San Antonio's Spanish Missions

This elegant coffee-table volume displays more than 100 color photographs by architectural photographer Mike Osborne, providing a distinctive contemporary portrait of the five mission complexes, now partly restored, partly still in ruins. One, better known as the Alamo, is a memorial to its defenders in 1836. The four others comprise San Antonio Missions National Historical Park. Each section begins with a dramatic 19th-century image. Osbornes color photographs range from interior views of the Alamo to a mariachi mass at San Jos to a composite of rifle portholes in Espadas bastion, with other dramatic views of the missions and related landmarks in between.