Contains essays that depict and decry the rapid growth and disappearing natural landscapes of the Sunbelt

Published in 1986, Blue Desert was Charles Bowden’s third book-length work and takes place almost entirely in Arizona, revealing Bowden’s growing and intense preoccupation with the state and what it represented as a symbol of America’s “New West.” Bowden presents a view of the Southwest that measures how rapid growth takes its toll on the land. Writing with a reporter’s objectivity and a desert rat’s passion, Bowden offers us his trademarked craft and wit to take us into the streets as well as the desert to depict not a fragile environment but the unavoidable reality of abuse, exploitation, and human cruelty. Blue Desert shows us the darker side of development—where “the land always makes promises of aching beauty and the people always fail the land”—and defies us to ignore it. In a thoughtful new foreword, Francisco Cantú writes, “In Blue Desert, we follow Bowden in the processes of becoming. We see the version of Bowden that he would likely most want us to remember—someone who did their best to be an honest witness, someone who was haunted by modernity and his place in it, someone who grappled with his demons by gazing deeply into the desert.” Blue Desert is a critical piece in the oeuvre of Charles Bowden, and it continues to remind readers of the cruelty and beauty of the world around us.

In 1910, sixteen-year-old Alice George and her family leave England for a new life in Morocco. A headstrong young woman, Alice is fascinated by the exotic life of Marrakesh until two years later she is abducted into the Sahara after a car accident. She is rescued by Abu, chief of his Tuareg tribe, and begins a life of freedom that she never could have imagined in corseted England.In 1917, after the tribe takes her son away from her, Alice escapes with her slave/companion. He betrays her, she becomes captive in a harem and murders a man, then escapes. She is 'found' by the Sisters of Blessed Mercy and returned home to a world completely alien to the one she had left seven years before, a world she believes cannot include her life in the Sahara. Decades later she receives a telegram announcing that Abu has died in the desert. "Who is Abu?" her husband asks. "My lover," she answers. Thus begins a seven-day journey of revelation as Alice struggles to come to terms with her life in the desert and with the fact that her greatest secret-the son she left behind-is coming at the end of the week.The story opens with the telegram, then moves back in time to recount the family's departure from England and arrival in Morocco, then forward to the opening storyline. Alice goes to stay with her sister and they finally tell each other about their lives before and after the abduction. Meanwhile her husband Martin uses his contacts as a government consultant to uncover the truth about Alice, Abu, and their son.At the end of the week Martin and Alice reunite in London and await her son, who arrives with her granddaughter.

In its 114th year, Billboard remains the world's premier weekly music publication and a diverse digital, events, brand, content and data licensing platform. Billboard publishes the most trusted charts and offers unrivaled reporting about the latest music, video, gaming, media, digital and mobile entertainment issues and trends.

While living in a relocation camp during the World War II, a young Japanese American boy receives a message of hope from his grandfather.

Arctic blue deserts are flatlining the arctic's spring pulses and radically altering natural water, silica and carbon cycles.Unchecked heat pollution from Canadian and Russian mega reservoir dams is causing global climate change.

Set in the American Southwest, "desert terror" films combine elements from horror, film noir and road movies to tell stories of isolation and violence. For more than half a century, these diverse and troubling films have eluded critical classification and analysis. Highlighting pioneering filmmakers and bizarre production stories, the author traces the genre's origins and development, from cult exploitation (The Hills Have Eyes, The Hitcher) to crowd-pleasing franchises (Tremors, From Dusk Till Dawn) to quirky auteurist fare (Natural Born Killers, Lost Highway) to more recent releases (Bone Tomahawk, Nocturnal Animals). Rare stills, promotional materials and a filmography are included.

As one of the last of her family line, Valla Dorn is under immense pressure to find a mate and secure her family’s future. So when she meets Kallam Bane, a member of the rival Macarae clan, she realizes this task may be more difficult than anticipated. With a forbidden yet passionate romance blooming between them, Valla finds herself on an emotional rollercoaster as she struggles to choose between Kallam and the man to whom she’s pledged. Will she risk it all to follow her heart and be with Kallam, or will she honor her obligations and forgo the possibility of true love? Or will she embrace another choice? Valla’s Choice is a short sensual romance that leave readers wanting more. Get Your Copy Today.

This study explores the ways in which the desert, as topographical space and cultural presence, shaped and reshaped concepts and images of America. Once a territory outside the geopolitical and cultural borders of the United States, the deserts of the West and Southwest have since emerged as canonical American landscapes. Drawing on the critical concepts of American studies and on questions and problems raised in recent debates on ecocriticism, The Poetics and Politics of the Desert investigates the spatial rhetoric of America as it developed in view of arid landscapes since the mid-nineteenth century. Gersdorf argues that the integration of the desert into America catered to the entire spectrum of ideological and political responses to the history and culture of the US, maintaining that the Americanization of this landscape was and continues to be staged within the idiomatic parameters and in reaction to the discursive authority of four spatial metaphors: garden, wilderness, Orient, and heterotopia.

This book comprehensively reviews the disease dynamics, distribution, surveillance, epidemiology, diagnosis, control strategies, and management of the desert malaria. It highlights the potential risks of unstable but often exacerbated malaria conflagration as epidemics in the middle of duned desert, a desert oasis, and desert-fringe regions. Further, it reveals the factors inveigled into desert environments due to extensive anthropogenic activities such as canalized irrigation projects, high-yielding new agriculture practices, human concentration, and increased trade. It addresses the impact of irrigation on the malarial dynamics and its coupling to the climate forcing. The book also offers a model for desert transformation into malaria heaven under the changed climatic conditions including high rainfall, humidity, and depletion in temperature. Lastly, it offers insight into malaria epidemiology and disease control in the desert’s arid environments. This book is an essential resource for medical entomologists, parasitologists, epidemiologists, and public health researchers.