商品簡介
A compelling compendium of biology, anthropology, and personal history, Branch offers a thorough examination of the extreme landscape of Nevada's Great Basin Desert--its terrain, its wildlife, and how an intrepid father and two curious little girls make the wilderness their home.
Raising Wild is an intimate study of Nevada's Great Basin Desert, the wild and extreme land of high desert caliche and juniper, of pronghorn antelope and mountain lions, where wildfires and snowstorms threaten in equal measure. Within this remote, high desert landscape sits the home of Michael Branch, where he, his wife, and two daughters brazenly live out their days among the packrats and ground squirrels, rattlesnakes and scorpions.
In Branch's hands, this exceedingly barren and stark landscape becomes a place teeming with energy, surprise, and an endless web of connections. It is in this wild landscape where building a ladder to the stars is still possible in the darkness that descends upon remote landscapes, where one can still find a connection to the past and to the heavens; where his children's first garden becomes not the quaint blossoming of seed to flower and fruit but a smoke-bomb-drenched exhibit of futility in the face of the inimitable antelope squirrel; where the surprise of fire acts as a reminder all too real of the unknowable that awaits us and for which we can never fully prepare. It is in this wildness that our ideas about nature and ourselves are challenged and changed.
作者簡介
MIKE BRANCH is the author of more than 200 essays, articles, and reviews, and has given more than 250 public readings and lectures. His creative nonfiction includes pieces that have received Honorable Mention for the Pushcart Prize and been recognized as Notable Essays in The Best American Essays (three times), The Best American Science and Nature Writing, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. His essays have appeared in magazines including Orion, Ecotone, Slate, Utne Reader, Sunset, Reader's Digest, Hawk and Handsaw, High Country News, Places, and Whole Terrain, and in many essay collections, including Wonder and Other Survival Skills, The Best Creative Nonfiction, and Companions in Wonder: Children and Adults Exploring Nature Together. He is co-founder of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE), and he served for sixteen years as the Book Review Editor of the creative/scholarly journal ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. Mike is Professor of Literature and Environment in the English Department at the University of Nevada, Reno, where he co-founded the nation's first graduate program in Literature and Environment studies.
