Blue Mountains Far Away: Journeys into the American Wilderness [Hardcover]

Gregory McNamee (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 2000

In this collection of essays, McNamee presents a startlingly beautiful vision of the miracles of nature and the dangers that humans present to their continuation.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

To live in the vast American Southwest is to understand, writes Gregory McNamee, who lives near Tucson, that "you cannot find a landscape that is not bordered, somewhere, by a blue fringe of mountains." Hence the title of this superb collection of 13 essays that wander the landscape those mountains define. These are meditations on exploration inward and out that revel in nature, honor the environment, touch the land, ponder science and art, contemplate religion, and, with an almost alchemical touch, make big moments small and understandable and small moments big and awesome. The essay "Walking," for instance, is a pointed antidote to the hurly-burly on the surface most of us inhabit:

"Solvitur ambulando," Saint Jerome was fond of saying. To solve a problem, walk around. Walk until your shoe leather falls off, until no moleskin patch can save the tattered remnants of your heels--only walk, walk as only a human can until the mysteries of the ages unravel before you.

There is a lot of walking in these pages--up mountain trails, beside rivers, over deserts, along paths. Indeed, walking is a continuous thread. "To live in the desert requires a certain kind of madness," McNamee writes, "that is epidemic out this way. To wander off into that desert, alone or in company, is to test the very limits of one's endurance and to tempt the end of one's tenure on this otherwise green planet." The point? "Such ventures make us human.... We were made to wander afoot.... and we were made to keep moving. When we settle down, it seems, we tend as a species to become nastier rather than more civilized." For McNamee, these walks within the perimeter of the blue mountains keep him at least civilized if not wholly sane. His evocations are meant to lead us down paths toward blue mountains of our own. --Jeff Silverman

From Publishers Weekly

In his new collection of 13 eclectic and enjoyable essays, nature writer McNamee (A Desert Bestiary, etc.) offers up the minutiae of life in the American wild to make a passionate case for its preservation. Whether he is giving instructions on how to avoid being struck by lightning or mourning the state of the Southwest's once vibrant rivers, McNamee is always aware of the fragile and violent relationship between human culture and the wilderness. In open and direct prose, he rages against shortsighted land development, commercial culture and an attitude that places humans at the center of the world. Instead, he posits a responsible, humble relationship between humans and the relatively pristine lands that remain. In "Growing Up Nuclear," he describes a Cold War childhood lived in fear of nuclear holocaust: "the culture of the Bomb deprived me and my agemates for years of a vision of the future." Yet he transcends such experiences to embrace hope and the challenge to keep the world's natural wonders intact, not for our pleasure, but for their own unmistakable value. As he explains, "We need not run with the wolves or dance with the bears to content ourselves with the notion that there are properly worlds that are not ours to comprehend." (June)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 176 pages
• Publisher: Lyons Press; 1st edition (June 1, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1585740144
• ISBN-13: 978-1585740147
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,601,201 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Gregory McNamee is a writer, journalist, editor, photographer, and consultant in publishing, film, and other media. He is the author or title-page editor of thirty books, including Careers in Renewable Energy: Get a Green Energy Job; Moveable Feasts: The History, Science, and Lore of Food; and Otero Mesa: Preserving America's Wildest Grassland; and of more than three thousand periodical pieces. He is a consultant, contributor, and contributing editor to the Encyclopaedia Britannica and its blog. He is also a regular reviewer for Kirkus Reviews and a contributing editor to The Bloomsbury Review.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars First read of McNamee, March 20, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Blue Mountains Far Away: Journeys into the American Wilderness (Hardcover)

This is my first experience with McNamee's writing, and I thoroughly enjoyed this work. Rarely have I read an environmental work that conveyed so much of the spirit of the Southwest, in such an informative and yet, lighthearted fashion. Here, too, we have blue mountains on the horizon, but they are often obscured by the haze of the the civilization surrounding them. His writing makes me long for the spare uncluttered areas he writes about. It is strange to think of a place where there is so little moisture, since we have so much, yet he makes it come alive.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A small package of brilliance, June 26, 2004

By 

Steven P. Lynn (Outside Tucson, Arizona) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Blue Mountains Far Away: Journeys into the American Wilderness (Hardcover)

McNamee's heartfelt essays of humankind's relationship to the natural world are beautifully and poetically written, and reveal the subleties of the arid American Southwest in much the manner of Edward Abbey, minus the politics. Which is not to say that McNamee does not have strong convictions. His analysis of Las Vegas is searing, as is his detailing of desert development in general. What he points out here is how alive the desert is and how easy it is to miss that aliveness. Those of us who have lived here a long time still learn from these uplifting letters.

6 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing effort for McNamee, January 13, 2001

By 

Jeffrey O. Shallit (Kitchener, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Blue Mountains Far Away: Journeys into the American Wilderness (Hardcover)

Tucson resident Gregory McNamee has written some of the best eco-prose about the Southwest, such as _Gila: The Life and Death of an American River_. But this volume was a real disappointment. A collection of essays from Tucson Weekly, North Dakota Quarterly, and other reviews, this book doesn't achieve any sort of meaningful coherence. The large print and brevity (only 161 pages) means that no topic is covered in any depth. The low for me was a glimpse of Howard Hughes, based uncritically on a biography by Michael Drosnin (who has foisted the execrable Bible Code on a gullible public).

This book doesn't give much bang for the buck. Avoid it, and get a paperback copy of _Gila_ instead.