DESERT AMERICA: BOOM AND BUST IN THE NEW “NEW WEST”
Book ID/图书代码： 12560512B53418
English Summary/英文概要： A brilliantly illuminating portrait of the twenty-first-century West—a book as vast, diverse, and unexpected as the land and the people, from one of our foremost chroniclers of migration
The economic boom—and the devastation left in its wake—has been writ nowhere as large as on the West, the most iconic of American landscapes. Over the last decade the West has undergone a political and demographic upheaval comparable only to the opening of the frontier. Now, in Desert America, a work of powerful reportage and memoir, Rubén Martínez, acclaimed author of Crossing Over, evokes a new world of extremes: outrageous wealth and devastating poverty, sublime beauty and ecological ruin.
In northern New Mexico, an epidemic of drug addiction flourishes in the shadow of some of the country’s richest zip codes; in Joshua Tree, California, gentrification displaces people and history. In Marfa, Texas, an exclusive enclave triggers a race war near the banks of the Rio Grande. And on the Tohono O’odham reservation, Native Americans hunt down Mexican migrants crossing the most desolate stretch of the border.
With each desert story, Martínez explores his own encounter with the West and his love for this most contested region. In the process, he reveals that the great frontier is now a harbinger of the vast disparities that are redefining the very idea of America.
Chinese Summary/中文概要： 本书出自我们一位最重要的移民编年史家，它色彩鲜明的描写了二十一世纪的西方——辽阔的，多种多样的和意想不到的土地和人们。
大萧条离去之后，西方到处一片经济繁荣的景象。在过去十年间，仅与开放边境时相比，西方经历了政治和人口上的剧变。现在，备受欢迎的《穿越国境》(Crossing Over)作者鲁本.马丁内兹(Rubén Martínez)的一步具有强大报导和实录的作品——《荒凉美洲》(Desert America)，又引起一个新的世界极端：令人发指的财富和毁灭性的贫困，崇尚美和生态破坏。
新墨西哥州北部，在一些最富有的城市表面下，毒瘾盛行；在加利福尼亚的约书亚树，高档化取代了人们和历史；在德克萨斯州马尔法小镇格兰德河沿岸附近，一块领土就引起一场种族战争；在 Tohono O’odham 的禁猎区内，美洲印第安人猎杀跨越荒凉边境的墨西哥偷渡客。
在每一个荒漠故事里，马丁内兹去探索他跟西部的邂逅以及他对这个备受争议区域的爱。在这个过程中，他透漏现在最大的边界是巨大差距的前兆，这些差距正重新定义美洲本身。(LNL & CK)
Awards/获奖情况：In this first-person report, Emmy-winning Mexican-American poet and journalist Martínez (Crossing Over) sojourns in the more remote regions of the Southwest, beyond the advertisements and zip codes of booming New Mexico, and finds the front line of a battle over the American past and future. From a base north of Albuquerque along the Rio Grande, in a house he rents in Velarde with his wife, Angela (a scholar studying heroin addiction in this heavily drug-addicted place), Martínez does his best to immerse himself in a largely Latino community that is extremely aware of outsiders, weighing the stark realities of his neighbors’ lives while musing on disparities and dislocations reaching back hundreds of years. Attentive to an ongoing history usurpation—as well as an entrenched poverty that remains “largely invisible, lost in the western mind that imagines it”—this thoughtful and well-written account intimately explores the convolutions of racism and class conflict that have come to define a divided America. The peripatetic narrative can feel digressive at times, but Martínez offers reportage beyond the simple binaries of the immigration issue or the drug war. He delivers a lively compassionate intervention into our collective conception of the Southwest, if only by eloquently writing the names and lives he finds there back into the landscape.
About the Author/作者介绍： 鲁本.马丁内兹(Rubén Martínez)，一位获得艾美奖的新闻记者和诗人，
是《穿越国境》(Crossing Over)和《新美国人》(The New Americans)的作者。他居住在洛杉矶，在那里他担任洛约拉玛莉蔓特大学弗莱彻·琼斯文学与写作的主席。
Rubén Martínez, an Emmy-winning journalist and poet, is the author of Crossing Over and The New Americans. He lives in Los Angeles, where he holds the Fletcher Jones Chair in Literature and Writing at Loyola Marymount University.
Here, Martínez’s journalistic background shines as he weaves together stories about the people and the landscape of the American Southwest. His journeys over the course of a decade living in locations from Verlarde, NM, to Marfa, TX, compelled him, a native Californian from Los Angeles, to confront the realities around him. Martínez (Fletcher Jones Chair in Literature & Writing, Loyola Marymount Univ.; Crossing Over) is forced to leave his original dreamy notions of the Southwestern desert behind as he writes about how living conditions for many in the Southwestern desert is a kind of poverty not known in America’s bigger cities, with extremes of wealth and destitution, landscape beauty and ruin. At each place he lives and calls home in the Southwest, he is usually seen as an outsider by locals. It is with that paradox in mind that he, the perceived outsider, captures and interprets the stories that make up this book.
Format:PROOF
Rights Status/版权销售情况：Simplified Chinese/简体中文：AVAILABLE
Complex/Traditional Chinese/繁体中文：AVAILABLE
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