Red
Passion and Patience in the Desert
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
In this potent collage of stories, essays, and testimony, Williams makes a stirring case for the preservation of America’s Redrock Wilderness in the canyon country of southern Utah.
As passionate as she is persuasive, Williams, the beloved author of Refuge, is one of the country’s most eloquent and imaginative writers. The desert is her blood. Here she writes lyrically about the desert’s power and vulnerability, describing wonders that range from an ancient Puebloan sash of macaw feathers found in Canyonlands National Park to the desert tortoise–an animal that can “teach us the slow art of revolutionary patience” as it extends our notion of kinship with all life. She examines the civil war being waged in the West today over public and private uses of land–an issue that divides even her own family. With grace, humor, and compassionate intelligence, Williams reminds us that the preservation of wildness is not simply a political process but a spiritual one.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Shaped by wind, heat and the etchings of rare water, the deserts of the American West are at the heart of Williams's numerous writings on the need to preserve wilderness (Leap; Refuge). This new collection of writings (some of which have been published before) is inspired by her daily experiences with the Southwestern desert, Anasazi petroglyphs and small shifts in time at her home outside Moab, Utah. Contributing to the movement to protect these fragile landscapes, she encourages her readers to consider the desert as a threatened national commons, drawing in the life around her to express just how the desert inhabits her and makes her more human. Included here are two of the works that have defined Williams as a central voice in the environmental movement: "Desert Quartet," which is made up of simple and erotic personal essays, and "Coyote's Canyon," comprised of the lovely tales of desert people. To these she adds pieces that center on her move out of Salt Lake City, her study of the meanings of the color red and, most importantly, the imperative to create national protection for land that cannot protect itself from each step of development and population growth. Although there are repetitions between the sections and at times Williams sounds desperate, the collection resonates with an inspiring and convincing devotion that cannot be set aside.
