Deep in the Heart of Texas

Is Texas still there? Or has it become just another exit off the interstate to Anywhere, USA?" Finding the answers to these questions is the task Michael Grant set for himself in writing the essays that fill Deep in the Heart of Texas. Asterisk Texans---those who've chosen to live outside Texas---become fearful that one day there will be nothing Texan left to cling to. But Grant hoped that "there must be deeper veins, beyond the rest of the scouring winds of change, in which the blood of Texas and Texans still runs".

His absence from Texas since 1972 provided him with the objectivity to go back for a realistic look. And that he did---he looked at the land, which never changes, and the weather, which always does. He looked at the roads---the best use of which is to view bluebonnets on a spring day---and at the history, which is "more a novel than a matter of record". He looked at Texans, Texas towns, oil, and moving back. Grant's entertaining and folksy prose is complemented by Willard and Kathy Clay's breathtaking photography. One-hundred-and-forty full-color photographs capture Texas, past and present---county courthouses, thunderclouds, wide-open skies, roadside markers, and wildflowers.