Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.
Loading... Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Landscape Wars of the American West (1994)by Rebecca Solnit
None Loading...
Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. 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. ( ) no reviews | add a review
"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 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. No library descriptions found. |
Current DiscussionsNonePopular covers
Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)978History and Geography North America Western U.S.LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
Is this you?Become a LibraryThing Author. |