What Barry Lopez did in expanding our vision of the frozen North in
Arctic Dreams, William Fox has done in broadening our perceptions
of the desert expanses of the West's Great Basin.
Roughly a quarter of a million acres of land spanning much of
Utah and most of Nevada, the Great Basin is the highest and driest
of the American deserts, a vast empty tract on the
nineteenth-century maps of our continent. Explorers and
cartographers found it imponderable; pioneers and settlers found it
uninhabitable. And today the Great Basin remains a largely unknown
and forbidding landscape, one that continues to exercise a powerful
influence on human desire and imagination.
The Void, the Grid, & the Sign guides us to a place so
unusual and disorienting that it can overcome rationality and
become the locus for our most fanciful and fearsome projections:
mythical rivers, mammoth artistic earthworks, alien spaceships,
jet-propelled race cars, and weapons of mass annihilation.
In "The Void", Fox walks us through this landscape,
investigating our responses to the Great Basin's appearance -- a
pattern of mountains and valleys on a scale so large, so empty and
undifferentiated by shape and form and color, that the visual and
cognitive expectations of the human mind are confounded and
impaired.
"The Grid" focuses on the evolution of cartography in the
nineteenth century and the explorations of John Charles Fremont in
his search for the legendary Buenaventura River. Fox invites us on
a Great Basin road trip, tracing the "net" of maps, section
markers, railroads, telegraph lines, and highways that humans have
thrown across the void throughout history.
"The Sign" considers the language and the metaphorswe continue
to place around and over the void, revealing the Great Basin as a
vast palimpsest where the neon-lined boulevards of Las Vegas
overlay and interplay with millennia-old petroglyphs and
pictographs.
Through vivid and arresting prose drawing from the disciplines
of natural history, art history, cognitive psychology, western
history, archaeology and anthropology, The Void, the Grid, &
the Sign traverses the knowns and the unknowns of the Great Basin,
offering a tour de force of inquiry and thought.
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