Savage Dreams A Journey into the Hidden Wars of the American West [Paperback]

A beautiful, absorbing, tragic book. Larry McMurtry

In 1851, a war began in what would become Yosemite National Park, a war against the indigenous inhabitants. A century laterin 1951and a hundred and fifty miles away, another war began when the U.S. government started setting off nuclear bombs at the Nevada Test Site. It was called a nuclear testing program, but functioned as a war against the land and people of the Great Basin.

In this foundational book of landscape theory and environmental thinking, Rebecca Solnit explores our national Eden and Armageddon and offers a pathbreaking history of the west, focusing on the relationship between culture and its implementation as politics. In a new preface, she considers the continuities and changes of these invisible wars in the context of our current climate change crisis, and reveals how the long arm of these histories continue to inspire her writing and hope.

Rebecca Solnitis the author of many books, includingStorming the Gates of Paradise,Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas, andUnfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas, all from UC Press.

A beautiful, absorbing, tragic book. . . . Rebecca Solnit tells this story with the passion and clarity it deserves. Larry McMurtry

The product of a stunningly original and expansive imagination. Savage Dreams ties together the histories of Yosemite National Park and the Nevada Test Site& to illuminate the political stakes of how we think about, and act upon, the landscape. SF Weekly

Savage Dreams summons us to the campfires of resistance. Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz

Savage Dreams is about many things: despoliation and restoration, finding a voice between contemporary noise and silence, making friends and enemies. Most of all, though, it may be about a journey into history: about how understanding history and making it are not really very different. Greil Marcus, authorl3½