Gathering the Desert

by Gary Paul Nabhan and Paul Mirocha

Book Overview

Winner of the John Burroughs Association's John Burroughs Medal for natural history writing and a Southwest Book Award from the Border Regional Library Association

To the untrained eye, a desert is a wasteland that defies civilization; yet the desert has been home to native cultures for centuries and offers sustenance in its surprisingly wide range of plant life. Gary Paul Nabhan has combed the desert in search of plants forgotten by all but...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0816510148
• ISBN13: 9780816510146
• Release Date: August 1986
• Publisher: University of Arizona Press
• Length: 220 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 7.1" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

my third copy

I was born and raised in the southern california desert, and am fascinated by how people lived here. this book has shone a fascinating lite on the desert and its inhabitants, animal, plant and human. it tells a great story. it also shows how we have lost so much to advancing our own culture. this is my third copy. I have read this book over several times, passed it on to friends, as well as purchased it for friends.

Desert Bsh Tucker

This is a pretty good book, well worth buying. It is especially geared to the Sonoran desert but has a couple of plants that are in the Chihuahuan desert also.

The author is not just an Ethnobotanist, he's a Poet!

Quite simply, read this book. It turns the subject of "ethnoecology" (sounds dull, doesn't it?!) into a poetic duet of plants and the relationship native peoples developed with them. Nabhan, in this book, profiles several individual species (found in his beloved Sonoran desert) as intimately as a biographer would profile an admired personage. The illustrations are delicate and so accurate you could go out and identify each species at first sight. I became enchanted, and wistful, at Nabhan's accounts of ingenious interactions of Southwest Amerinds and useful plants that allowed both to survive and thrive in such a harsh region. Wistful, because many of these vital prehistoric resources, such as panic grass and sandfood, are unknown to modern peoples, and virtually extinct. And with them, human ability to survive such harsh landscapes without radically modifying them is going extinct as well. From Nabhan's perspective (in all his books), native peoples of a region are not interlopers, but another component of a balanced local ecology; the ecological diversity & resource potentials lost when the First World imposes foreign ecologies on regions is a subtext of all Nabhan's writings.Each chapter of "Gathering the Desert" stands by itself; but together they lead to a conclusion of incomparable adaptation to what Euro-Americans see as a cactus "wasteland". I assign readings from this book, and the entire book, to my college classes in Southwest Indians and ecological anthropology. However, it has much wider appeal, and to call it "highly readable" is an understatement. I respect Nabhan's careful academic research and his commitment to actually going into the field to experience the peoples and the natural environment directly. I admire even more his ability to make what is very commonly a dull reporting of "what people ate" into a literary symphony. All his books are excellent; this is the best of the best.