Desert Hawk Books

 

The Desert Smells Like Rain

A Naturalist in O’odham Country

Gary Paul Nabhan

 

148 pages
6" x 9"
Paperback

Quantity:  $16.95 & S/H

 

Longtime residents of the Sonoran Desert, the Tohono O’odham people have spent centuries living off the land—a land that most modern citizens of southern Arizona consider totally inhospitable. Ethnobotanist Gary Nabhan has lived with the Tohono O’odham, long known as the Papagos, observing the delicate balance between these people and their environment. Bringing O’odham voices to the page at every turn, he writes elegantly of how they husband scant water supplies, grow crops, and utilize wild edible foods. Woven through his account are coyote tales, O’odham children’s impressions of the desert, and observations on the political problems that come with living on both sides of an international border. Whether visiting a sacred cave in the Baboquivari Mountains or attending a saguaro wine-drinking ceremony, Nabhan conveys the everyday life and extraordinary perseverance of these desert people in a book that has become a contemporary classic of environmental literature.

"People often find science boring and ill written. Not in this book. Here the reader is lured into botany, ethnology, hydrology, and a couple of million acres by vivid writing, good pictures, and a beautifully produced book. . . . Anyone ignorant of the desert should begin their cure here." —Tucson Citizen

"The humor, spice, charm, insight, and compassion with which Gary Paul Nabhan weaves his tale make for enjoyable reading." —Rio Grande Sun

"Nabhan’s point is that we transplanted desert dwellers have a great deal to learn from longtime, environmentally conscious inhabitants if we are not to destroy our fragile home. . . . A remarkably humane essay on nature and respect for it." —Bloomsbury Review

"The Desert Smells Like Rain offers a remarkable insight, sensitive but unsentimental, combining the sound perceptions of a scientist with ecological concerns, matching humor and a sense of human frailty with tentative hope for the future." —High Country News

Gary Paul Nabhan is Director of the Center for Sustainable Environments at Northern Arizona University. A former MacArthur Fellow and cofounder of Native Seeds/Search, he is also the author of Gathering the Desert (University of Arizona Press), winner of the John Burroughs Medal for natural history writing.