A New Book from Bill deBuys

New from Oxford University Press:
A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest

Dear Friends:

    Please excuse this act of shameless self-promotion, as well as duplication of messages and other sins of emailing.

    My new book, A Great Aridness, is about to appear.
    The launch will be Sunday, October 30, 3pm at Collected Works Bookstore in Santa Fe.
    If you are anywhere near Santa Fe, I hope you will come.

    One of my favorite writers, Frederick Turner, will be there to discuss the book with me, which guarantees that at least half of the conversation will be characterized by wit and intelligence.
   
    Other book-related events include signings at Moby Dickens in Taos Nov. 12 at 2pm; at Bookworks in Albuquerque Nov. 19 at 3pm; and at Travel Bug in Santa Fe, Dec. 11 at 3pm.

    I will also be having an open conversation Bill McKibben at the Quivira Coalition dinner kicking off Quivira’s annual conference in Albuquerque November 8. More info at www.quiviracoalition.com.

    The book is just beginning to get the attention of reviewers. Here is what Booklist had to say:

          “The untenable water situation in the Southwest has been the subject of several notable titles (Cadillac Desert, 1986; Running Dry, 2010). Now deBuys takes a broad approach in a manner that affirms his standing beside John McPhee and Wallace Stegner. While he focuses on the environmental science of heat and aridity, he also acknowledges the uncertain nature of climate variability itself. As deBuys wanders from Las Vegas to Mesa Verde to the Glen Canyon Dam, he gives the past and present their due as he maps our way to a drier future. As he walks the Mexican/American border, ground zero for the immigration debate, he addresses both countries’ undeniable dependence on the Colorado River. At a mountaintop observatory in Arizona, he faces head-on the complicated biopolitics concerning land that is home to an endangered squirrel, crucial to university astronomers, and held sacred by a local tribe. With wide-eyed wonder and the clearest of prose, deBuys explains why we should care about these places, the people he portrays, and the conundrums over land and water he illuminates. No longer are aridity and climate change in the Southwest only of regional interest; deBuys is writing for America and we should all listen to what he has to say.”        — Colleen Mondor