At first when I saw this book and flipped through it, I thought it was going to be horrible to read. However, this book was similar to The Meadowlands in that it wasnt just an overload of information and facts. This made it much easier to read and it flowed a lot better because of it. I liked the fact that Abbey used first hand accounts and told stories about them, just like in the Meadowlands, because it made me feel much more connected to the actual environment that he was discussing. In many ways, this kind of writing brings out emotions from the reader as opposed to just boring them with random factoids here and there. Despite this similarity to the Meadowlands, it was also almost a completely opposite subject matter. In the Meadowlands, the author brought up how humans had shaped the environment to a great degree. Like the title of the book suggests, Abbey is describing a desert environment. It was less interesting to me than the Meadowlands was, partially because I could not relate to this kind of a desert environment like I could with the Meadowlands. Overall, contrary to what I had expected the book wasn’t all that horrible, although it did read a lot slower than the Meadowlands did for me last week.
