Desert Oracle, Vol. 1: Strange True Tales from the American Southwest

Layne (Dignity) delivers a playful potpourri of lore, obscure facts, geographic meditations, and conservationist advocacy in this eclectic collection of desert-themed essays. The author presents the desert as a home worthy of protecting and suggests it is a source of meaning. “There is purpose waiting out here, for anyone who comes in honest pursuit of it,” he writes in the introduction, and the essays that follow tell how he and others found such purpose. An empathetic essay on “wandering philosopher” Edward Abbey imagines wilderness as “a haven for outlaws,” and essays on UFOs and the Yucca Man tackle myths with humor and curiosity. Several pieces provide something of a cultural history of the American Southwest, covering the legacy of Marty Robbins’s western music, William Burroughs’s time in Los Alamos, and the cultish “Solar Lodge.” Layne concludes with a poetically pitched message to keep the desert “a wild, open landscape available for our encounters with the mysterious and the divine.” With his succinct, descriptive, narrative-driven prose, Layne creates a fascinating homage to the beauty of an often unforgiving landscape. (Dec.)