Death in a Red Desert, a ground breaking case in animal DNA forensic investigation, was featured on the television network Animal Planet. The manuscript chronicles the unusual triangle between a woman, her lover and his transvestite partner, and the events leading up to the disappearance and murder of Elizabeth Langhorst-Ballard. The authors based the work on depositions, trial transcripts and tapes, and on interviews with the detectives, officials in the district attorney's office, the victim's parents and with Charles Martinez, one of the two convicted murderers. Some of the information, using as a guide court documentation and letters written by the other defendant Chris Faviell, is related in a conversational manner to enhance the flow of the story. Names of a few minor figures were changed. Many of the events and the trials are viewed through the eyes of the lead detective, Wolfgang Born, who was an invaluable resource in writing the account, as was the lead prosecutor Canon Stevens. After Born's dogged search for the victim's body in thousands of square miles of red desert in the Tularosa Basin of Otero County, New Mexico, yielded success, the persistence of the late Jim Biggs, a Ruidoso detective, led to Dr. Joy Halverson, whose DNA work on the case made history and was highlighted on the Animal Witness series in 2008. Canines played key roles in solving the crime from the pit bull pet of one of the killers to desert coyotes and a cadaver dog on his last assignment before retirement.

A photographic and multidisciplinary study of one of America’s last undeveloped—and most endangered—landscapes, edited by a Pulitzer Prize–winning author. A vast expanse of rock formations, sand dunes, and sagebrush in central and southwest Wyoming, the little-known Red Desert is one of the last undeveloped landscapes in the United States, as well as one of the most endangered. It is a last refuge for many species of wildlife. Sitting atop one of North America's largest untapped reservoirs of natural gas, the Red Desert is a magnet for energy producers who are damaging its complex and fragile ecosystem in a headlong race to open a new domestic source of energy and reap the profits. To capture and preserve what makes the Red Desert both valuable and scientifically and historically interesting, writer Annie Proulx and photographer Martin Stupich enlisted a team of scientists and scholars to join them in exploring the Red Desert through many disciplines: geology, hydrology, paleontology, ornithology, zoology, entomology, botany, climatology, anthropology, archaeology, sociology, and history. Their essays reveal many fascinating, often previously unknown facts about the Red Desert—everything from the rich pocket habitats that support an amazing diversity of life to engrossing stories of the transcontinental migrations that began in prehistory and continue today on I-80—which bisects the Red Desert. Complemented by Martin Stupich’s photo-essay, which portrays both the beauty and the devastation that characterize the region today, Red Desert bears eloquent witness to a unique landscape in its final years as a wild place./

The "High Line Flyer," as this train was derisively called among railroad men, was jerking along through the hot afternoon over the monotonous country between Holdridge and Cheyenne. Besides the blond man and himself the only occupants of the car were two dusty, bedraggled-looking girls who had been to the Exposition at Chicago, and who were earnestly discussing the cost of their first trip out of Colorado. The four uncomfortable passengers were covered with a sediment of fine, yellow dust which clung to their hair and eyebrows like gold powder. It blew up in clouds from the bleak, lifeless country through which they passed, until they were one color with the sagebrush and sandhills.

Bea Rivers' new job at Shandley Gardens seems to be idyllic; a stimulating career at a desert garden full of botanical wonders. But a slow rot has spread within Shandley Gardens as financial woes add stress to the small board of directors, putting Bea's job at risk. When one of the Gardens' founders, Liz Shandley, is killed in what appears to be a tragic accident, the immediate worry is the survival of the Gardens. But then the police determine that Liz was murdered, and suddenly Bea's job is less than idyllic. The tangled web of relationships is almost as confusing as the enigmatic botanical clues someone keeps dropping. Bea struggles to balance her life as a committed single parent dating a struggling writer while she's drawn further into the investigation of Liz's death. As Bea tries to decipher the strange clues to find the murderer, she uncovers deep secrets and surprises among the staff and board that will forever change the Gardens.

In this potent collage of stories, essays, and testimony, Williams makes a stirring case for the preservation of America’s Redrock Wilderness in the canyon country of southern Utah. As passionate as she is persuasive, Williams, the beloved author of Refuge, is one of the country’s most eloquent and imaginative writers. The desert is her blood. Here she writes lyrically about the desert’s power and vulnerability, describing wonders that range from an ancient Puebloan sash of macaw feathers found in Canyonlands National Park to the desert tortoise–an animal that can “teach us the slow art of revolutionary patience” as it extends our notion of kinship with all life. She examines the civil war being waged in the West today over public and private uses of land–an issue that divides even her own family. With grace, humor, and compassionate intelligence, Williams reminds us that the preservation of wildness is not simply a political process but a spiritual one.

The book explains briefly the way what it took for the writer to get to the Arabian Gulf waters of Yemen, starting from the long-distance heart of Ethiopia. After that, he talks of his childhood villages on the way to Jijiga, the eastern city of Ethiopia, and then to the port city of Bosaso. But he passed a lot of difficulties on his journey. It is difficult to track how many days the writer spent. He spent seventy-one hours walking in the Sahara Desert without food and water before crossing the Gulf of Aden. In those circumstances, days and nights lacked meaning. One can hardly tell what day of the week is any given day. All that matters is getting there at all cost. However, the most dangerous trip was the perilous fourty-one-hour journey in the waters of the Arabian Gulf. People are crammed into a rickety boat made for a dozen people. Some of the stories told in this fateful journey are too gruesome to mention. Suffice to say, it is a life-and-death situation. The harsh circumstances, however, hardly deter refugees from getting to their destination.

The cult-y pocket-size field guide to the strange and intriguing secrets of the Mojave—its myths and legends, outcasts and oddballs, flora, fauna, and UFOs—becomes the definitive, oracular book of the desert For the past five years, Desert Oracle has existed as a quasi-mythical, quarterly periodical available to the very determined only by subscription or at the odd desert-town gas station or the occasional hipster boutique, its canary-yellow-covered, forty-four-page issues handed from one curious desert zealot to the next, word spreading faster than the printers could keep up with. It became a radio show, a podcast, a live performance. Now, for the first time—and including both classic and new, never-before-seen revelations—Desert Oracle has been bound between two hard covers and is available to you. Straight out of Joshua Tree, California, Desert Oracle is “The Voice of the Desert”: a field guide to the strange tales, singing sand dunes, sagebrush trails, artists and aliens, authors and oddballs, ghost towns and modern legends, musicians and mystics, scorpions and saguaros, out there in the sand. Desert Oracle is your companion at a roadside diner, around a campfire, in your tent or cabin (or high-rise apartment or suburban living room) as the wind and the coyotes howl outside at night. From journal entries of long-deceased adventurers to stray railroad ad copy, and musings on everything from desert flora, rumored cryptid sightings, and other paranormal phenomena, Ken Layne's Desert Oracle collects the weird and the wonderful of the American Southwest into a single, essential volume.