Frog Mountain Blues

by Charles Bowden, Jack Dykinga (Photographer), Alison Hawthorne Deming (Foreword by)

Overview

The Santa Catalina Mountains north of Tucson—whose summit is called Frog Mountain by the Tohono O’odham—offers up to the citizens of the basins below a wilderness in their own backyard.

When it was first published in 1987, Frog Mountain Blues documented the creeping sprawl of new development up the Catalinas’ foothills. Today, that development is fully visible, but Charles Bowden’s prescience of the urgency to preserve and protect a sacred recreational space remains as vivid as ever. Accompanied by Jack W. Dykinga’s photographs from the original work, this book continues to convey the natural beauty of the Catalinas and warns readers that this unique wilderness could easily be lost.

As Alison Hawthorne Deming writes in the new foreword, “Frog Mountain Blues continues to be an important book for learning to read this place through the eyes of experience and history, and Bowden remains a sobering voice for facing our failures in protecting what we love in this time of global destruction, for taking seriously the power of language to set ourselves right again with the enormous task of living with purpose and presence and care on the land.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780816538935
Publisher:	University of Arizona Press
Publication date:	10/02/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	216
Sales rank:	750,162
File size:	6 MB

About the Author

Charles Bowden (1945–2014) was the author of many acclaimed books about the American Southwest and U.S.-Mexico border issues. He was a contributing editor for GQ, Harper’s, Esquire, and Mother Jones. His honors include a PEN First Amendment Award and the Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction.

Pulitzer Prize–winning photographer Jack Dykinga blends fine art photography with documentary photojournalism. He is a regular contributor to Arizona Highways and National Geographic and the author or photographer of numerous books, most recently A Photographer’s Life.

Alison Hawthorne Deming is an author of poetry and nonfiction, including The Edges of the Civilized World.

Table of Contents

Foreword by Alison Hawthorne Deming

Last Call
Heart of Gold
Buster’s Mountain
The Last Resort
The Front
Frog Mountain
Late Afternoon

Afterword
Acknowledgments
Bibliography

Editorial Reviews

This is one of the finest books on ecology in this decade, for it delineates the creeping environmental degradation that occurs when a boomtown pushes toward a wilderness. Bowden, author of Blue Desert, here explores the Santa Catalina Mountains (declared a Reserve in 1902) just outside of Tucson, Ariz., where he has lived for more than 40 years. Today, he writes, the city is ``a living, crawling thing probing the desert with subdivisions, roads and machines.'' The chronology runs like this: mining claims, ranches, a sawmill, summer cabins and camps, an inn, a paved highway in 1950, followed by radar towers and observatories on the mountain tops. There was further development: the Forest Service approved removal of an ancient stand of Douglas fir for a ski run; in 1984, bulldozers mowed down huge mesquite stands to widen the highway; the Forest Service recorded 1.3 million recreation visitors. Meanwhile, notes Bowden, hotels and foothill homes peddle natural splendor even as they destroy it. He makes an eloquent plea to ``get the cattle, mines, houses, roads, ski runs, golf courses and towers off the range.'' He reminds us that the Catalinas are just a small part of the worldwide assault on wilderness areas. His narrative is admirably supported by Dykinga's dramatic photographs. (May 22)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Frog Mountain is the name the native people gave the highest peak in Arizona's Santa Catalina Mountains. In this set of seven essays, Bowden elegizes this endangered wilderness area, and describes the recent developmentsroads, ski lodges, ATV trailsthat have degraded the mountains. He believes in preserving the wilderness, insisting that there be no encroachment into remaining wild areas. Some of the writing is startling in its descriptive power and imagery, and the chapter ``Frog Mountain'' is an elegant defense of the preservationist point of view. The many photographs nicely complement Bowden's text. But overall the book is uneven. Suitable for regional and comprehensive collections. Randy Dykhuis, Grace A. Dow Memorial Lib., Midland, Mich.

Library Journal

A beautifully written, handsomely illustrated love poem to a mountain range that has the fatal curse of being not merely too awesome in its beauty for its own good but, worse, too accessible to man.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review

“[Bowden’s] prose trembles with a raw and vital energy. . . . Frog Mountain Blues is part bitterness, part lament, a love story and a tragedy.”—New York Times Book Review

“[Frog Mountain Blues] delineates the creeping environmental degradation that occurs when a boomtown pushes toward a wilderness. . . . [Bowden’s] narrative is admirably supported by Dykinga’s dramatic photographs.”—Publishers Weekly

“A personal and provocative work . . . [that] makes an attractive—and effective—plea for wilderness preservation.”—Washington Post

“[Bowden] catches the attractiveness, ambiguity, artificiality, and frightening developmental pace of urbanizing Arizona with a fine-tuned eye and ear, and lays out bluntly what is at stake. . . . He has written an engaging, thoughtful, and tough-minded book.”—Western American Literature
 
“A microcosm . . . of the ‘civilized’ overuse of the entire planet.”—Bloomsbury Review
 
“Anyone interested in the survival of our most precious natural places should read this book.”—Bruce Babbitt, former Secretary of the Interior
 
“Stunning photography by Pulitzer Prize­­­-winning photographer Jack W. Dykinga lends a vivid visual dimension to Bowden’s message. . . . Dykinga’s evocative photography and Bowden’s relentless pen render the human erosion of the Santa Catalina Mountains painfully clear and give Frog Mountain Blues an undeniably strong emotional impact.”—Ecology Law Quarterly
 
“An elegiac, ecology-minded tribute to Tucson’s Santa Catalina Mountains. . . . A handsome book with elegant graphics and astounding photos.”—Kirkus Reviews
 
“Here’s the new American nature writing—resourceful, funny, personal, full of good facts, words of the locals, hard-hitting but not self-righteous . . . a case history of how America destroys itself.”—Gary Snyder
 
“A lively and informative meditation on the maddening, absurd, but still somehow hopeful relationship between an exploding western megalopolis and the still somehow wild mountain range that overlooks it.”—David Rains Wallace
 
“A moving, passionate eulogy for a place that, if not altogether dead, has been ravaged and mutilated, even by those who professed to love it.”—Donald Worster

 

From the Publisher