Deluge Before Dawn is Thomas R. Fox’s firsthand account of the flood that tore through Kerr County, Texas, on July 4, 2025, when the Guadalupe River rose in the dark. Fox, a Kerrville resident, gathered testimony from survivors, families, and responders — the overnight evacuation at Camp Mystic, the searches that followed, and the rebuilding.

David Dale’s memoir of a military flying career, Aviation Therapy chronicles Dale’s personal transformation through flight—from B-52 nuclear alert missions during the Cold War to wartime refueling in Desert Storm and Bosnia, then flying General Tommy Franks after 9/11. Dale went from a quiet navigator to commanding the elite squadron responsible for carrying the nation’s top military leaders. This inspiring memoir reveals how aviation shaped one man’s journey from quiet navigator to commanding an elite squadron.

The Barber, the Astronaut, & the Golf Ball is Barbara Radnofsky and Ed Supkis’s account of the friendship between Apollo 14 commander Alan Shepard and his barber, Carlos Villagomez. Shepard gave Villagomez an autographed golf ball after the mission. Whether that particular ball had been to the moon is the question the book chases.

Bound in Silence is Christena Stephens’s investigation of an unsolved 1943 double murder in Littlefield, Texas. Dr. Roy Hunt and his wife Mae were found bound, beaten, and shot. The only witness was their five-year-old daughter, who did not speak about that night for seventy years — until Stephens persuaded her to.

Deconstructed: An Insider’s View of Illegal Immigration and the Building Trades is Loren C. Steffy and Stan Marek’s best-selling account of illegal immigration inside the American construction industry. Marek runs one of the largest specialty subcontracting firms in the country and has watched, over forty years, construction work go from a middle-class career to something that traps undocumented workers without overtime or healthcare.

Five Thousand Years of Controversies is Arthur Garson, Jr.’s history of humanity’s great arguments, staged as fifty family dinners across five millennia. The same family appears at every table — a mother, a twelve-year-old daughter after the big picture, a fifteen-year-old son asking the hard questions — and two brothers debate the era’s controversy after the plates are cleared.

Grinders: Baseball’s Intrepid Infantry is a collection of baseball life stories by broadcaster Mike Capps and former major league pitcher Chuck Hartenstein  It profiles more than forty journeymen, roster fillers and cup-of-coffee callups — the players without superstar talent who fill out every roster at every level, and whose careers ran on will instead. It’s a tribute to the game’s unheralded foot soldiers who took the hard knocks road, bouncing between the Show and obscurity, never quite achieving their dreams, all for a chance to play the game they love.

Silver Winner — Best New Nonfiction, IBPA’s Ben Franklin Awards

The Last Trial of T. Boone Pickens is Chrysta Castañeda and Loren C. Steffy’s account of the legendary oilman’s final courtroom fight. . Cut out of a Permian Basin deal, Pickens hired Castañeda to sue. In this inside record of the billion-dollar trial that followed, Castañeda  and Pickens take on powerful oil industry adversaries, offering an intimate portrait of a business icon’s final fight and the determination required to win.

The Man Who Thought Like a Ship is Loren C. Steffy’s biography of his father, J. Richard Steffy — a small-town Pennsylvania electrician with no advanced degrees who taught himself to reconstruct ancient ships from their fragments, and became the world’s leading authority on how they were built.

No Saints Here is written by Aaron Fette and his mother Claudette, in alternating voices. Aaron lived with mental illness from childhood, moved through addiction, violence, and the justice system, and died of an opioid overdose in a Fort Worth homeless encampment on April 2, 2017. Claudette, a therapist and scholar, finished the book.

Outcry Witness: A Former Prosecutor’s Guide to Healing and Justice After Sexual Violence is JoDee Neil’s account of surviving sexual assault, written from the perspective of an attorney and former prosecutor who spent her career in the courtroom on the other side of cases like her own. It is part memoir and part practical guide to what disclosure actually does — for the person disclosing, and for a justice system that handles it badly.

Play Like He Would is a true story by Heath Hamrick about the Bremond Tigers, a Texas high school football team that lost sixteen-year-old Jason Yancy to an undiagnosed heart condition during a game in October 1999. Hamrick, the coach’s son, was in the stadium that night, and built the book from interviews conducted in the weeks afterward. After Yancy’s death, his teammates faced an impossible question: How do you continue after losing your heart? This true story follows the Bremond Tigers as they honor their fallen friend’s memory with a simple motto: “Play Like He Would.”

The Real World of Texas Politics argues that the state runs two political systems — one for the privileged and one for everyone else. Its authors are a political scientist, a union leader, and a former state representative, and they hold leaders in both parties responsible. The analysis builds on the work of political scientist James Lamare.

Richard Coke: Texan is a biography by Rosser Coke Newton, Sr., an indirect descendant of its subject. As governor, Coke brought Texas out of Reconstruction — a young Virginia lawyer who settled in Waco, served in the Civil War, and took office only after his predecessor occupied the Capitol with armed men rather than leave it.

Rickwood: How America’s Oldest Ballpark Forged Baseball’s Legends is Tim Whitt and Joe Mock’s history of Rickwood Field in Birmingham, Alabama — the oldest professional ballpark in the country. It runs from Rick Woodward, who built it in 1910, through the players who came through it: Willie Mays, Satchel Paige, Dizzy Dean, Reggie Jackson.

Second Lives is a memoir by neurologist Ralph B. Lilly, who was struck by a drunk driver while riding his motorcycle in 1980 and sustained a severe brain injury. He returned to practice as a behavioral neurologist treating the condition he now had. He died in 2021; Diane F. Kramer and Joyce Stamp Lilly finished the book.

The Mushroom Girl is Dagmar Grieder’s memoir of childhood in Germany at the end of the Second World War. Her father was conscripted and has not been heard from in months; her mother takes her and her younger brother west ahead of the advancing Russian Army. Food is scarce, so she learns the forests, and becomes expert at finding the best mushrooms.

A compelling historical biography that offers an in-depth look at one of Texas’ most influential and controversial figures during the tumultuous mid-19th century. In The Old Alcalde, John Adams, Jr. offers a balanced and nuanced portrayal of a controversial figure — Oran Milo Roberts — Texas jurist, secessionist, and governor, and one of the most consequential figures of the state’s nineteenth century. Adams follows him from an Alabama boyhood to the bench, through the convention that took Texas out of the Union, and into the governor’s office.

Voices of Camptown unlocks the stories lying beneath an overgrown cemetery in Washington County, Texas, and reconstructs the lives buried there — the churches, schools, and businesses African Americans built after Emancipation, under Reconstruction and then Jim Crow. The authors, Charles Swenson, Tina B. Henderson, and Robert R. Bubb, present more than a local history. Voices of Camptown is a celebration of community, resilience, and the enduring power of remembrance. It reveals the overlooked story of the “Birthplace of Texas Independence”— where half the population received their independence only following the Civil War.