I got this book as a gift, having never heard of it before. I'd never heard of it before, but am a fan of southwestern stories and about Glen Canyon in particular. Contrary to what I expected from the title, it's not just about the author's experiences rafting the Glen Canyon of the Colorado River. In fact, it's a collection of many essays covering about 30 years of his life in the desert southwest.

The essays are very personal and fairly emotionally charged. And yet, I didn't get turned off, because the author has a very conversational tone. There's lots of humor in here too, mainly in his descriptions of the strange people he's met in the desert. All in all, it was an easy and delightful read.

The first essay (which is where the book gets its title) alone is worth the price of the book, but I highly recommend reading the whole thing. And here's something that REALLY made reading the story about the Glen Canyon rafting trip a special treat for me. ...

The double vanishing points of personality and place create travel writing. They make a literature that runs from eccentric guidebooks to the geographies of ecstatics and tortured souls. Bruce Berger's Almost an Island occupies the middle ground where composition graces its sometimes dramatic spans with no show of force, no telltale ripple of perspective. His method is the sidewalk artist's whose drama is the blank space scored quickly and economically to sketch, then with return visits turning lines to 3-D webs, armature modeled and eventually blending in the final surprises of local color. It's the outline method out of predigested sequence. His flashes forward and retrospectives follow the natural learning curve of discovery, or its artful analog. Berger is obviously taken with the whole peninsula, and it shows. "Lovingly detailed," bled of sentimentality, describes his renderings of Baja California's barely adulterated bedrock, its vegetable adventurers, and its animal life scheming and occasionally teeming in the face of obstacles redolent of a whimsical and marginally malign experimenter. Particulars are best read in the original, a representative sample of which is feeding time at the evaporation ponds of a vast saltworks: "... We paused to watch more than two hundred waders making an angular design with the spindly legs that give them their English name, stilt, and the white bellies and black backs that give them the Spanish monjita, little nun. Eared grebes skimmed the surface by the hundreds in lines of smoke; northern shovelers and lesser scaups gathered in separate flotillas; flocks of sandpipers turned in flight like filings of a single mind-dark and striped backs that pivoted en masse, nearly disappearing, to reform as clouds of pale breasts. Certain areas featured a preponderance of white: white pelicans with their black wingtips hidden in folds, great and snowy egrets, blue herons in the white phase, as if they had all been dipped in salt. Marbled godwits suddenly burst from the surface with perfect spacing between each bird, forming an elongated cloud that swelled, shrank and drew itself out like a single sky serpent in a shifting lens. Some rectangles of water were so wide, their horizons so low, that they seemed the sea itself, and their spume blew onto our tracks like meringue. Occasionally we were jolted by having to make room for yellow trucks whose tires were as big as our jeep and whose gondolas were blinding with salt. Over subsequent censuses this skimming of the salt ponds became my favorite driving anywhere, and Fernando remarked that he had a colleague who drove the 30 kilometers of causeways for sport, attaining nonbirdwatching speeds of up to 120 kilometers per hour." Gradually, from four-wheel forays in the 60s to half-year residency in the 90s, Berger became an unofficial dual citizen, part observer and part protagonist in local battles over pronghorn preserves, whale breeding grounds and myopic multicultural change. Friends and all-too-understandable adversaries complete his moral landscape and anchor what is in the end the author's real and fully imagined almost-island.

I enjoy travel and have just returned from a wonderful trip to Baja, CA. Well, I didn't actually get to go in person but I did the next best thing. I just finished reading Berger's story of his experiences over three decades in the remotest region of the Sonoran desert, Baja, CA. Berger is a prolific writer and author of numerous books including There Was a River and The Telling Distance, which won both a Western States Book Award and a Colorado Book Authors award. He has an ongoing love affair with Baja(30 years) and it shows no sign of abating. Almost an Island is not your typical travel book.They are a dime a dozen. This book is a collection of stories, history, politics and reminiscence of the real Baja. It's a human story about real characters, agonizingly beautiful and harsh geography, and a future as uncertain as the paved highway recently built in part to encourage "economic development" and bring the "advantages" of modern living to the populace via tourism. When you go with Berger you are a traveler rather than a tourist. You will visit remote places and meet people that most tourists never see. The characters are unforgettable and, well, eccentric to say the least. Come along and meet Brandy, a Marine Corps veteran with scarred lungs, that traverses the desert in a dune buggy and oxygen tanks. How about spending some time with an innkeeper from Hollywood, nuns that raise pigs under questionable circumstances, and a former Detroit auto executive that walked away from a career and settled on a beach. The story of the activities surrounding a total eclipse is hilarious. There are stories of a pet tarantula, pronghorn antelope, and a million points of light in between. Berger is a keen observer of every thing he sees and experiences. He brings you the feel, the smell, the taste of the incredible diversity of the eight hundred mile long peninsula of desert surrounded by the sea we know as Baja. It is remote, close to the United States, famous, and little known. If you want to meet this area up close and personal, go with Bruce Berger. It is a trip you will never forget and you can't beat the price.

An excellent collection of short stories about the Southwest--its history, its fauna and flora, its people, and just a little about where it may be going if suburbia continues to encroach.

At its best, Bruce's writing style verges on poetry, refining the imagery into a few well chosen lines that beg to be read and read again. The very short story about the Metaphysical Tent is one the best short pieces I have read.