Hylton talks about politician Wendy Davis. When it comes to portraits, a gauzy look can be a welcome thing for people of a certain age. But politics takes place in an unforgiving spotlight, as Texas ...Democratic gubernatorial hopeful Davis discovered when the Dallas Morning News exposed discrepancies in her oft-told tale of bootstrapping her way from single motherhood in a Fort Worth trailer park to graduating from Harvard Law School.
Hylton talks about the political competition between Rick Perry and Bill White for the gubernatorial seat of Texas. The soft-spoken White talks about issues like transportation and education, while ...Perry preaches border security and rails against Washington spending.
But ever since the spotlight shifted to Bush's successor and the war in Iraq left the front pages, things have been quieter. Along Prairie Chapel Road, the country lane leading to the Bush ranch, the ...crosses symbolizing the war dead, the makeshift tents, the signs, the satellite trucks, the flag-draped Harley-Davidsons, the Joan Baezes and the right-wing talk-radio hosts are all gone. Sheehan quit her protest, disillusioned with both Republican and Democratic leaders, in 2007 The once flattened roadside grass, parched yellow by drought, now stands straight. The only movement is a hawk landing on a fence post, a horse pawing at the dust and a trio of baby goats playing in a dry creek bed.
The slow descent into the looking-glass land that hurricanes create begins just south of Houston along Interstate Highway 45, the road to Galveston Island. Along the bay, the wetlands are dotted with ...a sofa here, a plastic garbage can there, and suddenly on the causeway a flotilla of beached, battered boats appears, awkwardly stuck in the median, wedged against highway signs.
Francis Sullivan, 74, is on her front stoop, eyeing a small triangular wooden case on her living-room floor amid a stinking pile of family belongings. The case contains the flag that draped her ...husband's casket six years ago. She lives on in a neighborhood that looks like so many others on the island fiUed with lifeless homes with leafless, saltwater-poisoned trees, battered fences and shattered windows and front yards filled with piles of wet carpet, soaked clothes, moldy pots and pans, beach chairs and books. All is waterladen, useless, even dangerous from soaking in the diseased stew. Perhaps 20,000 households share these circumstances, according to Galveston mayor Lyda Ann Thomas. "It looks like someone picked up my home and shook it," Sullivan says. "It looks like a MixMaster inside and smells like I don't know what."
Gail Vittori, co-director of the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems, a nonprofit design center in Austin TX, is showing health-care providers the many ways they can enter the age of ...sustainable design. Vittori is profiled.
