Author: Bowden, Charles and Michael P. Berman
Title: Inferno
Description: Austin, TX, University of Texas Press, 2006. First Edition. Hardcover. White DJ with photo illustration and red, black and grey lettering; taupe boards with red lettering; 176 pp.; richly illustrated. "Charles Bowden has been an outspoken advocate for the desert Southwest since the 1970s. Recently his activism helped persuade the U.S. government to create the Sonoran Desert National Monument in southern Arizona. But in working for environmental preservation, Bowden refuses to be one who "outline[s] something straightforward, a manifesto with clear rules and a set of plans for others to follow." In this deeply personal book, he brings the Sonoran Desert alive, not as a place where well-meaning people can go to enjoy "nature," but as a raw reality that defies bureaucratic and even literary attempts to define it, that can only be experienced through the senses." "Inferno burns with Charles Bowden's passion for the desert he calls home. His vivid descriptions, complemented by Michael Berman's acutely observed photographs of the Sonoran Desert, make readers feel the heat and smell the dryness, see the colors in earth and sky, and hear the singing of dry bones across the parched ground. Written as "an antibiotic" during the time Bowden was lobbying the government to create the Sonoran Desert National Monument, Inferno repudiates both the propaganda and the lyricism of contemporary nature writing. Instead, it persuades us that "we need these places not to remember our better selves or our natural self or our spiritual self. We need these places to taste what we fear and devour what we are. We need these places to be animals because unless we are animals we are nothing at all. That is the price of being a civilized dude.""--Jacket. Good (Ex art library with sticker on the spine and on rear pastedown; DJ is lightly edgeworn/toned/scuffed/smudged; boards are lightly edgeworn and there is dampstaining at the top corner of both covers; textblock edges are lightly smudged; top of textblock is lightly cockled; binding is solid.) .

Keywords: Photography, Michael P. Berman, Charles Bowden, Sonoran Desert National Monument ; Berman, Michael P. ; ;


See more books from our catalog: Photography