An appreciation of the Tohono O'odham (long known as the Papago) Indians, whose reservation is the second largest in the United States. "Fontana, who has lived at the edge of the Tohono O'odham (formerly Papago) Reservation for decades, provides sympathetic insight into the history and lifeways of these gentle desert dwellers. Schaefer's photographs, many of them portraits, add timeliness and immediate presence." --Books of the Southwest "An unsurpassed insight into the Papago world, past and present." --Arizona Highways

“This text reveals [Fontana’s] interaction with his [Tohono O’odham] neighbors and how geography and climate define life and culture in this piece of dry land. Fontana’s words introduce the reader to people and provide an excellent overview of tribal history, but no notice of this book can overlook John P. Schaefer’s photographs . . . [which] give the reader a feeling for what day-to-day life is like . . . for the 12,000 or so people who call Papaguería their homeland.”—Journal of Arizona History

Originally published in 1903, this classic nature book by Mary Austin evokes the mysticism and spirituality of the American Southwest. Vibrant imagery of the landscape between the high Sierras and the Mojave Desert is punctuated with descriptions of the fauna, flora and people that coexist peacefully with the earth. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

The Land of Little Rain is an incredible collection of short stories and essays describing the geography and residents of the American Southwest. The stories are linked by messages of environmental conservation and a cultural and sociopolitical regionalism philosophy. It is represented as both "local color" and non-fiction, scientific work, written mainly for an urban American audience unknown to life in the Mojave Desert. The book attempts to entertain the reader by including direct, first, second and third-person viewpoints.

This is the nature of that country. There are hills, rounded, blunt, burned, squeezed up out of chaos, chrome and vermilion painted, aspiring to the snow-line. Between the hills lie high level-looking plains full of intolerable sun glare, or narrow valleys drowned in a blue haze. The hill surface is streaked with ash drift and black, unweathered lava flows. After rains water accumulates in the hollows of small closed valleys, and, evaporating, leaves hard dry levels of pure desertness that get the local name of dry lakes. Where the mountains are steep and the rains heavy, the pool is never quite dry, but dark and bitter, rimmed about with the efflorescence of alkaline deposits. A thin crust of it lies along the marsh over the vegetating area, which has neither beauty nor freshness. In the broad wastes open to the wind the sand drifts in hummocks about the stubby shrubs, and between them the soil shows saline traces. The sculpture of the hills here is more wind than water work, though the quick storms do sometimes scar them past many a year’s redeeming. In all the Western desert edges there are essays in miniature at the famed, terrible Grand Cañon, to which, if you keep on long enough in this country, you will come at last. Since this is a hill country one expects to find springs, but not to depend upon them; for when found they are often brackish and unwholesome, or maddening, slow dribbles in a thirsty soil. Here you find the hot sink of Death Valley, or high rolling districts where the air has always a tang of frost. Here are the long heavy winds and breathless calms on the tilted mesas where dust devils dance, whirling up into a wide, pale sky. Here you have no rain when all the earth cries for it, or quick downpours called cloud-bursts for violence. A land of lost rivers, with little in it to love; yet a land that once visited must be come back to inevitably. If it were not so there would be little told of it. This is the country of three seasons. From June on to November it lies hot, still, and unbearable, sick with violent unrelieving storms; then on until April, chill, quiescent, drinking its scant rain and scanter snows; from April to the hot season again, blossoming, radiant, and seductive. These months are only approximate; later or earlier the rain-laden wind may drift up the water gate of the Colorado from the Gulf, and the land sets its seasons by the rain.

A little sunshine and a little rain: A Poetry Journal will spark your imagination, encourage your creativity and guide your writing.