Blue Mountains Far Away: Journeys Into the American Wilderness

McNamee's heartfelt essays of humankind's relationship to the natural world are beautifully and poetically written, and reveal the subleties of the arid American Southwest in much the manner of Edward Abbey, minus the politics. Which is not to say that McNamee does not have strong convictions. His analysis of Las Vegas is searing, as is his detailing of desert development in general. What he points out here is how alive the desert is and how easy it is to miss that aliveness. Those of us who have lived here a long time still learn from these uplifting letters.

This is my first experience with McNamee's writing, and I thoroughly enjoyed this work. Rarely have I read an environmental work that conveyed so much of the spirit of the Southwest, in such an informative and yet, lighthearted fashion. Here, too, we have blue mountains on the horizon, but they are often obscured by the haze of the the civilization surrounding them. His writing makes me long for the spare uncluttered areas he writes about. It is strange to think of a place where there is so little moisture, since we have so much, yet he makes it come alive.