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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 917.940451
EAN num: 9780140249194
ISBN number: 0140249192
Label: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Manufacturer: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 128
Printing Date: February 01, 1997
Publishing house: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Sale Popularity Level: 181848
Studio: Penguin (Non-Classics)
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
A stunning tribute to the savage beauty of the area known as Death Valley. To most travelers it is a parched, empty territory, unwelcoming and forgiving. In a collection of essays that date back almost a century, naturalist and writer Mary Austin (1868-1934) breathes life into the desert landscape, describing its savage beauty, its plants and animals, and the occasional human visitor.
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Rated by buyers 
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Mary Austin's "Land of Little Rain" is a poetic description of the California desert--but its sometimes strangely structured word paintings of flora and fauna went on for pages and pages and pages:
"South the land rises in very blue hills, blue because thickly wooded with ceanothus and manzanita, the haunt of deer and the border of the Shoshones. Eastward the land goes very far by broken ranges, narrow valleys of pure desertness, and huge mesas, uplifted to the sky-line, east and west, and no man knows the end of it."
After a few pages of this strangely structured and at times abstract lyricism, I would lose my concentration. My mind would wander and when it returned, I would be saying to myself, "What is she talking about?"
The book is hard to read only because its descriptions just do not hold your interest for very long. The few characters Austin describes are also not very engaging.
I had just returned from cross-country skiing in the Sierras and hiking in Death Valley. I wanted to know more about these areas. Because Austin uses the Native American names for locations rather than the commonly used names, you are never sure exactly where she is geographically. This too was disappointing.
I read to page 83 of 113 and quit.
Rated by buyers 
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This book was about the desert and desert people which Austin knows well. Her language is beautiful. I purchased as a gift book for people who love the Southwest and the people.
Rated by buyers -
Mary Austin's work is roughly contemporary with John Muir's, although "The Land of Little Rain" comes after the publication of Muir's best work. It's been said that Mary Austin's work is the finest nature writing between John Muir's and Aldo Leopold's. I dearly love John Muir's writing, but Mary Austin is the better writer. There is a haunting, mystical quality in this book. At times it reads like beautifully stark poetry, like the landscape she describes. For me it reads like music. I read this after visiting Owens Valley, Death Valley and the valleys and mountains between. For me it was an affirmation of what I felt and sensed there. If you let it, the landscape has a way of burning itself into you, and she describes that very well.
Rated by buyers 
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Land of Little Interest would be a better title; it looks like even old Cactus Ed didn't read beyond the very first chapter. All the references he makes in his introduction are from the beginning of the book, and he seems to ignore the rest of the book, as I wish I had. Boring, unless you want to know about what grows subsequent to irrigating ditches. And I still don't know what the hell a "campoodie" is (a term used over and over), but, who cares?
Rated by buyers -
It's pretty easy to write a book that makes people want to go somewhere that already looks appealing to them--Manhattan, Yellowstone, other places where tourists flock to--but to write a book that makes one of the most desolate, bleak, inhospitable places on the entire planet seem like somewhere you have to see for yourself as soon as possible...well, that takes some skill.
That's what Mary Austin has done however, in "The Land of Little Rain." This book examines the wildlife, plants, terrain, weather, and people of Death Valley and the surrounding area, and it does so with the eye and the pen of a true poet.
Mary Austin lavishes her words on this area in sparse, measured prose, and distills the essence of this harsh California desert into sentences and paragraphs. She finds a handful of words that perfectly suit this terrain and the life it supports--words like white, slant, tilt, sessile, and winey--and bends and twists these words every way possible to serve her every purpose.
As a result, the land she describes comes across vividly. She writes of how the desert and the wilderness "uncramps our souls," of "the days too hot and white," of slant-winged scavengers," of wandering hopelessly through the desert trodding on vultures' shadows, of "the westering sun," "the late slant light," of "a stream that knows its purpose and reflects the sky," and of the sun dancing up the slope of a mountain.
Her prose is KILLER.
She also tells firsthand accounts of Death Valley's craziest miners, of little towns that could (kind of, sometimes), and of such sad sights as a cougar lamenting the destruction of its lair and family that had been destroyed by a torrential rainstorm, "crying a very human woe." In another such rainstorm she talks of "a bobcat mother mouthing her drowned kittens in the ruined lair built in the wash...."
I highly recommend this book. It's very brief, and is plotless, but the insights and descriptions are invaluable. I've never been to Death Valley, but I'm already planning on going there.
If the book has faults though, it's in some of the generalizations it makes about the area's people (All Spanish people dance and sing every evening? Really?), and in how abruptly it ends. It's a bit like taking a long, beautiful scenic drive and then ending up in a parking lot.
"This is so great, look at that--oh. Oh, we're there."
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