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This compelling new volume in the Time-Life Books American Wilderness series takes you on an incredible journey through a wild, unsettled region covering some 69,000 square miles of southern Arizona and northern Mexico. Geographers call it the Sonoran Desert. To ordinary people it is Cactus Country. Your guide is Edward Abbey, a former park ranger and self-proclaimed desert rat. With him you'll travel the length of this lonely, primitive and strangely beautiful land. You'll scale a sacred show more peak, explore abandoned silver mines, climb sand dunes and volcanic craters. You'll visit the Superstition Mountains, where touchy old prospectors still search for a legendary treasure of gold buried in a giant rockpile. You'll journey to the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument west of Tucson and the Papago Indian Reservation and the Kofa Mountains. You'll travel across the lava beds and volcanic field of the Pinacate region that the Mexicans call El Gran Desierto, the great desert. In your travels you'll see many of the more than 140 species of cactus that grow in the Sonoran Desert and learn the amazing ways they have reshaped themselves to fit their environment. Towering saguaros that grow to be 50 feet tall and live two hundred years. Cluster-branched organ pipes and hardy, homely prickly pears. Beautifully blossoming hedgehogs and columnar cardons. And you'll learn, too, about the other inhabitants of this desert garden. Olive-drab mesquite bushes, graceful paloverde trees, century plants that bloom only once and then die. You'll marvel at their ability to survive in the hostile wold of the Sonoran Desert. You'll be astounded at the richness and variety of the wildlife in Cactus Country. Coral snakes, Gila monsters, scorpions. Golden eagles, hawks, road runners, mountain lions, bighorn sheep and wolves. Jack rabbits and javelinas. In the mystery and solitude of the remote land - you'll discover you are never alone. All this and more awaits you in Cactus Country : 40,000 words of absorbing text accompanied by more than 100 photographs, drawings, maps and diagrams - a total of 95 pages in full color -- Book jacket. show lessTags
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Abbey's personal journals about being in the desert are interspersed with photographs new and old, some sketches and maps, in color and black and white. It's a trip - through the Sonoran desert and the world of Edward Abbey.
This book came with the house and the spouse. The kids loved it when they were young and we are basically saving them for the next generation of curious minds.
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Author Information
42+ Works 14,037 Members
Edward Abbey was born January 29, 1927 in Indiana, Pennsylvania, and grew up in nearby Home. After military service in Naples, Italy, from 1945-47, he enrolled in Indiana University of Pennsylvania for a year before traveling to the West. He fell in love with the desert Southwest and eventually attended the University of New Mexico, where he show more obtained both graduate and post-graduate degrees. Abbey was a Fulbright Fellow from 1951-52. Abbey was an anarchist and a radical environmentalist; these positions are reflected in his writings. His novel Fire on the Mountain won the Western Heritage Award for Best Novel in 1963. Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness, considered by many to be his best work, is nonfiction that reflects Abbey's love for the American Southwest and draws on his experiences as a park ranger. Among his best-known works are The Brave Cowboy (1956), The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975), and The Fool's Progress (1988). In 1966 The Brave Cowboy was made into a movie titled Lonely Are the Brave, starring Kirk Douglas. Two collections of essays have been published since his death in 1989: Confessions of a Barbarian in 1994 and The Serpents of Paradise the following year. In 1987, Abbey was offered the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, but he declined. Abbey died in March 1989, near Tucson, Arizona, from complications following surgery. He did not want a traditional burial but rather requested to be buried in the Arizona desert, where he could nourish the earth which had been the subject of so many of his works. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Series
Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- Cactus Country
- Original title
- Cactus Country
- Original publication date
- 1973
Classifications
Statistics
- Members
- 228
- Popularity
- 143,182
- Reviews
- 2
- Rating
- (3.65)
- Languages
- 6 — Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Norwegian (Bokmål)
- Media
- Paper
- ISBNs
- 8
- ASINs
- 9
