Travelers Tales American Southwest

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.

The ancient trail from Santa Fe, New Mexico to Crescent Junction near Green River, Utah was a good route for travel for the early settlers. The sixteen diaries or journals in this book give individual perspectives to the adventures and difficulties encountered on these treks.

Tom Miller's Southwest is a vortex of cockfights and cantinas, of black velvet paintings and tacky bolo ties, of eco-militants, border-crossers, and eccentric characters whose outlook is as spare and elemental as the desert that surrounds them. This is Miller's turf. With wit and insight, he reveals how the clichés of romanticism and capitalism have run amuck in his homeland. When a saguaro cactus outside Phoenix kills its own assassin, it becomes clear that no other guide to the Southwest manifests such a clear moral vision while reveling in the joy of this magnificent land and its people. Originally published by National Geographic as Jack Ruby's Kitchen Sink, it received the Gold Award for Best Travel Book in 2000 from the Society of American Travel Writers. Tom Miller has been writing about the American Southwest and Latin America for more than three decades. His ten books include The Panama Hat Trail, which follows the making and marketing of one Panama hat, and Trading with the Enemy, which Lonely Planet says "may be the best travel book about Cuba ever written." Miller began his journalism career in the underground press of the late '60s and early '70s, and has written articles for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, Smithsonian Magazine, Natural History, and Rolling Stone. He lives in Tucson, Arizona, with his wife, Regla.

This updated and expanded edition of American Southwest Travel-Smart has four new chapters on Arizona and two new chapters on New Mexico. It also includes fun special-interest tours.

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

The cult-y pocket-size field guide to the strange and intriguing secrets of the Mojave—its myths and legends, outcasts and oddballs, flora, fauna, and UFOs—becomes the definitive, oracular book of the desert For the past five years, Desert Oracle has existed as a quasi-mythical, quarterly periodical available to the very determined only by subscription or at the odd desert-town gas station or the occasional hipster boutique, its canary-yellow-covered, forty-four-page issues handed from one curious desert zealot to the next, word spreading faster than the printers could keep up with. It became a radio show, a podcast, a live performance. Now, for the first time—and including both classic and new, never-before-seen revelations—Desert Oracle has been bound between two hard covers and is available to you. Straight out of Joshua Tree, California, Desert Oracle is “The Voice of the Desert”: a field guide to the strange tales, singing sand dunes, sagebrush trails, artists and aliens, authors and oddballs, ghost towns and modern legends, musicians and mystics, scorpions and saguaros, out there in the sand. Desert Oracle is your companion at a roadside diner, around a campfire, in your tent or cabin (or high-rise apartment or suburban living room) as the wind and the coyotes howl outside at night. From journal entries of long-deceased adventurers to stray railroad ad copy, and musings on everything from desert flora, rumored cryptid sightings, and other paranormal phenomena, Ken Layne's Desert Oracle collects the weird and the wonderful of the American Southwest into a single, essential volume.

A guide to the history and culture of the American Southwest, as told through early encounters with fifteen iconic sites This unique guide for literate travelers in the American Southwest tells the story of fifteen iconic sites across Arizona, New Mexico, southern Utah, and southern Colorado through the eyes of the explorers, missionaries, and travelers who were the first non-natives to describe them. Noted borderlands historians David J. Weber and William deBuys lead readers through centuries of political, cultural, and ecological change. The sites visited in this volume range from popular destinations within the National Park System—including Carlsbad Caverns, the Grand Canyon, and Mesa Verde—to the Spanish colonial towns of Santa Fe and Taos and the living Indian communities of Acoma, Zuni, and Taos. Lovers of the Southwest, residents and visitors alike, will delight in the authors’ skillful evocation of the region’s sweeping landscapes, its rich Hispanic and Indian heritage, and the sense of discovery that so enchanted its early explorers. Published in Cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University

Offers several true stories of the old West, ranging from humorous to touching to tragic and violent - all told with frankness and candour. They offer interesting glimpses of the role of ranchers and other settlers, cowboys, adventurers, soldiers, and lawmen in the history of the region.

Essays by well-known travel writers--including Frances Mayes, Jan Morris, Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, and Ferenc MbtT--guide readers through the beautiful, sun-baked hills of Tuscany in search of friendly locals, breathtaking scenery, scrumptious dining, and award-winning wine. Original.