Legends of the American Desert: Sojourns in the Greater Southwest
Alex Shoumatoff
Language: English
Pages: 533
ISBN: 0394569156
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
For his brilliant reportage ranging from the forested recesses of the Amazon to the manicured lawns of Westchester County, New York, Alex Shoumatoff has won acclaim as one of our most perceptive guides to the oddest corners of the earth. Now, with this book, he takes us on a kaleidoscopic journey into the most complex and myth-laden region of the American landscape and imagination.
In this amazing narrative, Shoumatoff records his quest to capture the vast multiplicity of the American Southwest. Beginning with his first trip after college across the desert in a station wagon, some twenty-five years ago, he surveys the boundless variety of people and experiences constituting the place--the idea--that has become America's symbol and last redoubt of the "Other. 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 who have staked their claim in the Southwest, making it a haven for every brand of refugee, fugitive, and utopian. And as he ventures across time and space, blending many genres--history, anthropology, natural science, to name only a few--he brings us a wealth of information on chile addiction, the diffusion of horses, the formation of the deserts and mountain ranges, the struggles of the Navajo to preserve their culture, and countless other aspects of this place we think we know.
Full of profound sympathy and unique insights, Legends of the American Desert is a superbly rich epic of fact and reflection destined to take its place among such classics of regional portraiture as Ian Frazier's Great Plains. Alex Shoumatoff has created an exuberant celebration of a singularly American reality.
among the most pious Catholics, while holding on to vestiges of Judaism, such as lighting candles on Friday, their descendants in time not even knowing why they did it except that it was a family tradition. Another scholar, Martin Cohen, writes that there is “no evidence that any Jew … reached New Spain during the sixteenth century, and scant evidence for the balance of the colonial period.” No one, in any case, was ever convicted of being a Jew in New Mexico. One governor, Lopez de Mendocino,
searching for new space, more freedom. Traditional class distinctions were meaningless on the frontier, but the settlers tended to be belligerently nationalistic and ready to magnify minor incidents into war. The “frontier hypothesis” elaborated in 1893 by Frederick Jackson Turner in his seminal essay “The Significance of the Frontier in Western History” postulated the “formation of a composite nationality” in the “crucible of the frontier.” This dominated scholarly thinking for decades. Modern
little concern about fallout,” recalled the sixty-seven-year-old Hopkins, who had short white hair and a short-sleeved white shirt and epitomized the neutral, rational, disembodied scientist so much in evidence in Los Alamos. “A test in the Pacific had irradiated a Japanese fishing boat, the Lucky Dragon, and a number of Marshall Islanders. But I worked with accelerator-induced radiation for twenty years, and I’m still here. I’ll bet you can’t find a single Los Alamosan, whether he is happy or
and visit with one of Abelardo’s cousins, Segundino Blanchette, who is descended from the same soldier and has similar hypopigmented skin and eyes. The two most common forms of oculo-cutaneous albinism are recessive, so you need two copies of the gene, one from either parent, to get them. About one in forty thousand white Europeans is an albino. I don’t know what the ratio is in Zaire, but I’ve seen a few of them there, and they are striking. On my list of projects is to travel across equatorial
has ended up in Taos. Taos is still the raw frontier, where few questions are asked, and it attracts all kinds of fugitives. Like sixty-nine-year-old Lawrence “Howie” Krantz, who was arrested in Taos for having stolen $270,000 from a church treasury in Suffern, New York, ten years earlier, back when he was Clyde Womer. Or charming, handsome Judd Adam Platt, who turned up in Taos in 1986. Before long he moved in with the ex-wife of the manager of the ski area, and they converted her home into an