Dry Borders
Great Natural Reserves of the Sonoran Desert

Edited by Richard Stephen Felger and Bill Broyles

816 pp., 8 ½ x 11, 321 halftones, 80 color photographs, 27 illustrations, 5 Maps
Paper $45.00
ISBN 978-0-87480-819-3
Utah/Western History

"Swearing and mumbling against heat and drought, I was unwittingly seduced by this wonderful land. A passionate fascination grew in my heart. Slowly, gradually, the desert won my affections."
—From the Foreword by Exequiel Ezcurra

This evocative and informative excursion into the Sonoran Desert along the U.S.-Mexico border brings to life the beauty of a spare and seductive terrain, telling the stories of the people, plants, and politics that layer a landscape in need of understanding and protection. The contributors, all experts in their fields, bring to their respective essays both a passion for and a wide-ranging depth of knowledge of this jewel of the Southwest. The book also continues a stunning array of both color and black and white photographs.

The book is divided into six sections:
I. The Place—delves into the geography and geology of the region, giving shape to its rivers and ranges.
II. People of the Place—introduces those who make the desert their home, including both native peoples and visiting scientists.
III. The Desert—discusses birds, bugs, and botany, all the things that live and grow in the borderlands.
IV. The Gulf—examines the waters and the aquatic life of the region from the Colorado River to the Sea of Cortez.
V. Conservation—focuses on protecting and preserving the desert and its increasingly endangered species into the future.
VI. Place-names—includes a geographic dictionary.

Part natural history, part call to conservation, and part love song, Dry Borders speaks to the part of our souls that longs to delve beneath surface appearances to find the true, beautiful heart of a place.

Richard Stephen Felger studies natural history in arid lands, specializing in the Sonoran Desert. He is founding director of Drylands Institute in Tucson. Bill Broyles is a research associate at the Southwest Center, University of Arizona.

REVIEWS
Dry borders: great natural reserves of the Sonoran Desert, ed. by Richard Stephen Felger and Bill Broyles. Utah, 2007. 799p bibl index afp ISBN 0-87480-818-9, $80.00; ISBN 0874808197 pbk, $45.00; ISBN 9780874808186, $80.00; ISBN 9780874808193 pbk, $45.00. Reviewed in 2007may CHOICE. Softheaded sentimentality does not typically mesh with hard-edged scientific rigor. Perhaps in this case, the extreme heat and psychic pressure of the silence of the Sonoran Desert are what successfully bind the two together. This work intersperses tug-at-the-heartstrings stories of love, loss, and family with numbingly long lists of plants, mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, and invertebrates. All the contributors are leaders in their chosen fields, and each has created a stand-alone chapter; when taken together, they produce an extended field trip into the minds of Sonoran Desert inhabitants, both human and nonhuman. The chapters are all well documented (one chapter has 202 literature citations, but most have 20 to 80). Everyone will find something of interest here, from overviews of the history and geology to tributes to those hardy explorers who set the standards for the decades of fieldwork that followed. This single volume will encourage and inspire others to explore one of the most harshly beautiful habitats on Earth. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels. -- G. C. Stevens, formerly, University of New Mexico