"This colorful field guide for all ages illustrates and identifies the plants and animals of North America's four major desert regions: Sonoran, Mojave, Chihuahuan, and Great Basin."

"Following the model of the medieval Latin bestiaries, Gregory McNamee has written a book at once naturalistic, folkloristic, and literary, made up of short essays on forty-three animals of the world's deserts. These essays discuss the creatures as they are and as they are imagined, and bring their natural lives and histories vividly to the page."

"Whitford incorporates a systems perspective to the examination of how arid lands work and proper management guidelines. Chapters cover landforms, geomorphology, and vegetation; characterization of desert climates; wind and water processes; patch-mosaic dynamics; adaptations; primary production; consumption and secondary production; decomposition and nutrient cycling; desertification; and monitoring and assessment." [Book News]

"Like the highest mountain peaks, deserts are environments that can be inhospitable even to the most seasoned explorers. As Craig Childs makes clear in this highly praised book, there are two easy ways to die in the desert: thirst or drowning. His extraordinary treks through arid lands in search of water—mysterious solitary water holes, a network of streams that flow only at night, a gushing fountain that conceals a hidden lake, serene and otherworldy—are an astonshing revelation of the natural world at its most extreme."

"In Soul of Nowhere, Craig Childs answers the call of fierce placesÑthe more desolate the landscape, the more passionately he is drawn to it. Childs tracks a broad territory: the Sierra Madre mountains in northern New Mexico, the canyons of Utah, the White Mountain Apache Reservation, a deserted island in the Sea of Cortez. In his much-anticipated follow-up to The Secret Knowledge of Water, Childs reconfirms his singular voice and discovers the passion and grace of desolate places."