The King Ranch Story is the love story of an ambitious young man and his dream of creating a great empire on Texas land. It's about the love between a man and woman, Captain Richard King and his wife Henrietta Chamberlain, the driving force behind King's success. It's a story of passion and power and success on a scale never seen before on this continent. King began his great enterprise with 15,500 acres of arid land called Rincon de Santa Gertrudis, purchased for $300 in 1853. From there it has grown to become an international legend. It was here that the great Santa Gertrudis cattle, and the indispensable western quarter horse were developed. The book also includes terrifying stories of ancient ghosts and hauntings that still imbue many of the secret places on the ranch with a sense of mystery and fear.

Howard Hughes died with hypodermic needles broken off in his arms.

When Mary Kay Ash was in elementary school, she cared for her tubercular father while her mother worked fourteen hours a day in a cafe.

H. Ross Perot staged the rescue of his EDS executives from a jail in Iran when President Carter couldnt get his diplomats out of their own embassy.

Michael Dell started his fortune while still in high school.

What do they all have in common? Theyre all Texans and worth billions! Texas has long been synonymous with legendary wealth acquired by inheritance, by luck, by intelligence, and sometimes by sheer hard-nosed determination. Author Mona D. Sizer offers a glimpse into some extraordinary lives and reveals not only how they made it, but also what they did with it.

And every chapter begins with a party.

At the beginning of World War I, the English were more fascinated than frightened by the gigantic, silently floating Zeppelins. Using their flashlights they sought them through the fog unthinking that they were guiding them to drop bombs over London.

At Pearl Harbor the Japanese samurai damaged or destroyed all the ships on Battleship Row almost destroying the harbor's usefulness for the duration of the war.

Over Ploesti, Rumania, the American Fifteenth Air Force never did succeed in destroying Hitler's primary source of oil for his tanks. Colonel Paul Tibbets pulled the Enola Gay back on her tail and aimed her skyward to take off from the carrier Hornet to bomb Tokyo.

THE BOMBER BOYS is the story of all those raids and more. Author Mona Sizer is noted for her exciting scenes and careful research.

The poems in "Before the Wind" must speak for themselves with passionate clarity:

'A shriek in black ink down a diary's page." from "Passage: March 9, 1936."

'Savoring the perversity of power, I opened my hand." from 'Adventuring"

'In that world within our world
The explosion of Armageddon!" from 'A Conundrum Visited."

'Oh! Greedy Race to want much more than human!" from 'Speed"

'Thirty-four million miles apart,
Through space so narrow that
Your passing's like a kiss."
from 'On Seeing Mars" (August 27, 2003)

All the elements of fine ballads, free and rhymed verses, sonnets, and a villanelle are present in this volume. The past collides with the present in surprising images, and the vivid future is both possible and probable.