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Author: Peter Wild
Publisher: University of Utah Press
Published: 2006
Total Pages: 333
ISBN-13: 0874808715
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA slow change in outlook dominates the book, as attitudes shift from viewing the desert as a place of sanctity, then a land to be despised or exploited, and back to an appreciation of it as a special place, an arena of highly complex natural communities, and a wild refuge for the human body and soul.
Author: Gary Paul Nabhan
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Published: 2020-11-10
Total Pages: 209
ISBN-13: 0816540284
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn this refreshing collection, one of our best writers on desert places, Gary Paul Nabhan, challenges traditional notions of the desert. Beautiful, reflective, and at times humorous, Nabhan’s extended essay also called “The Nature of Desert Nature” reveals the complexity of what a desert is and can be. He passionately writes about what it is like to visit a desert and what living in a desert looks like when viewed through a new frame, turning age-old notions of the desert on their heads. Nabhan invites a prism of voices—friends, colleagues, and advisors from his more than four decades of study of deserts—to bring their own perspectives. Scientists, artists, desert contemplatives, poets, and writers bring the desert into view and investigate why these places compel us to walk through their sands and beneath their cacti and acacia. We observe the spines and spears, stings and songs of the desert anew. Unexpected. Surprising. Enchanting. Like the desert itself, each essay offers renewed vocabulary and thoughtful perceptions. The desert inspires wonder. Attending to history, culture, science, and spirit, The Nature of Desert Nature celebrates the bounty and the significance of desert places. Contributors Thomas M. Antonio Homero Aridjis James Aronson Tessa Bielecki Alberto Búrquez Montijo Francisco Cantú Douglas Christie Paul Dayton Alison Hawthorne Deming Father David Denny Exequiel Ezcurra Thomas Lowe Fleischner Jack Loeffler Ellen McMahon Rubén Martínez Curt Meine Alberto Mellado Moreno Paul Mirocha Gary Paul Nabhan Ray Perotti Larry Stevens Stephen Trimble Octaviana V. Trujillo Benjamin T. Wilder Andy Wilkinson Ofelia Zepeda
Author: Charles Bowden
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Published: 1988-04-01
Total Pages: 196
ISBN-13: 9780816510818
DOWNLOAD EBOOKContains essays that depict and decry the rapid growth and disappearing natural landscapes of the Sunbelt
Author: Marc Reisner
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 1993-06-01
Total Pages: 674
ISBN-13: 1440672822
DOWNLOAD EBOOK“I’ve been thinking a lot about Cadillac Desert in the past few weeks, as the rain fell and fell and kept falling over California, much of which, despite the pouring heavens, seems likely to remain in the grip of a severe drought. Reisner anticipated this moment. He worried that the West’s success with irrigation could be a mirage — that it took water for granted and didn’t appreciate the precariousness of our capacity to control it.” – Farhad Manjoo, The New York Times, January 20,2023 "The definitive work on the West's water crisis." --Newsweek The story of the American West is the story of a relentless quest for a precious resource: water. It is a tale of rivers diverted and dammed, of political corruption and intrigue, of billion-dollar battles over water rights, of ecological and economic disaster. In his landmark book, Cadillac Desert, Marc Reisner writes of the earliest settlers, lured by the promise of paradise, and of the ruthless tactics employed by Los Angeles politicians and business interests to ensure the city's growth. He documents the bitter rivalry between two government giants, the Bureau of Reclamation and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, in the competition to transform the West. Based on more than a decade of research, Cadillac Desert is a stunning expose and a dramatic, intriguing history of the creation of an Eden--an Eden that may only be a mirage. This edition includes a new postscript by Lawrie Mott, a former staff scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, that updates Western water issues over the last two decades, including the long-term impact of climate change and how the region can prepare for the future.
Author: Amy Irvine
Publisher: Torrey House Press
Published: 2018-11-06
Total Pages: 56
ISBN-13: 1937226964
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"Amy Irvine implores us to trade in our solitude for solidarity, to recognize ourselves in each other and in the places we love, so that we might come together to save them." —PAM HOUSTON As Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness turns fifty, its iconic author, who has inspired generations of rebel-rousing advocacy on behalf of the American West, is due for a tribute as well as a talking to. In Desert Cabal: A New Season in the Wilderness, Amy Irvine admires the man who influenced her life and work while challenging all that is dated—offensive, even—between the covers of Abbey’s environmental classic. From Abbey’s quiet notion of solitude to Irvine’s roaring cabal, the desert just got hotter, and its defenders more nuanced and numerous.
Author: Celia Jeffries
Publisher:
Published: 2021-04-20
Total Pages:
ISBN-13: 9781578690442
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn 1910, sixteen-year-old Alice George and her family leave England for a new life in Morocco. A headstrong young woman, Alice is fascinated by the exotic life of Marrakesh until two years later she is abducted into the Sahara after a car accident. She is rescued by Abu, chief of his Tuareg tribe, and begins a life of freedom that she never could have imagined in corseted England.In 1917, after the tribe takes her son away from her, Alice escapes with her slave/companion. He betrays her, she becomes captive in a harem and murders a man, then escapes. She is 'found' by the Sisters of Blessed Mercy and returned home to a world completely alien to the one she had left seven years before, a world she believes cannot include her life in the Sahara. Decades later she receives a telegram announcing that Abu has died in the desert. "Who is Abu?" her husband asks. "My lover," she answers. Thus begins a seven-day journey of revelation as Alice struggles to come to terms with her life in the desert and with the fact that her greatest secret-the son she left behind-is coming at the end of the week.The story opens with the telegram, then moves back in time to recount the family's departure from England and arrival in Morocco, then forward to the opening storyline. Alice goes to stay with her sister and they finally tell each other about their lives before and after the abduction. Meanwhile her husband Martin uses his contacts as a government consultant to uncover the truth about Alice, Abu, and their son.At the end of the week Martin and Alice reunite in London and await her son, who arrives with her granddaughter.
Author: Ezra Jack Keats
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 1999-06-01
Total Pages: 21
ISBN-13: 0451479572
DOWNLOAD EBOOKKeats departs from his traditional style for his one and only wordless picture book, Clementina's Cactus. Clementina and her father are out for a walk in the desert when Clementina discovers a lone cactus, all shriveled and prickly. But Clementina discovers there is something beautiful hiding inside that thick skin.
Author: Ken Layne
Publisher: MCD
Published: 2020-12-08
Total Pages: 193
ISBN-13: 0374722382
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe cult-y pocket-size field guide to the strange and intriguing secrets of the Mojave—its myths and legends, outcasts and oddballs, flora, fauna, and UFOs—becomes the definitive, oracular book of the desert For the past five years, Desert Oracle has existed as a quasi-mythical, quarterly periodical available to the very determined only by subscription or at the odd desert-town gas station or the occasional hipster boutique, its canary-yellow-covered, forty-four-page issues handed from one curious desert zealot to the next, word spreading faster than the printers could keep up with. It became a radio show, a podcast, a live performance. Now, for the first time—and including both classic and new, never-before-seen revelations—Desert Oracle has been bound between two hard covers and is available to you. Straight out of Joshua Tree, California, Desert Oracle is “The Voice of the Desert”: a field guide to the strange tales, singing sand dunes, sagebrush trails, artists and aliens, authors and oddballs, ghost towns and modern legends, musicians and mystics, scorpions and saguaros, out there in the sand. Desert Oracle is your companion at a roadside diner, around a campfire, in your tent or cabin (or high-rise apartment or suburban living room) as the wind and the coyotes howl outside at night. From journal entries of long-deceased adventurers to stray railroad ad copy, and musings on everything from desert flora, rumored cryptid sightings, and other paranormal phenomena, Ken Layne's Desert Oracle collects the weird and the wonderful of the American Southwest into a single, essential volume.
Author: Elise Broach
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company (BYR)
Published: 2006-05-02
Total Pages: 286
ISBN-13: 1466831944
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThere are some kinds of trouble you never see coming, like those thunderstorms that start from nothing at all. One minute the sky is bright blue and distant. Then, all of a sudden, it's dark and thick with clouds, pressing down right on top of you. The leaves turn silvery and twist in the wind, the air starts to hum, and the rain comes, so heavy and fast you can't even see. You almost never make it to the house on time. A dead body on the road—who is responsible and how will it affect the lives of three teens? For fourteen-year-old Lucy Martinez, the moment when everything changes comes one night during a long car trip with her older brother and his friend Kit. They are on their way to visit Lucy's father for spring break, but never make it. While driving across northern New Mexico through a blinding rainstorm, their car hits something—an animal, they think. But when they backtrack, they find a dead body on the side of the road. With amazing insight and compelling prose, Elise Broach charts a suspenseful journey full of danger, loss, and painful self-discovery. What will happen to the lives of three teenagers who can suddenly no longer pretend innocence?
Author: Thomas Merton
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
Published: 1970-01-17
Total Pages: 100
ISBN-13: 0811220133
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe Wisdom of the Desert was one of Thomas Merton's favorites among his own books—surely because he had hoped to spend his last years as a hermit. The personal tones of the translations, the blend of reverence and humor so characteristic of him, show how deeply Merton identified with the legendary authors of these sayings and parables, the fourth-century Christian Fathers who sought solitude and contemplation in the deserts of the Near East. The hermits of Screte who turned their backs on a corrupt society remarkably like our own had much in common with the Zen masters of China and Japan, and Father Merton made his selection from them with an eye to the kind of impact produced by the Zen mondo.
