Home Is the Desert

by Ann Woodin

Book Overview

Marrying a herpetologist in the lush eastern coastal US prepared her not all for her husband's field of expertise to lead them to the arid Sonoran desert in south eastern Arizona to raise four boys... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0816508577
• ISBN13: 9780816508570
• Release Date: May 1984
• Publisher: University of Arizona Press
• Length: 247 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.

Customer Reviews

A strangely moving autobiography

We read this book several years ago, and even back then the book was quite old being published back in the sixties. It is told by Ann Woodin, a woman originally from back East who marries a biologist. That might have been the end of it, but she ends up moving with him to the desert Southwest next to Phoenix where he ends up working at a national park there. Once in her new environment she is not overly enthusiastic, and her first impression is that everything is "prickly." Over time she comes to appreciate and greatly love her new desert home. She relates many interesting and/or charming anecdotes that she, her husband, and her children had about their adventures in the daytime and nightime wilds of Arizona, the pros and cons (sometimes quite humorous) of temporarily hosting wild animals that eventually become more like pets, and throughout the first-person narrative that truly conveys her transformation from a reluctant transplant to someone who truly came to love the desert and its way of life. Sadly the area they lived in so long ago has, in all likelihood, vastly transformed due to the relentless urban sprawl, and chances are one would little recognize the area they lived in assuming that anything even remains there. But for those of us who truly appreciated this book, at least it lives on in our memories...and on obscure library bookshelves like ours here in Minnesota to pleasantly surprise the patient reader who is willing to give it a chance. Their children truly had a rare and remarkable childhood experience, not unlike my own in many regards up here in the Minnesota wilds--although my childhood environment was a lot wetter and greener. Perhaps that is why this book resonated with me so well. I guess I would define this book as one of those that you read in less than a week but remember for a lifetime. I sure would be curious to know what ever happened to all of them.... Thanks, Ann. You did a fine job.