A Desert Harvest: New and Selected Essays

by Bruce Berger, Colum McCann (Introduction)

A career-spanning collection of Bruce Berger’s beautiful, subtle, and spiky essays on the American desert

Occupying a space between traditional nature writing, memoir, journalism, and prose poetry, Bruce Berger’s essays are beautiful, subtle, and haunting meditations on the landscape and culture of the American Southwest. Combining new, unpublished essays with selections from his acclaimed trilogy of “desert books”― The Telling Distance , There Was a River , and Almost an Island ― A Desert Harvest is a career-spanning selection of the best work by this unique and undervalued voice.

Wasteland architecture, mountaintop astronomy, Bach in the wilderness, the mind of the wood rat, the canals of Phoenix, and the numerous eccentric personalities who call the desert their home all come to life in these fascinating portraits of America’s seemingly desolate terrains.

Genres: Nature, Essays, Nonfiction

272 pages, Hardcover

Published March 12, 2019

Reviews

[Katherine · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful collection of essays, some long, some short, mostly centered on the Sonoran Desert and La Paz with a few totally different subjects thrown in like attending a Physics Conference in Spain. A couple of them I absolutely loved and could be spun into a more of a novel. Others will make you look at familiar places very differently. Desert dwellers enjoy.

[David Robertson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is my first introduction to Bruce Berger’s work, though he has written extensively, often about the desert. "A Desert Harvest" is a fine but somewhat “schizophrenic” collection of essays gathered together under a rather misleading title. The collection contains a few longer essays interspersed with many short (3-4 page) essays. While all but one of the longer essays take place in desert locales, they are not really ruminations on desert “natural history” in a traditional sense. Instead, Berger introduces his readers to unusual people and circumstances involving habitat and endangered species protection, the folly of building contemporary cities in the desert, and the manic preparation for a total solar eclipse among other topics. Many of these longer essays are set in the city of La Paz, in the Mexican state of Baja California Sur, and many also revolve around the author’s passion for playing classical music on the piano. The shorter essays are more typical natural history, but even these digress and lead to unexpected outcomes. In my opinion, the best two of these shorter essays appear near the end of the book: “Slickrock and the Bach Chacone” and “Transition Zone.” "A Desert Harvest" is well worth a read (I finished it in three days), but the reader would be well advised to approach the book understanding its contents and structure.

[Allie Vera · Rating 4 out of 5]

There were a couple of entries I dropped, and others that didn't quite fit into the larger connecting theme of 'desert', but ultimately Berger's selection of essays won me over because I found myself falling harder in love with the desert than I had already been. I'm going to be turning over some of these essays in my head like stones in my palm for a long while.

[Zac Whaley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Genius. Only a few other books have other made me feel so seen while also expanding my perspective so greatly. Reading Berger’s work gave me a novel perspective on the desert landscape, a new lens through which to exam nature, people, and time. Truly this anthology is a masterpiece.

[Brian Yatman · Rating 5 out of 5]

As much concerned with the human inhabitants of desert regions as their fauna and flora, this is a personal and surprisingly funny collection of essays.

[Javier Vazquez · Rating 4 out of 5]

Intricate stories of the desert and very well written. Animals, ecology, physics, music, pianos and the nature of time. All rolled up into one book.

[Sarah Wiles · Rating 2 out of 5]

This just didn't do it for me. I was expecting more about the natural desert and not just a memoir kind of thing... and it just wasn't that interesting besides.