The Secret Knowledge of Water: Discovering the Essence of the American Desert

Childs, Craig (signed)

ISBN 10: 1570611599 / ISBN 13: 9781570611599

Published by Sasquatch Books, Seattle, 2000

About this Item

Signed on the title page by Childs. His third book, first in hardcover, and his most iconic, uncommon signed. Childs is one of our premiere and most adventurous environmental writers, known above all for his explorations of American desert. He's twice the winner of the Sigurd Olson Award Nature Writing Award. A book with just one crease to top corner of title page, still fine; in a near fine jacket with trace rubbing to rear panel. Seller Inventory # 1165

Bibliographic Details

Title: The Secret Knowledge of Water: Discovering ...

Publisher: Sasquatch Books, Seattle

Publication Date: 2000

Binding: Hardcover

Condition: Fine

Dust Jacket Condition: Near fine

Signed: Signed by Author(s)

Edition: First edition.

About this title

Synopsis:

Deserts are environments that can be inhospitable even to seasoned explorers. Craig Childs has spent years in the deserts of the American West, and his treks through arid lands in search of water reveal the natural world at its most extreme.

Review:

The "essence of the American desert," as the subtitle of Craig Childs's book has it, is water. A desert, by definition, lacks it, but when water does come, it comes in torrential, sometimes devastating abundance. Childs, a thirtysomething desert rat with a vast knowledge of the Southwest's remote corners, knows this fact well. "Most rain falling anywhere but the desert comes slow enough that it is swallowed by the soil without comment," he observes. "Desert rains, powerful and sporadic, tend to hit the ground, gather into floods, and are gone before the water can sink five inches into the ground."

The travels that Childs recounts in this vivid narrative take him from places sometimes parched, sometimes swimming, from the depths of the Grand Canyon to the dry limestone tanks of the lava-strewn Sonoran Desert. As he travels, Childs gives a close reading of the desert landscape ("the moral," he writes at one point, "is that if you know the land and its maps, you might live"), observing the rocks, plants, animals, and people that call it home. Some of his adventures will remind readers of Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire--save that Childs writes without Abbey's bluster, and with a measured lyricism that well suits the achingly lovely back canyons and cactus forests of the Southwest. By turns travelogue, ecological treatise, and meditative essay, Childs's book will speak to anyone who has spent time under desert skies, wondering when the next drop of rain might fall. --Gregory McNamee