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123rd out of 348 books
—
381 voters
The Land of Little Rain
A stunning tribute to the savage beauty of the area known as Death Valley. To most travelers it is a parched, empty territory, unwelcoming and forgiving. In a collection of essays that date back almost a century, naturalist and writer Mary Austin (1868-1934) breathes life into the desert landscape, describing its savage beauty, its plants and animals, and the occasional hu...more
Paperback, 128 pages
Published
February 1st 1997
by Penguin Books
(first published 1903)
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I am in that hopeless state of reading too many books at the same time, but they are (almost) all so delicious! One is Mary Austin's _The Land of Little Rain_ which I highly recommend. She is an ethologist and ecologist somewhat ahead of her time, I think, though I know little about the history of either subject. But in writing about the desert, she has a whole-world view that enables her to see the necessary connections among all the parts. And when she wants to show you the desert-dweller's vi...more
Apparently, Austin viewed her writing as the desert equivalent of Thoreau's writing on New England. There are similiarities between the two. There's much in the way of dry description that is not particularly interesting. The writing is void of Muir-like passion, but is interspersed here and there with sentences that leap out as particularly good ("One must learn to spare a little of the pang of inexpressible beauty, not to spend all one's purse in one shop. There is always another year, and ano...more
Land of Little Rain is Mary Austin's 1903 account of the deserts of the American Southwest. Her text is as spare and secretly seductive as the deserts of which she writes.
Austin lived, for a time, in Independence, CA, until the water literally went south.
Complex woman; complex environment; straight-up text.
Austin lived, for a time, in Independence, CA, until the water literally went south.
Complex woman; complex environment; straight-up text.
Another book recommendation from Philip Connors in Shelf Awareness 4/8/11:
On your nightstand now:
I just visited a cool little bookstore in Truth or Consequences, N.M.--Black Cat Books--and loaded up on used paperbacks. Among them: The Liars Club by Mary Karr (yes, I'm coming to it awfully late); The Land of Little Rain by Mary Austin (her classic about the California desert); and The River Why by David James Duncan (which my friends from the Northwest tell me is great). I also just finished two...more
On your nightstand now:
I just visited a cool little bookstore in Truth or Consequences, N.M.--Black Cat Books--and loaded up on used paperbacks. Among them: The Liars Club by Mary Karr (yes, I'm coming to it awfully late); The Land of Little Rain by Mary Austin (her classic about the California desert); and The River Why by David James Duncan (which my friends from the Northwest tell me is great). I also just finished two...more
"Mary Austin was convinced that the valley [Owens Valley*] had died when it sold its first water right to Los Angeles--that city would never stop until it owned the whole river and all of the land. One day, in Los Angeles for an interview with Mulholland, she told him so. After she had left, a subordinate came into his office and found him staring at the wall. "By God, " Mulholland reportedly said, "that woman is the only one who has brains enough to see where this is going." [Cadillac Desert, b...more
A short descriptive book on Death Valley around the turn of the 20 th century. Mary Hunter Austin was an ethnologist who studied the area, looking at the lack of available water and how plants, animals and humans survived. She notes the hidden water sources that humans don't notice but coyotes often do. The way plants and animals sustain themselves and the native people who lived surrounding the area but not deep inside it. The settlers would often plan to travel in certain directions and times...more
This forerunner or prototype for tight-focus, on-the-ground writing about nature and a specific ecosystem is still fresh and strange. It tells the truth, but tells it slant. Austin is a presence but not a personality: you'll learn more about the coyotes than her life in the desert at the base of the Eastern Sierra Nevada ca. 1900. There's mystery here, an unusual mind, and an unforgettable landscape and its denizens, including the remaining local Native Americans.
A fascinating woman. Check out...more
A fascinating woman. Check out...more
This is a wonderful little book describing desert life. It educates us on plant life, the effect of rain on the amazing plant life, the wind and rock formations and how the American Indians thought and reacted to the desert around them. There are some lovely native American stories and the whole book is relaxing, taking me away to a land of solitude. However, there is one huge flaw. This book fairly cried for PICTURES. They are, after all, worth a thousand words. I hope that is was only the Kind...more
Omg, you guys, that felt like it would never end. I'm sure it's a very worthy book, but the narrative threads are minimal, and long descriptive passages are just excruciatingly boring to me. Mary Austin does have several interesting anecdotes in this collection of essays, but they are few and far between in a book that rhapsodizes far too much about trees and mountains and lakes and weather. I'd rather look at a picture, thanks.
I received a letter.
Dearest, dig more deeply into my personal disarray. with dirt on your fingertips, past my bruised vaginal lips, in the desert sand of my lining, blow sweetly off the topsoil of my personality, find me. I am your little version of hooded release, premature death. But I am not violent where your are concerned. I grow in the desert but in the desert of the Northwest. Pediocactus Nigrispinus. If you wait long enough my flower is yours for the taking, if you take it away though,...more
Dearest, dig more deeply into my personal disarray. with dirt on your fingertips, past my bruised vaginal lips, in the desert sand of my lining, blow sweetly off the topsoil of my personality, find me. I am your little version of hooded release, premature death. But I am not violent where your are concerned. I grow in the desert but in the desert of the Northwest. Pediocactus Nigrispinus. If you wait long enough my flower is yours for the taking, if you take it away though,...more
I read this in an English class I'm taking. I gave this book two stars because it is beautifully written and explores a terrain (the California desert) that is utterly foreign to me and that I knew nothing about. It is, however, long-winded and boring, and a mere 110 pages took me over a week to get through. Still, if you like nature writing, it's got merit.
Mary Austin is an intriguing figure. She was a woman who lived in the California deserts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, a familiar of salty miners and Paiute maidens, mourned along with cougars who lost their young to cloudburst wreckage, knew the personal legends of sometimes violent men, and watched the desert plants closely.
This country is gifted with great writer/naturalists, and Mary Austin is one of the best. The Land of Little Rain is an incredibly poetic collection of little essays on the theme of living in the desert. This is a book that is worth reading several times, not only for the sense of what Austin says, but also how she says it.
This tribute to the desert lands of southern California was written by a woman who moved there from the midwest in the late 1800s. Austin paid close attention to the land (and its human and animal inhabitants) and wrote about it in detailed, exquisite prose.
This is a book that I return to, again and again. Austin's description of the austere beauty of the Eastern Sierra and Mojave desert and the tough and enduring inhabitants she encountered during her years there is vivid and poetic.
I loved this book enough to make a pilgrimage to Mary Austin's house. I walked up the road into the hills like she did. A happy day.
I have read many great books on nature - Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez, The Sand Country Almanac by Leopold, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard and...many more. This book was disappointing in that some of her expressions were very dated and she kept herself so far away from the book that it became a set of impersonal observations with no real heart. Nothing really appealed to me, nothing she talked about inspired me to read more about them (which often does when I read books about plants an...more
This is the 1988 Penguin Books edition with an introduction by Edward Abbey.
Quite possibly the most charming book ever.
This book is gorg.
I have a strong interest in desert literature and particularly in literature of the Southwest U.S. Mary Austin's remarkable observations of the high desert and its people in the early days of westward expansion stands out as independent of the prejudices early American writers held for the arid climates and the area cultures.
The fact that my friend, Mary Austin Speaker, shares a name with this talented American writer adds a happy facet to my relationship with this excellent book.
The fact that my friend, Mary Austin Speaker, shares a name with this talented American writer adds a happy facet to my relationship with this excellent book.
Beautiful, detailed, and eerily concerned about man's carbon foot print way before it was cool.
"Come away, you who are obsessed with your own importance in the scheme of things, and have got nothing to sweat for, come away by the brown valleys and full-bosomed hills to the even-breathing days, to the kindness, earthiness, ease of El Pueblo de Las Uvas." I really enjoyed the simplicity of “The Land of Little Rain”. No frills. No decorations. Just good writing that reveals a great deal about a place you thought you already knew.
This might be a great book for people who like to read long, flowery descriptions of scenery and what animals are doing. I personally found it slooooow and boring. I was forced to read it for school, so I would never have chosen to read it on my own.
Perhaps the book just wasn't "for" me.
Perhaps the book just wasn't "for" me.
I should say that I mostly read this. Towards the end I gave up and started skipping through essays after the first few paragraphs. I thought I would like this a lot more - nature writing and the Eastern Sierra. Two of my favorite things. I guess I found her writing uncompelling, to say the least. Perhaps a bit too Victorian.
p. 105
In our kind of society, when a woman ceases to alter the fashion of her hair, you guess that she has passed the crisis of her experience. If she goes on crimping and uncrimping with the changing mode, it is safe to suppose she has never come up against anything too big for her.
In our kind of society, when a woman ceases to alter the fashion of her hair, you guess that she has passed the crisis of her experience. If she goes on crimping and uncrimping with the changing mode, it is safe to suppose she has never come up against anything too big for her.
Written in the early 1900's. This was an essay about the flor and fauna of the Sierra's in the early 1900's. There were some nice brief stories about the indians, mexicans that lived in the area, but a lot about the plant life as well as the trees, flowers and waterways.
I really enjoyed every word of Austin's. It's a short book, and I was slow-moving to get through it. But I don't regret that. I feel like part of her eyeopening awareness of the natural world speaks to being slow-moving. There's nothing wrong with that. I'm a desert tortoise.
A collection of wonderful prose, evoking the landscape and nature of the Eastern Sierra in a poetic manner. Mary Austin was obviously a keen observer of the world around her, and what set her apart was her ability to convey it so eloquently.
One of my favorites from the 60's.
She wrote these stories and descriptions
of the land and people of the southwest
in the early 1900's. You can smell the sage
after a rain and watch plants break through
the sandy crust of the soil.
She wrote these stories and descriptions
of the land and people of the southwest
in the early 1900's. You can smell the sage
after a rain and watch plants break through
the sandy crust of the soil.
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Mary Hunter Austin was an American writer. One of the early nature writers of the American Southwest, her classic The Land of Little Rain (1903) describes the fauna, flora and people – as well as evoking the mysticism and spirituality – of the region between the High Sierras and the Mojave Desert of southern California.
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May 02, 2009 10:47pm