Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
July/August 1996 | Volume 47, Issue 4
Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
July/August 1996 | Volume 47, Issue 4
by David Darlington , Henry Holt and Company, 337 pages, $25.00 . CODE: HHC-8 Other writers have found purity or anarchic freedom in the Mojave, but Darlington, while seeing the desert’s beauty, shows it in harder detail: “The unofficial symbol of the desert is the abandoned automobile: overturned, covered with rust, riddled with holes made by bullets.” A car will often contain a corpse, and Darlington’s investigation overlaps briefly with the work of some desert homicide detectives, among whom “the running joke . . . is that if all the people they haven’t found were to stand up simultaneously, the Mojave would resemble Manhattan Island.” Many little border towns live off the hardships of desert tourists, and are sustained by towing charges and the sale of radiator hoses. Darlington ends up surprisingly divided over the recently passed Desert Protection Act, which may tame the Mojave he loves in order to save it.