cover image Desert Time: A Journey Through the American Southwest

Desert Time: A Journey Through the American Southwest

Diana Kappel-Smith. Little Brown and Company, $22.95 (262pp) ISBN 978-0-316-48298-1

A self-confessed interloper from Connecticut, Kappel-Smith ( Wintering ) attempts to interpret the Southwest by examining its geology and the people, plants and animals that dot its unique landforms. Here, she extends the region from its normal boundaries of West Texas, New Mexico and Arizona to include deserts in Colorado, Idaho, even Oregon. The author gets much mileage from her considerable writing talent as she conducts a series of trips to sand dunes, Anasazi ruins on high cliffs, a sacred canyon of the Tohono O'odham Indians and the unlikely civilization around the Salton Sea in California. But eloquence does not substitute for the understanding born of long experience, and the author's hit-and-run encounters with an alien world do not, in this case, fill the bill. Illustrations. (Nov.)