhouse. Wilding also wrote stories at Vicki Viidikas, another friend and talented writer from the counterculture. Wilding's contribution to the creation of modern Australian writing can also be seen in the formation of a small press, Wild & Woolley, in 1972. Wilding and his partner, Pat Woolley, published numerous poets and fiction writers, thus furthering the production and circulation of new writing. Wilding has continued his three-fold career into the present. Since 2000 he has produced a number of novels and two memoirs; he has also written studies of Australian literary traditions; and finally, he is active in a new publishing venture, Press On. Wilding has been a major force in Australian letters for half a century, a true man of letters in every sense. . By looking at Wilding's long and distinguished career, this book brings to the attention of a new generation of readers the quality and scope of his accomplishments in imaginative writing, scholarship, and publishing. Throughout this study the author draws upon extensive email exchanges with Wilding regarding his memories of those days and the stories and novels that resulted. His comments shed a unique perspective on his works and ideas from the beginning of his career until the present.

A sampling of Texas literature and movies in pieces.

From the earliest days of film, Texas and its colorful history offered promising story lines comprised of heroes, images, lore, and legend that filmmakers could return to again and again. And so they did in films about the Alamo, the Texas Rangers, the ubiquitous cowboy and the trail drives, big ranchers, and bigger wildcatters. With the advent of the Talkies, Texas movies continued to be a staple of Hollywood backlot productions, mainly in the form of B Westerns.

In the golden age of Texas cinema--dating from the end of World War II to the assassination of JFK--the Western continued to be the predominant genre. A roll call of the most notable Texas movies would include Red River, Giant (probably the single most influential Texas movie of all), The Searchers, Hud and The Last Picture Show.

The reader is invited to return to those thrilling days of yesteryear as well as to consider the most recent cinematic efforts to capture one of the nation's most mythologized places. After a brief overview of Texas in the movies, the book offers detailed commentary on the most important, the most interesting, or, in a few cases, the most wretched films about the Lone Star State.

In Giant Country Don Graham brings together a collection of lively, absorbing essays written over the past two decades.

The collection begins with a twist on book introductions that sets the tone for the essays to come--a self-interview conducted poolside at an eccentric Houston motel favored by regional rock bands. Over pi a coladas the author works on his tan and discusses timeless Texas themes: the transition of the state from a rural to an urban world, the sense of a vanishing era, and the way that artists in literature and film represent a state both infectiously grand and too big for its britches.

In Fildelphia Story, Graham remembers his Ivy League professorial stint in a city the small-town Texan who rented him a moving van looked up under F. In Doing England the Lone Star Yankee courts Oxford University and returns with a veddy British education. In The Ground Sense Necessary a native son journeys inward to explore the dry ceremonies of frontier Protestantism and to recount movingly his father's funeral in Collin County.

With his wide-ranging knowledge of classic regional works, Graham unerringly traces the style and substance of local literary giants and offers a sometimes irreverent but always entertaining look at the Texas triumvirate of Dobie, Webb and Bedichek. Other essays look at such Texas greats as Katherine Anne Porter, George Sessions Perry, William Humphrey and John Graves.

In a section he calls Polemics, Graham includes his best known essays, Palefaces vs. Redskins, a sardonic survey of the Texas literary landscape, and Anything for Larry, a tour de force that has already become a minor classic. The essay weighs the puny financial achievements of Graham against those of mega-author Larry McMurtry and never fails to bring down the house when Graham gives a public reading.

A recognized authority on celluloid Texas, Graham provides a rich sampling of his knowledge of Texas movies in pieces that blanket the territory from moo-cow cattle-drive epics to soggy Alamo sagas to urban cowboy melodramas.

In the larger-than-life state that is Texas, nobody sizes up the Lone-Star mythos, its interpreters, boosters and detractors better than Don Graham.

Don Graham brings together the history, color, and character of Texas's capital city since 1839 when it was selected, on the advice of Mirabeau B. Lamar, as the site for a new capital of the then-Republic of Texas.

Essays, fiction, and poetry reveal the variety of literary responses to Austin through the decades and are organized in a roughly chronological fashion to reveal the themes, places, and personalities that have defined the life of the city.

Austin was always about three things--natural beauty, government, and education--and thus many of the pieces in this volume dwell upon one and sometimes all of these themes.

Besides O. Henry, the other most important figures in the city's history were J. Frank Dobie, Roy Bedichek, and Walter P. Webb: folklorist, naturalist, historian. During their heyday, from the 1930s through the early 1960s, they were the face of literary culture in the city. They remain a source of interest, pride, and sometimes controversy.

Austin is a well-known haven of liberal political activism, represented by such well-known figures as Lyndon B. Johnson, Ralph Yarborough, Ann and David Richards, Liz Carpenter, Willie Morris, John Henry Faulk, and Molly Ivins.

The city is also a haven for literary writers, many of whom appear in these pages: Carolyn Osborn, Rolando Hinojosa-Smith, Dagoberto Gilb, Stephen Harrigan, and Lawrence Wright, to name a few. Among the poets, Thomas Whitbread, Dave Oliphant, David Wevill, and Christopher Middleton have long been on the scene.

Certain sites recur--the University Tower, Barton Springs, various watering holes of another kind--so that for anybody who has ever spent time in Austin will experience twinges of nostalgia for vanished icons, closed-down venues, long-gone sites of pleasure brought to life once again, in these pages.

These Texas stories are among the best produced by the state's writers in the mid-twentieth century. Selected above all for their artistic excellence and their narrative mastery, they also present a vital picture of the Southwest in microcosm, as revealed in its largest state.

Texas and Texas writing moved from a Southern orientation in the 1940s--reflected here in works by William Goyen, William Humphrey, and others--to the strong Southwestern flavor of stories by such authors as Larry McMurtry and A. C. Greene to, finally, urban or Sunbelt Texas, mirrored in the edgy, sometimes experimental prose of Doug Crowell, William Harrison, and Peter LaSalle.

Here are stories by such celebrated authors as Paul Horgan and William A. Owens, as well as startling, in some cases previously unpublished work by writers like Harryette Mullen, Naomi Shihab Nye, Pat Ellis Taylor, and Thomas Zigal. A few stories may already be favorites--Larry McMurtry's There Will Be Peace in Korea, Amado Muro's Cecilia Rosas. Many others have become classics, such as Vassar Miller's poignantly autobiographical Pact, Hughes Rudd's hilarious record of grade school fieldtrips, R. E. Smith's gripping story of a Houstonian's life-changing encounter with nature, and Dave Hickey's astonishing account of an old cowboy's imprisonment . . . in a bathtub.

Bill Brett, James Crumley, Linda West Eckhardt, Robert Flynn, Mary Gray Hughes, Carolyn Osborn--all are represented here by stories guaranteed to banish stereotypes and boredom and to enlarge one's vision of the Lone Star State. Anyone who thinks that oil wells and big hair define Texas will find out differently in the dazzling short fiction presented in South by Southwest.

A vast land combining the West, the South, and the Border, small dusty towns and gleaming modern cities, Texas has a history and identity all its own, and a mythology bigger than the Lone Star State itself. In this anthology, selected as a Southwest Book of the Year in 2003, Don Graham has rounded up a comprehensive collection of writings that provides an overview of the diversity and excellence of Texas literature and reveals its vital contribution to America's literary landscape. The result is a sometimes rowdy, always artful panorama of fable and truth, humor and pathos--all growing out of the state that continues to stimulate the collective imagination like no other.

Road congestion imposes major financial, social, and environmental costs. One solution is the operation of high-occupancy toll (HOT) lanes. This book outlines a method for dynamic pricing for HOT lanes based on non-linear programming (NLP) techniques, finite difference stochastic approximation, genetic algorithms, and simulated annealing stochastic algorithms, working within a cell transmission framework. The result is a solution for optimal flow and optimal toll to minimize total travel time and reduce congestion.

ANOVA results are presented which show differences in the performance of the NLP algorithms in solving this problem and reducing travel time, and econometric forecasting methods utilizing vector autoregressive techniques are shown to successfully forecast demand.

• The book compares different optimization approaches
• It presents case studies from around the world, such as the I-95 Express HOT Lane in Miami, USA

Applications of Heuristic Algorithms to Optimal Road Congestion Pricing is ideal for transportation practitioners and researchers.

This book addresses the use of existing and emerging electronic payment technologies within a smart city in the context of the clear and proven value these systems have demonstrated in improving transportation. It addresses such question as How does the toll gantry work? How does it read the transponder tag and deduct the correct amount? How do cities harness the transaction data from mass transit to better meet the demand during peak hours? What can city planners do to make trip scheduling and payments seamless, so commuters can go from park-and-ride to mass transit to ride-share with a single payment platform? The volume is technical in nature and describes solid technical solutions to engineers and planners associated with smart cities initiatives. It is specifically designed to support smart city designers and engineers as they develop strategies that incorporate the latest payment system technologies. It will also be of value to private sector payment systems solution providers looking to deliver their products and services to smart cities. In addition, the book supplements technical perspectives with guidance on planning and implementation. For example, it defines procurement approaches for emerging technologies such as crypto currencies and block chain. Rounding out technical detail with advice on policy and the organizational framework required to underpin the technologies, the book delivers practical support to smart city technical practitioners. It further stands as an appropriate text for university courses associated with smart city planning, operations, and urban analytics.

This book explores these questions and provides answers that a typical transportation planner can follow. It covers technology topics such as RFID (Radio Frequency ID), ETC (Electronic Toll collection), and ANPR (Automatic Number Plate Recognition). The book also delves into how contactless payment (Near-Field) technologies can be used in a smart city. Blockchain is introduced as a platform that is suitable for solving the problem of payment segregation and shows how the entities in a smart city can work together to provide a seamless payment solution for riders across different modes of transport.

The book also covers some theoretical concepts of congestion pricing which students at the university level can apply to city planning projects and research into smart cities.

Several examples of US-based and international smart city implementations are provided in the closing chapters which demonstrate new, innovative smart city techniques for the transportation planner.

This book addresses the use of existing and emerging electronic payment technologies within a smart city in the context of the clear and proven value these systems have demonstrated in improving transportation. It addresses such question as How does the toll gantry work? How does it read the transponder tag and deduct the correct amount? How do cities harness the transaction data from mass transit to better meet the demand during peak hours? What can city planners do to make trip scheduling and payments seamless, so commuters can go from park-and-ride to mass transit to ride-share with a single payment platform? The volume is technical in nature and describes solid technical solutions to engineers and planners associated with smart cities initiatives. It is specifically designed to support smart city designers and engineers as they develop strategies that incorporate the latest payment system technologies. It will also be of value to private sector payment systems solution providers looking to deliver their products and services to smart cities. In addition, the book supplements technical perspectives with guidance on planning and implementation. For example, it defines procurement approaches for emerging technologies such as crypto currencies and block chain. Rounding out technical detail with advice on policy and the organizational framework required to underpin the technologies, the book delivers practical support to smart city technical practitioners. It further stands as an appropriate text for university courses associated with smart city planning, operations, and urban analytics.

This book explores these questions and provides answers that a typical transportation planner can follow. It covers technology topics such as RFID (Radio Frequency ID), ETC (Electronic Toll collection), and ANPR (Automatic Number Plate Recognition). The book also delves into how contactless payment (Near-Field) technologies can be used in a smart city. Blockchain is introduced as a platform that is suitable for solving the problem of payment segregation and shows how the entities in a smart city can work together to provide a seamless payment solution for riders across different modes of transport.

The book also covers some theoretical concepts of congestion pricing which students at the university level can apply to city planning projects and research into smart cities.

Several examples of US-based and international smart city implementations are provided in the closing chapters which demonstrate new, innovative smart city techniques for the transportation planner.

Road congestion imposes major financial, social, and environmental costs. One solution is the operation of high-occupancy toll (HOT) lanes. This book outlines a method for dynamic pricing for HOT lanes based on non-linear programming (NLP) techniques, finite difference stochastic approximation, genetic algorithms, and simulated annealing stochastic algorithms, working within a cell transmission framework. The result is a solution for optimal flow and optimal toll to minimize total travel time and reduce congestion.

ANOVA results are presented which show differences in the performance of the NLP algorithms in solving this problem and reducing travel time, and econometric forecasting methods utilizing vector autoregressive techniques are shown to successfully forecast demand.

• The book compares different optimization approaches
• It presents case studies from around the world, such as the I-95 Express HOT Lane in Miami, USA

Applications of Heuristic Algorithms to Optimal Road Congestion Pricing is ideal for transportation practitioners and researchers.