Although Marc Reisner's "Cadillac Desert" is the most encyclopedic book about the West and its problems with water, this book actually gets closer to the bone of what's wrong with the way we in the US live in our desert climes. The book focuses first on how the O'odham and Pima indian cultures managed to live sustainably in the Sonoran Desert with its unpredictable and rare water flows. While I doubt that many of us but the most idealistic and romantic would want to live the life of these peoples, there is a certain genius in the ways they made the land and its water work for them that we could do well to learn from. Bowden contrasts this with the civilization the European cultures came and built during the last 150 years, a civilization built on "mining" the ice-age aquifers so rapidly that they will soon be drained once and for all. Having turned the plains to a dust bowl, will we just pack up and move on as we always have in the past?

In his later books, Bowden's bitter spleen often spills uncontrollably from his pen, but his tone here is much more restrained. In "Waters," his voice is almost scholarly scholarly and tinged with sad wisdom. This is a great book, and one that deserves far more readers.

Although Marc Reisner's "Cadillac Desert" is the most encyclopedic book about the West and its problems with water, this book actually gets closer to the bone of what's wrong with the way we in the US live in our desert climes. The book focuses first on how the O'odham and Pima indian cultures managed to live sustainably in the Sonoran Desert with its unpredictable and rare water flows. While I doubt that many of us but the most idealistic and romantic would want to live the life of these peoples, there is a certain genius in the ways they made the land and its water work for them that we could do well to learn from. Bowden contrasts this with the civilization the European cultures came and built during the last 150 years, a civilization built on "mining" the ice-age aquifers so rapidly that they will soon be drained once and for all. Having turned the plains to a dust bowl, will we just pack up and move on as we always have in the past?

In his later books, Bowden's bitter spleen often spills uncontrollably from his pen, but his tone here is much more restrained. In "Waters," his voice is almost scholarly scholarly and tinged with sad wisdom. This is a great book, and one that deserves far more readers.

7-306 Sanup Utong Center 129 Songhuy-dong Dong-gu Inchon, Korea. post no. 401-040

In 1998 I'd seen a photo on a calendar of the Vermillion Cliffs in Utah, but had no idea where exactly it was located. I teach photography and my students and I had done some research to find it, but discovered it was a very large area. When I found Mr. Dykinga's book I was even more determined for my students to see and photograph the area. Needless to say, the book is truly inspirational thanks to Jack's remarkabe work.!
If you know a photographer or a traveller - this is the book for them! Enjoy the treat yourself as well.

Jeff Grimm
Bedford, TX

The number of photographic works exploring the nuances of the Colorado Plateau is seemingly endless. Many can be browsed once and left behind. This book is the scintillating exception.

Jack Dykinga's photographic work is simply exceptional, and beyond the pale. Each color photograph appears as exquisitely crafted as a piece of fine crystal, beginning with very cover of the paperback edition. One can only envy his great patience and expertise in composing each work.

Much of the photography comes from the Paria Wilderness, an area of the Plateau not usually treated to any degree in most works, and the novelty is refreshing. A particularly enjoyable facet of the book is that use of a telephoto lens has been largely eschewed, leaving a series of scenes that the enterprising tourist can find and view with his or her own eyes, just as depicted by the book.

Charles Bowden's accompanying text is evocative and hearkens a wild diffusion of images and memories of the fascinating region.
It is an apt companion to Dykinga's superb work.

If you are limited to five or less books about the Colorado plateau, let this be one of them. I enjoy it more every time I read it.

An hymn to the nature and it's landscapes, whose pictures are superb in both the technical and artistic plans.

Having grown up with Arizona Highways magazine, I had, over the years, lost interest in the same old lovely-but-humdrum Meunch brothers photography and lackluster text commonly given to the Sonoran desert. Then I saw the cover of "The Sonoran Desert" and everything changed as I leafed through it. Bowden's text is intensely thought-provoking; the text is spare and rich at the same time, like his subject matter, and Dykinga's photographs show the Sonoran desert in the only way it should EVER be photographed. The photos capture a depth of the desert I've never seen in print before. Dykinga shows like nobody else the juxtaposition of textures and colors, the whole feel of the Sonoran desert in all its glory- and there's a whole lot of glory there if you take the time to look for it. Dykinga clearly does.

If you think of the deserts as places of emptiness and boredom, have a look at this superb book! The subject was not easy but Jack Dykinga is mastering the art of using the light and the shapes to make us enter a new dimension. His breathtaking large format photographs plead in favor of preserving the wilderness in it's original state and presents us to it's amazing vegetal hosts. After seeing this book, you will never ever think of the Sonoran Desert as an "uninhabited place".

This new book combines Charles Laseron's 1947 "South With Mawson" and Frank Hurley's 1948 "Shackleton's Argonauts" in one volume, continuing the wonderful flood of reprints relating to the heroic era of Antarctic exploration. Laseron's account of the 1912 Mawson expedition is full of human interest, and makes a useful adjunct to Mawson's own, somewhat drier account in "Home of the Blizzard." Laseron was a careful observer of his surroundings and his fellow expedition members, and his writing style is vivid and often humorous. This half of the book includes photographs by expedition photographer Frank Hurley, whose own memoirs of the Endurance voyage make up the second half of the book. Frank Hurley's "Shackleton's Argonauts" is a gripping description of the Endurance expedition, also illustrated with some of Hurley's magnificent photographs. Having served with both Sir Douglas Mawson and Sir Ernest Shackleton, Hurley compares the two men in a couple of wonderful paragraphs, concluding "Shackleton grafted science onto exploration; Mawson added exploration onto science," a very good way of summing up the differences between the leaders. Hurley also shows himself to have been an early environmentalist, and expresses in no uncertain terms his horror of the South Atlantic whaling industry and its slaughter of those great animals, commenting "I had marvelled at the devices that enabled man's ingenuity to triumph over nature's moods and most powerful creatures, but I marvelled still more that man was unable to triumph over the seemingly more potent monster of his creating; its name is greed," to which I can only add, "amen." Anyone interested in Antarctic exploration will want to add this valuable reprint to their library, and I cannot recommend it more highly.

The writer's impression of the desert and the impressions it leaves on him. It is written in a style both chilling and lyrical, and will haunt the reader for a long time.

All you ever wanted to know about the Catalina Mountains and the people who braved them. Bowden has a way with words to capture your interests--even through the historical factual info. Aldo would be proud of him

I first read "Running Wild" several years ago while recovering from a running injury and it not only gave me the confidence to come back from the injury but also became my running companion. I have since re-read it many times especially before an important race or when the reasons for training get blurry. For a runner it is a spiritual connection to the joy and mystery that running can be as well as historic proof of the origins of American running. John Annerino is an incredible man whose courage and love of the wilderness together with his deep spiritual committment to the land, it's history and it's people make "Running Wild" a masterpiece.

Read this incredible book. -Karimor International Mountain Marathon

I'm rereading RUNNING WILD - enjoying it even more. Hard to sit still - want to lace up and go.

Blues for Cannibals can be a hard book at times to work through. The ideas become circular and repetitive but the beautiful writing often smooths over these rough spots, while at other times there is true beauty, touched with both horror and sadness, in its words and thoughts. Charles Bowden writes near the beginning that if he had life to live over again he "would never think that wars are events recorded in the book of history but realize they are actual and always take my hands from my ears and hear the cries of the slain." Much of this book is filled with those cries, and not only from war. He also would never say no to a woman or skip a meal. From evidence in this book, one gets the feeling he never has. The section on food and his dying friends is the best part of the book and reverberates with a quiet power. An unique book.

Charles Bowden places himself as a steel wedge into the crevices, what we've created of ourselves and our environment, the unsavory places, the mirror that we all shield our faces from, the places that we are all afraid to venture. He drives himself into these places because he knows that he ... we ... have become fearful hypocrites.

Once set, he kicks violently at the business end of that wedge with his feet to drive himself in further, going as far as a man can go without letting go: dirt, water, sex, and food, with a little booze and drugs thrown in to soften the edge of our brutal contemporary reality.

But now that he's found the courage to go to these places in our stead and make it back, he found it necessary to write about it and we find it necessary to read it. We know that we will likely never visit these places. We will only read vicariously and reflect nervously, remaining sadly and ultimately, fearful hypocrites to the end.

Charles Bowden's got the blues. "I am a fallen man and I know it," he writes, "and I accept the torture of living this fact. But I will be damned--and they say I surely will be damned--if I accept God's answer. So I do not pray. Nor do I worship. I can love, I can comfort. I am the tree struggling in the hot ground of my desert. No bended knee and please no messages from on high. The messages must come from here, from the ground itself or away with them. That is what I learn from the mesguite, my brother-in-arms" (p. 6). In his 293-page book of revelations, he looks deeply into our cold, modern culture of gated communities, suicide, death row inmates, and sexual predators, to discover we are cannibals now--"we can devour and take but cannot give" (p. 28)--living a life of unrestrained consumption without future.

For too many of us, Bowden may be the best writer we've never read. His prose is powerful, prophetic, hallucinogenic, and poetic. Using mesquite as a metaphor to connect his essays, he encourages us to face the truth about American culture, and to question the people who try to give us easy answers. "I believe in dirt and bone and flowers and fresh pasta and salsa cruda and red wine," he writes. "I do not believe in white wine, I insist on color. I think death is a word and life is a fact, just as food is a fact and cactus is a fact" (p. 246). Although Bowden's "Mesquite Manifesto" is rooted in despair, in the end it encourages us to celebrate life: eat, lust, caress, fight, and swallow. "Now," Bowden tells us, "choke it down" (p. 277).

G. Merritt

For those of you who feel this is not a "normal" Abbey book, you are right in one sence but not totally. You must take into account that this book was written shortly after his wife passed away. So there were thoughts and feelings and emotions that he was going through that dictated the lay of this book. The woman who disappears, never seen again, all boils back to the heartbreak Abbey was going through after loosing his young wife. This is a great book to pick up if you want to read one of Abbey's different styles of writing.

Edward Abbey (Cactus Ed) describes the American southwest like no other American writter. This book, "Black Sun" is one of Abbey's earlier works. It is a rough, profane and moving look at a man's love affair with the Red Rock Desert. It's not for the tame or the easily offended. I believe Abbey said once, "And if there is anyone left in the room I have not offened, I apologize". His views on conservation and preservation of our National Parks are extreme, but he puts these views in the format of a novel. It is a book I have read and reread many times, and the many people I have shared it with have all loved it and have not been able to put it down. It is a tragic book, just as the loss and destruction of the desert southwest is tragic. If you love the desert and love good writting, this book is a good read. Abbey said, "Oh my desert, yours is the one death I cannot endure". That passion for the wild places of America comes through on every page of this wonderful book.

The person who wrote this review must be completely immune to subtext. Abbey is such a raw, emotional expositor on nature. This book he considered his masterwork, I think because he saw it as his best, most personal expression of how he felt, both about the red rock region and his late wife. In this book he reconciles the loss of the later and diminishment of the former, yet doesn't succumb to any easy answers about what happens to either. Vicious in its simplicity. I recommend it if you've read some Abbey and want to get into his head a bit.

i was deeply absorbed in this book for the first 300 pages and then i started to lose track of names and incidents. it is certainly one of the most compelling stories i have ever read. i only wish that bowden could have organized it better. this is not the kind of book that you read before you take your lithium. it is really smashing and makes you wonder what in the world we could be complaining about here in the u.s.

You want the true story about the "War On Drugs"? Then don't wait and buy this book NOW. Bowden takes you right inside what's going on with this so called war, and the people who get hurt by it. Once you pick up this book you won't be able to put it down. Charles Bowden is one of this country's great reporters/writers.

Jay Marvin
WLS Radio
Chicago, IL

As a former participant in the drug war (on the wrong end), I will assure you this is an accurate portrayal. Participants on both sides of the issue are decimated, and people prefer to bury their heads and hide from this reality, a reality that may be the most critical problem facing our nation.

This book is extremely well written. My hat is off to Mr. Bowden.