Legends of the American Desert
Sojourns in the Greater Southwest
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
For his brilliant reportage ranging from the forested recesses of the Amazon to the manicured lawns of Westchester County, New York, Alex Shoumatoff has won acclaim as one of our most perceptive guides to the oddest corners of the earth. Now, with this book, he takes us on a kaleidoscopic journey into the most complex and myth-laden region of the American landscape and imagination.
In this amazing narrative, Shoumatoff records his quest to capture the vast multiplicity of the American Southwest. Beginning with his first trip after college across the desert in a station wagon, some twenty-five years ago, he surveys the boundless variety of people and experiences constituting the place--the idea--that has become America's symbol and last redoubt of the "Other. From the Biosphere to the Mormons, from the deadly world of narcotraffickers to the secret lives of the covertly Jewish conversos, Shoumatoff explores the many alternative states of being who have staked their claim in the Southwest, making it a haven for every brand of refugee, fugitive, and utopian. And as he ventures across time and space, blending many genres--history, anthropology, natural science, to name only a few--he brings us a wealth of information on chile addiction, the diffusion of horses, the formation of the deserts and mountain ranges, the struggles of the Navajo to preserve their culture, and countless other aspects of this place we think we know.
Full of profound sympathy and unique insights, Legends of the American Desert is a superbly rich epic of fact and reflection destined to take its place among such classics of regional portraiture as Ian Frazier's Great Plains. Alex Shoumatoff has created an exuberant celebration of a singularly American reality.
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Shoumatoff (The World Is Burning) set himself to write a "sweeping hydrohistory" of the Southwest--"the least American part of the United States"--but as the project expanded so did his focus, and it then became his intention to write of his own relationship with the region in a book that would be "the next Ulysses." Though falling short of that, he has nonetheless produced a rich biography of the area. The book is the extended monologue of a scholar, adventurer and seeker enamored of and intimately knowledgeable about the indigenous cultures of the Southwest; the overlay of Latino culture; a study of the flora and fauna; the dominating need for water that has influenced custom and politics; the pollution of that water and the land by mining interests--all of which are played against the author's own encounters with the Southwest at different periods of his life. His explorations take him from Mexico, along the route of the conquistadors to California, Arizona and New Mexico to the settlements of the ancient Anasazi, Hopi, Navajo and Apaches, and builds friendships with their descendants--the "billboard culture" of Anglo-Albuquerque--whose culture is idealized by alternative lifestylers. Though it falls short of Shoumatoff's stated ambitions, the book is an enchanting melange of portraits of the extraordinary region and people of the Southwest.
