Customer Reviews

Reaching Keet Seel: Ruin's Echo & the Anasazi

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I beg to differ with the reviewer from Kirkus associates. The guy's a pompous windbag and if he actually read the whole book, I doubt seriously if he understands what he read. The book is not and does not profess to be a work of anthropological science. It is a look into one man's reactions to historical places which cannot be described, but have to be experienced to feel their effects. Again and again, Reg Saner captured these effects, along with his "show me" quest, poetically with a mastery of language seldom seen anywhere. The reviewer claimed that the writing style hurt his teeth. I suggest he sees a dentist, for the writing is great. Like the places they describe, the essays need be experienced for their full effect. I won't do them the dishonor of inadequate description here. The book is an informative, thought-provoking read. As one who has been researching the Anasazi, Pueblo, and Hopi for some time, I place this book near the top of my favorites list of the last 25 books I've read on the subject. The essay, "Spirit Root" should win an award of some sort. It's fabulous. To anyone reading my review, I say get the book. To the reviewer who was so shallow, wishy-washy and unkind, I say get a life.

Shooshie

I first discovered Reg Saner after reading about him in Denver's Bloomsbury Review--a regional book review periodical. Shortly afterward, while browsing an on-line bookstore I found his "The Four-Cornered Falcon: Essays on the Interior West and the Natural Scene" as a remainder. That book spoke to me. Each essay another gem of insight into the natural scene of the Southwest. "Reaching Keet Seel" is more of the same. This time an attempt to come to terms from 600 years hence with the Anasazi--a people who learned to prosper in corner of the world that is now largely barren.

One of my favorite books about one of my favorite destinations. This is a collection of brief essays that is the perfect companion for a trip to the Four Corners area and the abounding ruins and sites of the Anazasi. Its not a book detailing where to go and how to get the most for your tourist dollar. Rather its a musing reflection on what its like to visit these places from the perspective of a 21st century traveler. These writings draw our attention to the feelings evoked by the experience of wandering among the reminders of another people, another culture, another cosmology and way of understanding what life is about. I have been to Keet Seel. Its a demanding walk. I appreciated having the opportunity to travel back there with someone who provided words to some of the feelings I experienced at the time. A subtext of these writings is the idea of the sacred in a postmodern world that has chased that concept into small corners of carefully bounded scholarship. The author discovers it abounding all around us and that we are desperate to recover some sense of it for ourselves. The trip to Keet Seel and the other destinations is a rediscovery of its significance and meaning for human existence.

I agree with the editorial (Kirkus) reviewer; which you ought to read and pay attention to before buying. This is strictly one man's impressions of what the Colorado Plateau means to him. It is not authoritative as to the ruin's archeology or anthropology. It could better be classed as poetry.

The literary world is full of inequities, with recognition and reputations that are much larger or much smaller than they deserve to be, and in the world of literary nature writing no one better illustrates this point than Reg Saner, whose work deserves to be far better known and admired than it is. The Southwest is America's most powerful and lyrical landscape, and it defies many of the conventions of literary nature writing developed to celebrate green English hills or Walden Ponds or Sierra forests. To do justice to the Southwest requires originality and lyricism and a philosophical eye. Reg Saner has what it takes. Once when I was heading into the Grand Canyon on a solo early-summer hike and knew I'd be spending a fair amount of time hiding in the shade, I took along Saner's "The Four Cornered Falcon". When you read a book surrounded by the hard realities and deep beauties of the Grand Canyon, it has to stand up to a higher test of reality than it might in your cozy easy chair at home surrounded by human culture in all its artificialities. Saner's prose is full of lyrical gems and philosophical knots to make you stop and think and helps make the Southwest more intensely real.