《书目》(Booklist)书评

The desert's hard, spiky, multihued, sculpted, secretive, immense, inhuman, and glorious terrain is a visionary and toughening place. It terrifies and elates, abrades and soothes, disorients and focuses. Edward Abbey observed, "What draws us into the desert is the search for something intimate in the remote." Each of the authors and photographers in these tributes to the Southwest set out on just such a quest, returning with an altered sense of time, space, and self. Douglas Preston's Cities of Gold chronicles the most adventurous undertaking: an ambitious plan to retrace the steps of Francisco Vasquez de Coronado's 1540 expedition. An utter greenhorn, Preston not only decided to make the trip on horseback, but refused to scout out the route in advance, wanting to preserve the element of surprise. Shock was more like it; he's lucky to be alive. The Arizona terrain Preston and his equally ignorant companions traversed is some of the roughest country imaginable. After parting ways with a dangerously inept hired "wrangler," Preston and his artist friend Walter Nelson got the hang of handling the horses and the heat and learned how to navigate the flesh-ripping mesquite, deadly quicksand, and slippery rocks. They also ended up proving that much of the route historians have credited Coronado with taking is, and was, impossible to follow. In all, they covered 950 miles of Arizona wilderness, aided and enlightened by various wise and generous ranchers and residents of nine Indian reservations. Preston's well-crafted sentences evoke the stark and stunning landscape while lucidly tracking the travelers' increasingly profound understanding of the region's history of sacredness and conquest. Stewart Aitchison's fine photographs and engaging text introduce readers to Arizona's majestic Red Rock-Sacred Mountain region, which includes the classy town of Sedona, beautiful Oak Creek Canyon, the volcanic San Francisco Peaks, and Flagstaff. Aitchison covers the geological and cultural complexity of the area as he describes plant and animal life and summarizes the histories of the prehistoric Singua, Spanish explorers, Navajos, Hopi, Yavapai, and noteworthy home~steaders. His celebration of the diverse region, which embraces desert grassland, river canyons, ponderosa pine forests, and alpine tundra, includes musings on the importance of the region to scientists and the paradox of how the beauty of the region may become a fatal attraction because, as the number of visitors multiplies, environmental concerns become more complicated. Photographer Jack Dykinga and Charles Bowden, author of Desierto [BKL My 15 91], form an ardent and lyrical duo as they unite in expressing their mutual adoration of the desert. Bowden writes with his characteristically incantatory energy, recounting the histories of the people of the brutal and grand Sonoran Desert and the survival strategies of its tenacious cacti, patient reptiles, and sly coyotes. Bowden is drawn to the tragic, the ruthless, and the absurd. Aggressive and doubting, angry and poetic, he mocks our artificiality in contrast to the spirituality of native American cultures and decries humankind's meddling with the desert's perfect ecological balance. Meanwhile, Dykinga's mesmerizing photographs record the startling forms and juxtapositions of the Sonoran Desert as it stretches across southern Arizona, northern Mexico, Baja, and far southern California. Light is the soul of these images, rosy and low, glaring and omniscient, caressing and shadowy. The saguaro, cholla, organpipe, yucca, ocotillo, and agave; the rocks, sand ripples, and extinct volcanoes all gleam silently, proudly, and mysteriously in counterpoint to Bowden's feverish narration. A powerful and provocative response to a place of wonder. ~--Donna Seaman