The Desert Reader: Descriptions of America's Arid Regions. (book reviews)

Many a human voice has echoed across the American desert, some in despair, others in a hallelujah of astonishment. In The Desert Reader, Peter Wild treats his audience to the best of two centuries of desert writing.

If there is a central argument to this delightful compendium it is how, over time, perceptions of the desert have changed. This is not an ecology book where flora and fauna are dryly catalogued, but a work that savors the evolution of desert thought. The desert in Wild's selections hardly changes -- in fact it is starkly constant -- it is the cultural realities that ...

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