- Hardcover: 336 pages
- Publisher: Pantheon Books; 1 edition (July 2002)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0375408851
- ISBN-13: 978-0375408854
- Product Dimensions: 21.8 x 14 x 2.7 cm
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 3,468,095 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
Of all the things I wondered about on this land, I wondered the hardest about the seduction of certain geographies that feel like home—not by story or blood but merely by their forms and colors. How our perceptions are our only internal map of the world, how there are places that claim you and places that warn you away. How you can fall in love with the light.
—Ellen Meloy
Neurobiologists say that our sensitivity to color begins when we are infants. For artist-naturalist Ellen Meloy, who has spent most of her life in wild, remote places, an intoxication with light and color—sometimes subliminal, often fierce—has expressed itself as a profound attachment to landscape. It has been rightly said: Color is the first principle of Place.
In this luminous mix of memoir, natural history, and eccentric adventure, Meloy uses turquoise—the color and the gem—as a metaphor for a way to make sense of the world from the clues of nature. From the Sierra Nevada, the Mojave Desert, the Yucatan Peninsula, and the Bahamas to her home ground on the high plateaus and in the deep canyons of the Southwest, we journey with Meloy through diverse habitats of supersensual light, through places of beauty and places of desecration. With keen vision and sharp wit she introduces us to deserts, canyons, turquoise seas, and ancestral mountains, as well as to comedian plants, psychiatrist mules, and Persians who consider turquoise the equivalent of a bulletproof vest. Meloy describes women held to the desert by sheer gravity, and she mourns the passing of her oldest neighbors, the Navajo “velvet grandmothers” whose attire and aesthetics absorb the vivid palette of their homeland. There is a swim across the Mojave, a harrowing error on a solo trip down a wild river, and a birthday party with wild sheep.
Throughout, Meloy invites us to appreciate along with her the environments, creatures, and objects that celebrate what we often take for granted: “our own spirits, the eternity of all things.”
—Ellen Meloy
Neurobiologists say that our sensitivity to color begins when we are infants. For artist-naturalist Ellen Meloy, who has spent most of her life in wild, remote places, an intoxication with light and color—sometimes subliminal, often fierce—has expressed itself as a profound attachment to landscape. It has been rightly said: Color is the first principle of Place.
In this luminous mix of memoir, natural history, and eccentric adventure, Meloy uses turquoise—the color and the gem—as a metaphor for a way to make sense of the world from the clues of nature. From the Sierra Nevada, the Mojave Desert, the Yucatan Peninsula, and the Bahamas to her home ground on the high plateaus and in the deep canyons of the Southwest, we journey with Meloy through diverse habitats of supersensual light, through places of beauty and places of desecration. With keen vision and sharp wit she introduces us to deserts, canyons, turquoise seas, and ancestral mountains, as well as to comedian plants, psychiatrist mules, and Persians who consider turquoise the equivalent of a bulletproof vest. Meloy describes women held to the desert by sheer gravity, and she mourns the passing of her oldest neighbors, the Navajo “velvet grandmothers” whose attire and aesthetics absorb the vivid palette of their homeland. There is a swim across the Mojave, a harrowing error on a solo trip down a wild river, and a birthday party with wild sheep.
Throughout, Meloy invites us to appreciate along with her the environments, creatures, and objects that celebrate what we often take for granted: “our own spirits, the eternity of all things.”
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Customer Reviews
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
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5 reviews
12 of 13 people found the following review helpful
More of a fan than ever
21 Aug 2002
Format:Hardcover
I have been a fan of Ellen Meloy's writing since her exquisite book about the southwest's Green River. Now, with "The Anthropology of Turquoise," she shows her full colors: skilled writing (there are passages of pure poetry), a firm grasp of natural history and the talent to make seemingly dense scientific subjects of interest to the reader. "A Field Guide to Brazen Harlotry," a chapter about plant sex and unrequited love, for example, reveals the alluring bloom of desert wildflowers. She spends her midlife crisis with a herd of rare bighorn sheep and most of her life outdoors, traveling landscapes of terrific beauty and lively absurdities. Most of all, she has a riotous sense of humor. A lot of so-called "nature writing" ends up preachy or polemical or stuck in New Age fluff. But Meloy is smart. Her descriptive images stay with me. Her wit is joyful, playful and an engaging way to reach profound ideas. What a great book.
11 of 12 people found the following review helpful
More than a "women's book"
22 Jan 2003
Format:Hardcover
I first became aware of Ellen Meloy in a excerpt from this book in a recent Patagonia catalog. That seems to have been a appropriate venue as I have since discovered she is as sensible and durable and dependable as a pair of Talus pants and presents herself with the best of Patagonia's whimsical flair.
Her writing is Edward Abbey without the macho polemic, Annie Dillard before she lost her way in the incomprehensible, Terry Tempest Williams with a playful and self-deprecating sense of humor and without the Salt Lake City-Cosmo angst. (If you spent a week in the desert backcountry with TTW, I think you would begin to wonder how she stayed so CLEAN. Ellen Meloy IS the desert!) Anyway, sprinkle in a little Loren Eisely (literally in this case) and I think you have it.
So this probably sounds like a "women's book", and in many ways it is. But know this guys, this lady had three brothers, rows I would guess at least Class IV, and has roofed her own home. Any guy who has done at least two of those things and has done them with grace and dignity and good humor is welcome to take a bye. (But probably won't.)
But here's how to tell if you would want to read this book. Open the back cover. Look at the photograph on the dust cover flap. If this is a face you would drive by at high speed with the air-conditioner roaring and the punk rock blaring, drive on. If, on the other hand, it is the face you sense in the willow shade of a deep redrock river canyon...
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Colors are the deeds and sufferings of light - Johann Wolfg
30 Oct 2004
Format:Hardcover
There are three reasons to possess this book. The first reason: You want to read an author whose prose verges on poetry... "On the Colorado Plateau... nights come less as a smooth pause than as a steep, enduring purity of eye-blind dark. (In the day) The mesa's colors in their flanks - terra cotta, blood-red salmon, vermilion - bear the temperament of iron."
Second: Color for you, as for flowers, are a part of your being. You draw colors into your life as an elixir to defeat life's monotony. Ellen Meloy is a master wordsmith. She, more than most, knows that colors "challenge language to encompass them", yet, unabashedly, she tracks down the colors of nature, feels them, tastes them, holds them in her mind and then vividly gives them life. No color is sacrosanct to her. Yes, orange, red, blue, green will all find an expression, but Meloy seeks, not the plebeian, but the unusual, unique, even ruthless colors: burnt sienna, magenta, burgundy red, Prussian blue and of course turquoise, "the stone of the desert," "the color of yearning,". For Meloy; "Colors bear the metaphors of entire cultures. They convey every sensation from lust to distress. Flowers use colors ruthlessly for sex. Moths steal them from their surroundings and disappear. A cactus spines glows red-gold in the angle of sun, like an electrocuted aura." Life is good.
Finally, you will find in Ellen Meloy a forthright lover of nature. She is a south westerner, lover of the desert and outdoors woman who sees in desert life the paradoxes of being. She calls for attention as she expresses the damage to the earth that we are so thoughtlessly committing. She points out how we, Homo sapiens, are the first species to witness and will our own extinction. Her social - naturalist commentary is balanced with humor and memoirs; her narrative is both captivating and informative. She is at her best when she sticks to the southwest, but the chapters that chronicle her forays to the Bahamas and the Yucatan are nonetheless engaging. This is a well-crafted work that is filled with captivating metaphors, naturalism, travelogue, memoirs and humor. If you seek award winning writing, are captivated by colors and find sustenance in the natural world this is a highly recommended read. 4.5 stars
Second: Color for you, as for flowers, are a part of your being. You draw colors into your life as an elixir to defeat life's monotony. Ellen Meloy is a master wordsmith. She, more than most, knows that colors "challenge language to encompass them", yet, unabashedly, she tracks down the colors of nature, feels them, tastes them, holds them in her mind and then vividly gives them life. No color is sacrosanct to her. Yes, orange, red, blue, green will all find an expression, but Meloy seeks, not the plebeian, but the unusual, unique, even ruthless colors: burnt sienna, magenta, burgundy red, Prussian blue and of course turquoise, "the stone of the desert," "the color of yearning,". For Meloy; "Colors bear the metaphors of entire cultures. They convey every sensation from lust to distress. Flowers use colors ruthlessly for sex. Moths steal them from their surroundings and disappear. A cactus spines glows red-gold in the angle of sun, like an electrocuted aura." Life is good.
Finally, you will find in Ellen Meloy a forthright lover of nature. She is a south westerner, lover of the desert and outdoors woman who sees in desert life the paradoxes of being. She calls for attention as she expresses the damage to the earth that we are so thoughtlessly committing. She points out how we, Homo sapiens, are the first species to witness and will our own extinction. Her social - naturalist commentary is balanced with humor and memoirs; her narrative is both captivating and informative. She is at her best when she sticks to the southwest, but the chapters that chronicle her forays to the Bahamas and the Yucatan are nonetheless engaging. This is a well-crafted work that is filled with captivating metaphors, naturalism, travelogue, memoirs and humor. If you seek award winning writing, are captivated by colors and find sustenance in the natural world this is a highly recommended read. 4.5 stars
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