The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 93, July 1989 - April, 1990 Page: 251

Book Revzews

whom Owen names. It also provides good primary material for the his-
torian dealing with the history of petroleum geology.
From 1942 to 1945, Owen served in the Southwest Pacific as an air in-
telligence officer; he devised methods for air-photo interpretation and
received several honors and promotions. Excerpts from his wartime di-
aries provide raw material for those studying the war in the Pacific.
Other parts of the book contain descriptions of bird life near his
homes, an essay on personal factors important in a professional career,
his impression of specific American cities and geographic areas, state-
ments illustrating his personal beliefs, and a few poems. Although the
selections are well chosen, use of more dates to indicate when Owen
wrote specific comments, especially the geographical discussions,
would be helpful. For two decades, from 1952 into the 197os, Owen
served as an unpaid lecturer and consultant in geology at the Univer-
sity of Texas at Austin, bringing together industry and academe. Un-
fortunately, he left no written recollections of those years; thus the
book contains only brief mention of his significant contribution in
training future geologists.
The Flavor of Ed Owen will be of particular interest to geologists who
worked in the areas in which Owen worked, a delight to his friends,
and a useful source for historians studying American petroleum
geology.
Stephen F. Austin State University SYLVIA W. MCGRATH
At Home in Texas: Early Views of the Land. By Robin W. Doughty. (College
Station, Tex.: Texas A&M University Press, 1987. Pp. viii+164.
Acknowledgments, introduction, maps, notes, bibliography, index.
$17.95.)
Robin W. Doughty's At Home in Texas is a thoughtful and thought-
provoking analysis of the geographic images of Texas from the era of
the empresario grants until the Civil War. Doughty concentrates on how
American-born and European settlers in Texas evolved specific percep-
tions of Texas as a "place" that denoted specific symbolic geographic
meanings, not only for Texans but also for other Americans and
Europeans.
Studies of regional imagery, intriguing as they can be, are often
methodologically amorphous. By using the "process of dwelling, of ex-
periencing a sense of belonging in a physical and cultural setting,"
Doughty examines how human "industry transforms a location, a given
space, into a place, a repository of meaning" (p. 4). This approach pro-
vides a clear focus for At Home in Texas.

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