Winner of a 2019 Southwest Book Award (BRLA) An homage to the
useful and idiosyncratic mesquite tree In his latest book,
Mesquite, Gary Paul Nabhan employs humor and contemplative
reflection to convince readers that they have never really glimpsed
the essence of what he calls "arboreality." As a Franciscan brother
and ethnobotanist who has often mixed mirth with earth, laughter
with landscape, food with frolic, Nabhan now takes on a large,
many-branched question: What does it means to be a tree, or,
accordingly, to be in a deep and intimate relationship with one? To
answer this question, Nabhan does not disappear into a forest but
exposes himself to some of the most austere hyper-arid terrain on
the planet-the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts along the US/Mexico
border-where even the most ancient perennial plants are not tall
and thin, but stunted and squat. There, in desert regions that
cover more than a third of our continent, mesquite trees have
become the staff of life, not just for indigenous cultures, but for
myriad creatures, many of which respond to these "nurse plants" in
wildly intelligent and symbiotic ways. In this landscape, where
Nabhan claims that nearly every surviving being either sticks,
stinks, stings, or sings, he finds more lives thriving than you
could ever shake a stick at. As he weaves his arid yarns, we
suddenly realize that our normal view of the world has been turned
on its head: where we once saw scarcity, there is abundance; where
we once perceived severity, there is whimsy. Desert cultures that
we once assumed lived in "food deserts" are secretly savoring a
most delicious world. Drawing on his half-century of immersion in
desert ethnobotany, ecology, linguistics, agroforestry, and
eco-gastronomy, Nabhan opens up for us a hidden world that we had
never glimpsed before. Along the way, he explores the sensuous
reality surrounding this most useful and generous tree. Mesquite is
a book that will delight mystics and foresters, naturalists and
foodies. It combines cutting-edge science with a generous
sprinkling of humor and folk wisdom, even including traditional
recipes for cooking with mesquite.
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