Desert Oracle

Desert Oracle
Author: Ken Layne
Publisher: MCD
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2020-12-08
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 0374722382

The 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.

Desert Notebooks

Desert Notebooks
Author: Ben Ehrenreich
Publisher: Catapult
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2020-07-07
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1640093540

Layering climate science, mythologies, nature writing, and personal experiences, this New York Times Notable Book presents a stunning reckoning with our current moment and with the literal and figurative end of time. Desert Notebooks examines how the unprecedented pace of destruction to our environment and an increasingly unstable geopolitical landscape have led us to the brink of a calamity greater than any humankind has confronted before. As inhabitants of the Anthropocene, what might some of our own histories tell us about how to confront apocalypse? And how might the geologies and ecologies of desert spaces inform how we see and act toward time—the pasts we have erased and paved over, this anxious present, the future we have no choice but to build? Ehrenreich draws on the stark grandeur of the desert to ask how we might reckon with the uncertainty that surrounds us and fight off the crises that have already begun. In the canyons and oases of the Mojave and in Las Vegas’s neon apocalypse, Ehrenreich finds beauty, and even hope, surging up in the most unlikely places, from the most barren rocks, and the apparent emptiness of the sky. Desert Notebooks is a vital and necessary chronicle of our past and our present—unflinching, urgent—yet timeless and profound.

Blue Desert

Blue Desert
Author: Charles Bowden
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Total Pages: 196
Release: 1988-04-01
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 9780816510818

Contains essays that depict and decry the rapid growth and disappearing natural landscapes of the Sunbelt

Imperial

Imperial
Author: William T. Vollmann
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 1854
Release: 2009-07-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1101105151

From the author of Europe Central, winner of the National Book Award, a journalistic tour de force along the Mexican-American border – a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award For generations of migrant workers, Imperial Country has held the promise of paradise and the reality of hell. It sprawls across a stirring accidental sea, across the deserts, date groves and labor camps of Southeastern California, right across the border into Mexico. In this eye-opening book, William T. Vollmann takes us deep into the heart of this haunted region, exploring polluted rivers and guarded factories and talking with everyone from Mexican migrant workers to border patrolmen. Teeming with patterns, facts, stories, people and hope, this is an epic study of an emblematic region.

The Frontier of Leisure

The Frontier of Leisure
Author: Lawrence Culver
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 331
Release: 2010-09-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199779686

Southern California has long been promoted as the playground of the world, the home of resort-style living, backyard swimming pools, and year-round suntans. Tracing the history of Southern California from the late nineteenth century through the late twentieth century, The Frontier of Leisure reveals how this region did much more than just create lavish resorts like Santa Catalina Island and Palm Springs--it literally remade American attitudes towards leisure. Lawrence Culver shows how this "culture of leisure" gradually took hold with an increasingly broad group of Americans, and ultimately manifested itself in suburban developments throughout the Sunbelt and across the United States. He further shows that as Southern Californians promoted resort-style living, they also encouraged people to turn inward, away from public spaces and toward their private homes and communities. Impressively researched, a fascinating and lively read, this finely nuanced history connects Southern Californian recreation and leisure to larger historical themes, including regional development, architecture and urban planning, race relations, Indian policy, politics, suburbanization, and changing perceptions of nature.

A Natural History of the Mojave Desert

A Natural History of the Mojave Desert
Author: Lawrence R. Walker
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Total Pages: 343
Release: 2018-03-27
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 0816532621

Invites readers to explore the smallest and most unique southwestern desert, the beautiful Mojave--Provided by publisher.

Marshal South and the Ghost Mountain Chronicles

Marshal South and the Ghost Mountain Chronicles
Author: Marshal South
Publisher: Sunbelt Publications, Inc.
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2005
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780932653666

In the 1940s, Marshal South chronicled his family's controversial primitive lifestyle on Ghost Mountain, in what is now Anza-Borrego Desert State Park in southern California, through popular monthly articles written for Desert Magazine. This is the complete collection, along with never-before-published photos of the family.

Dig Here!

Dig Here!
Author: Thomas Penfield
Publisher: Adventures Unlimited Press
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2004
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781931882354

The most amazing treasure book ever written, giving the locations of well over 100 fabulous fortunes waiting to be found in the ore-rich Southwest. Thomas Penfield has done years of exhaustive research for Dig Here! and has accomplished the Herculean task of separating fact from fiction. For the first time lost treasure stories of the Southwest are stripped bare of their legends and lies. Each treasure account is preceded by the approximate location, estimated total value - and authentication. Reading sources for each account are also included so you can do additional research on the intriguing stories of these treasures. Dig Here! is overflowing with lore, spellbinding backgrounds, driving Western drama - and exciting, reliable facts.