Customer Reviews

The Anthropology of Turquoise: Reflections on Desert, Sea, Stone, and Sky

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

There are three reasons to possess this book. The first reason: You want to read an author whose prose verges on poetry... "On the Colorado Plateau... nights come less as a smooth pause than as a steep, enduring purity of eye-blind dark. (In the day) The mesa's colors in their flanks - terra cotta, blood-red salmon, vermilion - bear the temperament of iron."

Second: Color for you, as for flowers, are a part of your being. You draw colors into your life as an elixir to defeat life's monotony. Ellen Meloy is a master wordsmith. She, more than most, knows that colors "challenge language to encompass them", yet, unabashedly, she tracks down the colors of nature, feels them, tastes them, holds them in her mind and then vividly gives them life. No color is sacrosanct to her. Yes, orange, red, blue, green will all find an expression, but Meloy seeks, not the plebeian, but the unusual, unique, even ruthless colors: burnt sienna, magenta, burgundy red, Prussian blue and of course turquoise, "the stone of the desert," "the color of yearning,". For Meloy; "Colors bear the metaphors of entire cultures. They convey every sensation from lust to distress. Flowers use colors ruthlessly for sex. Moths steal them from their surroundings and disappear. A cactus spines glows red-gold in the angle of sun, like an electrocuted aura." Life is good.

Finally, you will find in Ellen Meloy a forthright lover of nature. She is a south westerner, lover of the desert and outdoors woman who sees in desert life the paradoxes of being. She calls for attention as she expresses the damage to the earth that we are so thoughtlessly committing. She points out how we, Homo sapiens, are the first species to witness and will our own extinction. Her social - naturalist commentary is balanced with humor and memoirs; her narrative is both captivating and informative. She is at her best when she sticks to the southwest, but the chapters that chronicle her forays to the Bahamas and the Yucatan are nonetheless engaging. This is a well-crafted work that is filled with captivating metaphors, naturalism, travelogue, memoirs and humor. If you seek award winning writing, are captivated by colors and find sustenance in the natural world this is a highly recommended read. 4.5 stars

Did this ever happen to you, you close the pages of a well-written book and you just sigh for a minute, wishing it had not ended? And then as it happens you open up your daily newspaper and find out that the author has died, died even perhaps as you were reading and admiring her prose style? I first read "Swimming in Mojave" two years ago in the magazine ORION, and I laughed out loud thinking of the author trying to beat the desert heat by swimming across the sands, like a John Cheever character, in every swimming pool at every motel and resort her family could find. Recently I found this book, THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF TURQUOISE, and settled in for the pleasure of a whole collection of essays, and some well-researched bits of historical fact and fancy about the mineral turquoise, another hobby of mine.

The book took me over two weeks to finish, as I kept putting it down to admire the author's flights of fancy and beautiful language. There wasn't much of a story, but as I read it now, and think about the different essays from The "Deeds and Sufferings of Light" to the final chapters of "Brides of Place" and "Passing through Green to Reach It," I see so clearly how her words speak to the drive in every one who lives out West to stay alive and to see the possibility and grandeur in all of the things God or the Devil created. Ellen Meloy has left us, but she has left us with a magnificent charge, to go into the world unafraid and to urge the others to "You come, too."

Enthusiastic Recommend: The Anthropology of Turquoise by Ellen Meloy
I finished this book sitting in my camp chair on the edge of Capital Reef National Park - on the side of Boulder Mountain looking into the vista of the water pocket fold and the Henry Mountains. It was four days after I ran a half marathon, and I was decompressing on a camping trip. The scenery was amazing, Meloy's writing just as good.
Meloy lives not all that far from where I was sitting, in what I would call an "outpost of nowhere" in southern Utah on what she calls the "salsa farm beside the river." She's a desert rat with a keen sense of surroundings and life.
Her book is about a lot of things; it's a collection of essays loosely tied by the idea of turquoise - the color and the rock. But the essays that spoke to me were the ones about the land, the desert southwest and the creatures, plant and animal, that inhabit it. Meloy can bring you inside a flower, near a big horn sheep, into the river, out into the night sky. She made me ache to be part of the natural world, her desert world. Her prose is poetic. Here's a taste. This is what she writes about the river that is so deeply engrained in her soul when she finds herself swimming after her boat: "What happens when I surrender to the aloof, silken creature that hurls me down its spine?" Again, about her river: "I write a book about a river and cannot tell if it's a love story or an obituary or both."
She cares deeply about her land. And she also writes about writing: "Writers write because they can't shut up." This resonated. I have found my voice in my fifth decade of life. But I have also found other voices, voices like Meloy's that are worth shutting up to hear.

Ellen Meloy quotes Goethe, "The highest goal that man can achieve is amazement." The Anthropology of Turquoise leaves the reader amazed, by her rich and vivid prose, and by how it urges us to engage the natural world around us with fresh, hungry senses.

Meloy decries American's "entrenched national resistance to anything the least bit inconvenient or uncomfortable," but her emphasis, overall, is affirmation not critique. So she describes our brains as a "three-pound mass of neurons wired for an organic, sensory relationship to place... We are blood-tied to landscape by the language of cells. Although we may be hell-bent for metaphysical starvation, trying with all our might to surrender our sensory intelligence to technology and massive artifice, it will take time for these million-years-old senses to atrophy, to go the way of our tail, devolved to a bony nub. In the meantime here we are staggering about the diminishing wilds, greedy to feed those ossifying lobes with light."

Anthropology of Turquoise takes its place, along with her final book, Eating Stone, among my very most favorite books of all time

I stumbled on this book during one of those periods in which I become overwhelmed by an urge to go and sit in the desert. Such feelings come to me from time to time. Unfortunately this wasn't practical at the time so I sought to satisfy my longing vicariously. Hence my browsing Amazon and my discovery of this book. Prior to that time I had never heard of the author or her book.

It's difficult to categorize this book. The best that I can do is describe it. It is a collection of essays in which the author muses about various geologies, mostly the southwest, her feelings about the outdoors and her relationship with color. But there are many, many digressions including such subjects as her personal history and the social/political nature of Utah. For the most part I found these digressions enjoyable. Like others have commented I found many passages in which her prose is almost poetical. There are sentences, paragraphs and whole pages that one is tempted to read out loud to anyone who would care to listen. But there are also times that the flights of fancy become a little bit too personal, a little bit too abstruse. It is for this reason that I give it only four stars.

Having said that I would still recommend this book. It is best read when one is in a quiet frame of mind, with no expectation of plot or narrative. As such it fulfilled my desire to go and sit in the desert without leaving home. And I came to appreciate the author's approach to life, her love of nature, her love of being alone and her sometimes irreverent habit of contrasting the lyricism of the desert with the more humorous and profane aspects of life. Doing so only helps one appreciate to totality of life.

At times I found myself wondering why anyone would feel compelled to write such a book. I'm sure the author would reply that a writer writes because she has to. Writing is an indispensable part of the author's life. A life that the reader comes to share. Perhaps this is why, when I discovered half way through the book that the author had died unexpectedly in 2004 at the age of 58, that I felt a pain inside.

I'll probably read another book by Ellen Meloy. Hopefully while sitting on a mesa somewhere. With no expectations.

This book moved me deeply - many times, at surprising moments, and about a dizzying array of topics.

It's impossible to breeze through this book. One Amazon reviewer described it as "lyrical"; another "like poetry." I'd agree with both - "prose-etry" if that's a word? While reading this book, MANY MANY times, I had to stop after a paragraph, catch my breath, re-read it - then put the book down altogether because the passages were so insightful, thought-provoking, and beautiful.

About crossing the Mojave: "the heat and aridity can kill you, and if they do not, you might die from the intimidating despair evoked by a vast emptiness that is wholly indifferent to your existence." About wearing heirloom pearl necklace: "...I wear the pearls with sun-bleached cotton shirts on strolls to visit cliffrose in bloom, renewing their luster with my skin, remembering a stalwart lineage of pearl-wearers, their necks bearing strands of perfectly matched spheres on every occasion that mattered in their lives, from college graduation to tea dances for the war effort and weddings in dresses the color of gardenias...."

Ellen Meloy doesn't just SEE color, she FEELS it; it provokes emotional connections - as does the contrast of one color against another - and she's able to describe it in a way that made me feel like I'm listening to someone talk about visiting another dimension. It also made me wonder, "I see color, why have I missed all that?" That's why we have writers. She has an uncanny ability to weave poetry with prose, her own intense connection with color, cultural observations, and humankind's connection to the planet into a sentence that stopped me in my tracks. Scores of times - literally. Her life's experience includes the desert, rafting, and a sojourn to the Caribbean and her learning about family history intertwined with slavery.

As I was reading this book, I kept thinking, "I have GOT to meet this woman. And I have GOT to own something she has painted with her own hands." Alas, in doing research about an hour after I finished the book (and I'm a procrastinator!), I was deeply saddened to learn that she is no longer with us.

I'd put this book in my top 10, and would recommend it to anyone. It would be great for a book club - but I'd recommend more than one session to discuss it! Get a copy, find a quiet spot, pour yourself a cup of tea or glass of wine, and savor each page. Prepare to "read, rinse, repeat" - because you won't be able to breeze through this book. You won't want to - you'll want to savor every page.

This lyrical, beautifully written book shows the author's love for not only the desert regions of the Southwest, but also for the color turquoise, the color of our skies and the color of the stone lovingly set in the jewelry that defines the region.

You will learn to appreciate tiny details about living in the desert, and you will come to see the land and its beauty through a new light, colored, of course, by shades of turquoise.

Enjoy!

A lovely, to be savored read about how color (naturally she focuses on turquoise) and light affect culture. She has a wonderful way with words and I enjoyed the memoir-essay-musing feel of this natural history book. I experienced many emotions while reading this and isn't that a good enough reason to read anything??

Once again, this woman's writing touches my soul. Truly one of America's best nature writers. She is sorely missed. She never fails to help me learn to use all my senses.

No one writes the feel of the southest like Ellen Meloy. Reading her is second only to being there.