The author has a nice description of each portion of the state, dividing it into eight regions. The accompanying photos are good but in random knots unaccociated with the text or even the region of the state they are embedded in. This is too little attention to design during publishing so I would not put this book in the top tier of books on Texas. The book would have been much better without the photos as pictures of desert are distracting when reading about some other region. The out-of-place photos also interrupt the train of thought built by the Phelan. Perhaps you could use this as an example of what happens when a book is designed by committee rather than the author. ( )