Bonelight: Ruin and Grace in the New Southwest »

When Upstate New Yorker Mary Sojourner reluctantly agreed to visit the Grand Canyon of Arizona nearly two decades ago, she little suspected that she was about to lose her heart to the daunting, gut-wrenching beauty of the Southwest, or that she would shortly find there a home, a passion for the land, and a cause in protecting it. Since then, she has become acclaimed as an environmental writer and respected as a grassroots activist protesting the heedless development of the Southwest's increasingly precious and embattled open spaces. The essays collected in bonelight reflect Sojourner's southwestern journey from greenhorn to old-timer, from tourist to committed defender of the land and the human communities that share it. She writes of exploring the deserts, forests, canyons, mountains, and river rapids of the Southwest, and of her passionate love for this austere and ravishing landscape; of family, friends, and lovers, a woman's wary passage into middle age, the discovery of peace and balance in the execution of mundane chores and in the close observation of natural surroundings; of the ways that development is destroying the Southwest's fragile beauty, and of the greed and spiritual emptiness that motivate much of this development. There is humor here, and adventure, and the intense intimacy of a writer who dares to confront the world around her with bold candor and a lover's tender gaze. Mary Sojourner's Southwest is a world that, through these graceful and engaging essays, we can all share -- and fall in love with.