[PDF] Desert America eBook

Author : Rubén Martínez
Publisher : Metropolitan Books
Page : 352 pages
File Size : 50,43 MB
Release : 2012-08-07
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0805095616

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A brilliantly illuminating portrait of the twenty-first-century West—a book as vast, diverse, and unexpected as the land and the people, from one of our foremost chroniclers of migration The economic boom—and the devastation left in its wake—has been writ nowhere as large as on the West, the most iconic of American landscapes. Over the last decade the West has undergone a political and demographic upheaval comparable only to the opening of the frontier. Now, in Desert America, a work of powerful reportage and memoir, Rubén Martínez, acclaimed author of Crossing Over, evokes a new world of extremes: outrageous wealth and devastating poverty, sublime beauty and ecological ruin. In northern New Mexico, an epidemic of drug addiction flourishes in the shadow of some of the country's richest zip codes; in Joshua Tree, California, gentrification displaces people and history. In Marfa, Texas, an exclusive enclave triggers a race war near the banks of the Rio Grande. And on the Tohono O'odham reservation, Native Americans hunt down Mexican migrants crossing the most desolate stretch of the border. With each desert story, Martínez explores his own encounter with the West and his love for this most contested region. In the process, he reveals that the great frontier is now a harbinger of the vast disparities that are redefining the very idea of America.

Author : Ramon Prat
Publisher :
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 43,50 MB
Release : 2006
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 9788496540095

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""Desert America: Territory of Paradox" is a survey of the extreme uses and activities that take place in the area roughly encompassing Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona and sections of California and Texas. Through photography and text, personal experience and history, we explore an alternate American desert - one of promise and failure inflated to magnificent proportions. In a region typically considered barren and empty, we investigate the phenomena that reveal the desert as a place that is in fact teeming with activity." "Seven "books" work in tandem to demonstrate how the Desert is an epic territory of extreme conditions that generate severe and often monumental reactions, constructions and outcomes. These books trace a parabola that begins with the idea of the Desert as the vacant, desired territory of history, the destination of past and present stories of American exodus. The chapters next rise through an arc of increasing colonization, examining the infrastructure projects that made the Desert inhabitable, as well as the technologies and ambitions that encouraged occupation, growth, and fortification. Our journey through this fascinating landscape is completed as we return to the image of the Desert as a territory of the empty and sublime - an image now conditioned by all that we have just witnessed."--BOOK JACKET.

Author : Charles Bowden
Publisher : University of Arizona Press
Page : 196 pages
File Size : 11,49 MB
Release : 1988-04-01
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 9780816510818

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

Author : Marc Reisner
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 674 pages
File Size : 38,73 MB
Release : 1993-06-01
Category : Technology & Engineering
ISBN : 1440672822

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“I’ve been thinking a lot about Cadillac Desert in the past few weeks, as the rain fell and fell and kept falling over California, much of which, despite the pouring heavens, seems likely to remain in the grip of a severe drought. Reisner anticipated this moment. He worried that the West’s success with irrigation could be a mirage — that it took water for granted and didn’t appreciate the precariousness of our capacity to control it.” – Farhad Manjoo, The New York Times, January 20,2023 "The definitive work on the West's water crisis." --Newsweek The story of the American West is the story of a relentless quest for a precious resource: water. It is a tale of rivers diverted and dammed, of political corruption and intrigue, of billion-dollar battles over water rights, of ecological and economic disaster. In his landmark book, Cadillac Desert, Marc Reisner writes of the earliest settlers, lured by the promise of paradise, and of the ruthless tactics employed by Los Angeles politicians and business interests to ensure the city's growth. He documents the bitter rivalry between two government giants, the Bureau of Reclamation and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, in the competition to transform the West. Based on more than a decade of research, Cadillac Desert is a stunning expose and a dramatic, intriguing history of the creation of an Eden--an Eden that may only be a mirage. This edition includes a new postscript by Lawrie Mott, a former staff scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, that updates Western water issues over the last two decades, including the long-term impact of climate change and how the region can prepare for the future.

Author : Lyle Massey
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 255 pages
File Size : 35,77 MB
Release : 2021-11-02
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 0520306694

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Introduction / Lyle Massey and James Nisbet -- Desolate dreams / Joseph Masco -- Air, wind, breath, life : desertification and Will Wilson's AIR (Auto-Immune Response) / Jessica L. Horton -- Notes from bioteknika / Albert Narath -- Troglodyte modernists / Lyle Massey -- Explosive modernism : Hiram Hudson Benedict's Bouldereign and Zabriskie Point at 50 / Edward Dimendberg -- Point Omega/Omega Point : desert In three parts / Stefanie Sobelle -- The desert in fine grain / Emily Eliza Scott -- The desert as black mythology / Bridget R. Cooks -- On the recalcitrance of the desert island, by way of Andrea Zittel's A-Z West / James Nisbet -- Four theses for the coming deserts / Hans Baumann and Karen Pinkus.

Author : Patricia Nelson Limerick
Publisher : UNM Press
Page : 228 pages
File Size : 26,57 MB
Release : 1985
Category : History
ISBN : 9780826308085

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Traces the development of American attitudes toward the desert using case studies from many writers over the years.

Author : Steven J. Phillips
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 676 pages
File Size : 44,89 MB
Release : 2000
Category : History
ISBN : 9780520219809

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"A Natural History of the Sonoran Desert provides the most complete collection of Sonoran Desert natural history information ever compiled and is a perfect introduction to this biologically rich desert of North America."--BOOK JACKET.

Author : Valerie L. Kuletz
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 372 pages
File Size : 20,36 MB
Release : 2016-04-29
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1134954336

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For decades, nuclear testing in America's southwest was shrouded in secrecy, with images gradually made public of mushroom clouds blooming over the desert. Now, another nuclear crisis looms over this region: the storage of tens of thousands of tons of nuclear waste. Tainted Desert maps the nuclear landscapes of the US inter-desert southwest, a land sacrificed to the Cold-War arms race and nuclear energy policy.

Author : W. P. Mara
Publisher : TFH Publications
Page : 50 pages
File Size : 19,4 MB
Release : 1996
Category : Nature
ISBN : 9780793820474

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Describes the snakes of the North American deserts and provides a guide for keeping them as pets, covering such topics as feeding, housing, and breeding.

Author : Ken Layne
Publisher : MCD
Page : 193 pages
File Size : 22,43 MB
Release : 2020-12-08
Category : Nature
ISBN : 0374722382

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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.