Read more
"An exploration of California's deserts and their biodiversity, including hundreds of watercolor maps and trail paintings"--
List of contents
ABRIDGED TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction: A Promise of Life and Death: Journey into the Desert Heart
Keys and measures
1. The Dire and the Sublime: Exploring California desert physiography
2. Every Sacred Drop: California desert water
3. The Living Network: Desert plant habitats
4. Big Desert Parcels of Federal and State Land: Parks, monuments, and military inholdings
5. Of Sagebrush and Solitude: The Great Basin Desert in California
6. Of Resilience and Fragility: The Mojave Desert in California
7. Of the Remote and the Rugged: The Colorado-Sonoran Desert in California
8. Philosophies of What Comes Next: California’s Tomorrow Desert
Acknowledgments
Glossary
Notes
Selected Bibliography
About the Author
About the author
Obi Kaufmann is the author of The California Field Atlas (2017, #1 San Francisco Chronicle Best Seller), The State of Water (2019), The Forests of California (2020), and The Coasts of California (2022), all published by Heyday. When he is not backpacking, you can find the painter-poet at home in the East Bay, posting trail paintings at his handle @coyotethunder on Instagram. His speaking tour dates are available at californiafieldatlas.com, and his essays are posted at coyoteandthunder.com.
Summary
A magnificent illustrated journey into California’s famed deserts and the astonishingly abundant life they contain.
2023 Glenn Goldman Award Winner for California Lifestyle, Chosen by the California Independent Booksellers Alliance
A San Francisco Chronicle Bestseller!
From Obi Kaufmann, author-illustrator of the best-selling California Field Atlas, comes a grand adventure through time, geography, and ecology in California’s deserts. Of a piece with his richly illustrated books The Forests of California and The Coasts of California, this volume features hundreds of vivid watercolor maps and illustrations, blending art and science to breathtaking effect. Journeying through the Great Basin, Mojave, Colorado, and Sonoran Deserts, Kaufmann pays special attention to national and state parks and monuments, and to the dozens of wilderness areas that reveal the underappreciated natural abundance of California’s arid lands.
From Joshua Tree to Death Valley, these deserts full of life, as Kaufmann evokes them, are perfect places for meditating on our future, and for imagining a California that might thrive beyond the age of climate breakdown. The Deserts of California is a canonical entry into the literature of the American deserts, uniquely colorful and celebratory, and abounding in hope and wonder.
