Taking The Kids To The Great American Southwest

This comprehensive activity book for children offers more than 50 pages of action-packed fun highlighting the contributions made by Native American, Hispanic, and Anglo peoples to the multi-cultural environment. Projects are presented in a variety of formats such as word searches, puzzles, matching objects, picture construction, and mystery puzzles.

With its soaring azure sky and stark landscapes, the American Southwest is one of the most hauntingly beautiful regions on earth. Yet staggering population growth, combined with the intensifying effects of climate change, is driving the oasis-based society close to the brink of a Dust-Bowl-scale catastrophe. In A Great Aridness, William deBuys paints a compelling picture of what the Southwest might look like when the heat turns up and the water runs out. This semi-arid land, vulnerable to water shortages, rising temperatures, wildfires, and a host of other environmental challenges, is poised to bear the heaviest consequences of global environmental change in the United States. Examining interrelated factors such as vanishing wildlife, forest die backs, and the over-allocation of the already stressed Colorado River--upon which nearly 30 million people depend--the author narrates the landscape's history--and future. He tells the inspiring stories of the climatologists and others who are helping untangle the complex, interlocking causes and effects of global warming. And while the fate of this region may seem at first blush to be of merely local interest, what happens in the Southwest, deBuys suggests, will provide a glimpse of what other mid-latitude arid lands worldwide--the Mediterranean Basin, southern Africa, and the Middle East--will experience in the coming years. Written with an elegance that recalls the prose of John McPhee and Wallace Stegner, A Great Aridness offers an unflinching look at the dramatic effects of climate change occurring right now in our own backyard.

An activity book for children highlighting the contributions of Native American, Hispanic and Anglo peoples to our multi-cultural environment. There are nine sections on The Land, Desert Wonders, Natural Things, Pioneers, Hispanic Heritage, Native Crafts, Kachina Art, Sand Painting, and Mud, Clay and Stone. Projects are presented in a variety of formats such as word searches, puzzles, matching objects, picture construction and more.

Coyote insists the crows teach him how to fly, but the experience ends in diaster.

In this superbly rich epic of fact and reflection, Alex Shoumatoff records his quest to capture the vast multiplicity of the American Southwest. From the Biosphere to the Mormons, from the deadly world of narcotraffickers to the secret lives of the covertly Jewish conversos, Shoumatoff explores the many alternative states of being that have staked their claim in the Southwest. Full of profound sympathy and unique insights, Legends of the American Desert takes us on a kaleidoscopic journey into the most complex and myth-laden region of the American landscape and imagination.

With its vast vistas, splendid sunsets, and rich history, the American Southwest has always inspired superb writing. "Travelers' Tales Southwest" features a choice selection of some of the best by Tony Hillerman, David Roberts, Barbara Kingsolver, Alex Schoumatoff, Terry Tempest Williams, Edward Abbey, and others. Maps.

If the Southwest is known for its distinctive regional culture, it is not only the indigenous influences that make it so. As Anglo Americans moved into the territories of the greater Southwest, they brought with them a desire to reestablish the highest culture of their former homes: opera, painting, sculpture, architecture, and literature. But their inherited culture was altered, challenged, and reshaped by Native American and Hispanic peoples, and a new, vibrant cultural life resulted. From Houston to Los Angeles, from Tulsa to Tucson, Keith L. Bryant traces the development of "high culture" in the Southwest. Humans create culture, but in the Southwest, Bryant argues, the land itself has also influenced that creation. "Incredible light, natural grandeur, . . . and a geography at once beautiful and yet brutal molded societies that sprang from unique cultural sources." The peoples of the American Southwest share a regional consciousness—an experience of place—that has helped to create a unified, but not homogenized, Southwestern culture. Bryant also examines a paradox of Southwestern cultural life. Southwesterners take pride in their cultural distinctiveness, yet they struggled to win recognition for their achievements in "high culture." A dynamic tension between those seeking to re-create a Western European culture and those desiring one based on regional themes and resources continues to stimulate creativity. Decade by decade and city by city, Bryant charts the growth of cultural institutions and patronage as he describes the contributions of artists and performers and of the elites who support them. Bryant focuses on the significant role women played as leaders in the formation of cultural institutions and as writers, artists, and musicians. The text is enhanced by more than fifty photographs depicting the interplay between the people and the land and the culture that has resulted.

Specially designed with the needs of parents in mind, this guide to the American Southwest is filled with vacation-saving ideas for traveling with kids, featuring one-day excursions to the Southwest's greatest destinations.