The Land of Little Rain

Austin was an unknown writer in her 30s, living near Death Valley, when this tiny book of desert sketches first appeared in 1903, but from its first sentences she writes with a startling and compelling authority that has made it one of the great American nature books. She invests everything around her—buzzards and mice and yucca, and humans too, Anglos like her as well as the Paiutes and Mexicans whose "dying" customs she admires—with a kind of natural intelligence, subject to the cruel limits of the land. —Tom Old Book of the Week