The Void, The Grid, & The Sign: Traversing The Great Basin

At last, the ultimate travel book, a journey not only through the stunning Great Basin but also through our own minds wherein land becomes landscape by means of art, architecture and narrative.

This is a story that few know, but those who do are its disciples.

The story, of the highest and driest of all American deserts, the Great Basin, has no finer voice than that of William Fox. In a book that has become a classic of contemporary desert literature, Fox navigates us through a landscape so alien it has much to tell us about who we are. Fox s book is divided into the three sections of the title. In "The Void," he leads us through the Great Basin landscape, investigating our visual response to it a pattern of mountains and valleys on a scale of such magnitude and emptiness and undifferentiated by shape, form, and color that the visual and cognitive expectations of the human mind are confounded and impaired. "The Grid" leads us on a journey through the evolution of cartography in the nineteenth century and the explorations of John Charles Frémont to the net of maps, section markers, railroads, telegraph lines, and highways that humans have thrown across the void throughout history. "The Sign" wends us through the metaphors and language we continue to place around and over the void, revealing the Great Basin as a vast palimpsest where, for example, the neon boulevards of Las Vegas interplay with ancient petroglyphs.

In this one-of-a-kind travel book that allows us to travel within our own neurophysiological processes as well as out into the arresting void of the Great Basin, Fox has created a dazzling new standard at the frontier of writing about the American West. His stunning and broad insight draws from the fields of natural history, cognitive psychology, art history, western history, archaeology, and anthropology, and will be of value to scholars and readers in all these subjects.

William L. Fox has been an arts consultant, curator, and visiting scholar at the Getty Research Institute. He is the author of several books including Driving By Memory (1999), Mapping the Empty: Eight Artists and Nevada (1997), and Playa Works: The Myth of the Empty (2002). His work on cognition and the landscape includes a trip to the Antarctic as a visiting writer with the National Science Foundation and work in the Arctic with NASA on Haughton-Mars Project. He currently resides in Los Angeles.