Publisher's Weekly Review
In these perceptive essays, Conaway (The Far Side of Eden) shows how development and tourism are laying waste to America's natural and cultural landscapes. Entertaining as well as astute, the pieces revolve around his impressions of exceptional places he considers "physical and spiritual barometers" of the country's health, including the Boise River in Idaho (overused and polluted), Napa Valley in California (disfigured by gigantic wineries and McMansions) and national parks (considered "saleable products" by elected officials and adversely affected by too many tourists, toilets, buses, concessionaires and paved highways). On Western communal lands that should be preserved by the Bureau of Land Management, such as New Mexico's Bisti Badlands and Wyoming's Big Piney, energy exploration and extraction, grazing and all-terrain vehicles are taking their toll. On the grounds of Washington, D.C.'s National Cathedral, "development needs" have resulted in new buildings, accommodations for tour buses and a huge gymnasium, so that an institution supposedly dedicated to saving souls has been turned into an "engine of tourism, development, and controversy." Conaway argues persuasively that these irreplaceable landscapes stand for the real America, but because we are sacrificing them to material concerns, we're losing our culture along with the very ground upon which America was built. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Preservation magazine editor-at-large Conaway (The Far Side of Eden: New Money, Old Land, and the Battle for Napa Valley, 2002, etc.) goes on a walkabout, looking for the America that doesn't make the headlines. Over in, say, Rock Springs, Wyo., time was when a person could find a patch of dirt and grow a few things to eat. When Conaway arrived, he found a "nightmare of development," courtesy of the oil-industry-friendly Bush administration, which did away with the usual precautions "in the frenzied abandonment of environmental and community standards," yielding a raped-and-pillaged landscape that even the worst strip miner could only have dreamed of a generation earlier. Up on the Strip, that remote part of the country where the Grand Canyon divides a chunk of Arizona from the rest of the state, Mormon ranchers struggle to keep a few cattle alive in country so parched that "dust got into ears and nose and formed little mud deltas at the corners of our eyes." In Orange, Va., the better-off among the landed gentry gather on their farms, places where pickup trucks are unknown, to go chasing after foxes--but mostly to eat oysters and clams and tournedos of beef and drink and drink. Each of Conaway's forays into odd corners of the country is an anthropological exercise of a kind, introducing readers to people who inhabit places that could use a little preserving--as, he insists, does the entire public domain, a commonweal that is rapidly disappearing in a country that "denies itself nothing, including squandered resources requiring the abandonment of whole cultures and the destruction of the very ground upon which America was built." A lively, literate and pained visit to American places too little seen, deserving a place alongside Steinbeck's Travels with Charley and William Least Heat-Moon's Blue Highways. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Preservation magazine editor Conaway has crafted essays both poignant and combative as he details aspects of the country's natural and cultural history that are steadily being destroyed. He points out that the very idea of improving the land is a misnomer given the destruction of its character and the use of concrete and other things to entomb its timeless past. Readers will be stunned by what Conaway uncovers in his travels, from the dubious success brought by Wyoming s Big Piney gas field to the ironclad control of water usage by irrigators in Boise. Memories of Hurricane Betsy in New Orleans reveal truths known in 1965, but not appreciated until Katrina. And a visit to the Dry Tortugas national park causes him to wax rhapsodic about losing the battle to maintain some of the last places where citizens can escape the relentless merchandizing that has come to characterize contemporary life. Consider this an elegantly written wake-up call to all of us who take our nation for granted.--Mondor, Colleen Copyright 2007 Booklist
