Darlington spent years driving and walking the Mojave in the years around the fight over the California Desert Protection Act, and the book is built out of the people who live there and can’t agree on anything. Miners who see a park as theft. Cattlemen with allotments going back generations. Off-roaders, the Sierra Club, the Marine base, the Park Service. Desert tortoise biologists counting a species going down. He gives everybody their say at length, drives a lot of dirt road, and gets at what makes this particular desert — high, cold, empty, unlovely at first look — the one people fight hardest over.
The Mojave: A Portrait of the Definitive American Desert