"Inferno is wonderful-- reminiscent of Edward Abbey's Desert
Solitaire and Terry Tempest Williams' Leap, as well as some of Joy
Williams' essays. I am also reminded of Annie Dillard's amazing
work, For the Time Being. . . . I think the book is incredibly
timely-- there is a lot of chatter about 'the death of
environmentalism, ' and this work catches perfectly and
passionately the sterility or lack of dirt and earth that has
helped contribute to the extreme weakening of the movement. There
is no one answer to the problem, but this is a beautiful and
compelling treatment of the weakness." -- Rick Bass
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. "I want to eat the dirt and lick the rock. Or leave the
shade for the sun and feel the burning. I know I don't belong here.
But this is the only place I belong," he says. 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 inearth 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."
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