BONELIGHT; Ruin and Grace in the New Southwest

Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2002. First Edition, First Printing. Cloth and boards. Very Fine/Very Fine. SIGNED and INSCRIBEDi by the author on the half title in black pen: "--- /; In the sweet light / of sisterhood / love / Mary Sojourner"; 8vo, cream-colored cloth covered boards and spine with shiny light blue foil lettering on the spine; decorative tan endpapers, xi, [xii] + 168 pages. Mary Sojourner is the author of a novel, Sisters of the Dream, and Delicate, a short story collection selected by independent booksellers for "Booksense 76." She is a featured commentator on National Public Radio and columnist for High Country News's "Writers on the Range." A dedicated environmental activist, she lives in the shadow of the mountains she serves.<br/> <br/> When upstate New Yorker Mary Sojourner reluctantly agreed to visit the Grand Canyon of Arizona nearly two decades ago, she little suspected that she was about to lose her heart to the daunting, gut-wrenching beauty of the Southwest, or that she would shortly find there a home, a passion for the land, and a cause in protecting it. Since then, she has become acclaimed as an environmental writer and respected as a grass-roots activist protesting the heedless development of the Southwest's increasingly precious and embattled open spaces.<br/> <br/> The essays collected in Bonelight reflect Sojourner's southwestern journey from greenhorn to old-timer, from tourist to committed defender of the land and the human communities that share it. She writes of exploring the deserts, forests, canyons, mountains, and river rapids of the Southwest, and of her passionate love for this austere and ravishing landscape; of family, friends, and lovers, a woman's wary passage into middle age, the discovery of peace and balance in the execution of mundane chores and in the close observation of natural surroundings; of the ways that development is destroying the Southwest's fragile beauty, and of the greed and spiritual emptiness that motivate much of this development. There is humor here, and adventure, and the intense intimacy.