Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Landscape Wars of the American West
by Rebecca Solnit
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"A beautiful, absorbing, tragic book."-Larry McMurtryIn 1851, a war began in what would become Yosemite National Park, a war against the indigenous inhabitants. A century later-in 1951-and a hundred and fifty miles away, another war began when the U.S. government started setting off nuclear bombs at the Nevada Test Site. It was called a nuclear testing program, but functioned as a war against the land and people of the Great Basin. In this foundational book of landscape theory and show more environmental thinking, Rebecca Solnit explores our national Eden and Armageddon and offers a pathbreaking history of the west, focusing on the relationship between culture and its implementation as politics. In a new preface, she considers the continuities and changes of these invisible wars in the context of our current climate change crisis, and reveals how the long arm of these histories continue to inspire her writing and hope. show lessTags
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Member Reviews
So I read this book for a class on Environmental Literature at grad school. I started it in Boise, but didn't get into it for the first 70 pages or so, but then got really hooked. It's a brilliant book, a kind of non-fiction novel of ideas that is well researched, smart, perceptive, and really self-aware. It's essentially two books, the first longer part is about the Nevada test site and the history of nuclear bombs and the United States. The second shorter half presents the buried history of the creation of Yosemite National Park and the horrors the government wrought on the native population in order to produce the myth of virgin wilderness. A really stellar book, but not really light reading.
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Author Information
47+ Works 17,282 Members
Rebecca Solnit writes extensively on photography and landscape. She is a contributing editor to Art Issues and Creative Camera and is the author of three books. She has contributed essays to several museum catalogues including Crimes and Splendors: The Desert Cantos of Richard Misrach and the Whitney Museum's Beat Culture and the New America. She show more was a 1993 recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Common Knowledge
- Original publication date
- 1994
- Important places
- American West; Yosemite National Park, California, USA; Nevada, USA
- Original language
- English
- Disambiguation notice
- Full title (1994): Savage dreams : a journey into the hidden wars of the American West / Rebbeca Solnit
Classifications
- Genres
- Nonfiction, History, Science & Nature, General Nonfiction
- DDC/MDS
- 979 — History & geography History of North America Great Basin and Pacific Slope region of United States
- LCC
- F591 .S6685 — Local History of the United States, Canada and Latin America United States local history The West. Trans-Mississippi Region. Great Plains
- BISAC
Statistics
- Members
- 259
- Popularity
- 125,841
- Reviews
- 1
- Rating
- (4.31)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 7
- ASINs
- 4
