The Void, The Grid & The Sign: Traversing The Great Basin [Idioma Inglés] - Softcover

Fox, William L.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0874176182 ISBN 13: 9780874176186

Verlag: University of Nevada Press, 2005

Inhaltsangabe

Book by Fox William L

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Reseña del editor:

This is a story that few know, but those who do are its disciples. The story, of the highest and driest of all American deserts, the Great Basin, has no finer voice than that of William Fox. Fox's book is divided into the three sections of the title. In \u201cThe Void,\u201d he leads us through the Great Basin landscape, investigating our visual response to it-a pattern of mountains and valleys on a scale of such magnitude and emptiness and undifferentiated by shape, form, and color that the visual and cognitive expectations of the human mind are confounded and impaired. \u201cThe Grid\u201d leads us on a journey through the evolution of cartography in the nineteenth century and the explorations of John Charles Fr\u00e9mont to the net of maps, section markers, railroads, telegraph lines, and highways that humans have thrown across the void throughout history. \u201cThe Sign\u201d wends us through the metaphors and language we continue to place around and over the void, revealing the Great Basin as a palimpsest where, for example, the neon boulevards of Las Vegas interplay with ancient petroglyphs. In this one-of-a-kind travel book that allows us to travel within our own neurophysiological processes as well as out into the arresting void of the Great Basin, Fox has created a dazzling new standard at the frontier of writing about the American West. His stunning and broad insight draws from the fields of natural history, cognitive psychology, art history, western history, archaeology, and anthropology, and will be of value to scholars and readers in all these subjects.. NOTA: El libro no está en español, sino en inglés.

Reseña del editor:

What Barry Lopez did in expanding our vision of the frozen North in Arctic Dreams, William Fox has done in broadening our perceptions of the desert expanses of the West's Great Basin.Roughly a quarter of a million acres of land spanning much of Utah and most of Nevada, the Great Basin is the highest and driest of the American deserts, a vast empty tract on the nineteenth-century maps of our continent. Explorers and cartographers found it imponderable; pioneers and settlers found it uninhabitable. And today the Great Basin remains a largely unknown and forbidding landscape, one that continues to exercise a powerful influence on human desire and imagination.The Void, the Grid, & the Sign guides us to a place so unusual and disorienting that it can overcome rationality and become the locus for our most fanciful and fearsome projections: mythical rivers, mammoth artistic earthworks, alien spaceships, jet-propelled race cars, and weapons of mass annihilation.In The Void, Fox walks us through this landscape, investigating our responses to the Great Basin's appearance -- a pattern of mountains and valleys on a scale so large, so empty and undifferentiated by shape and form and color, that the visual and cognitive expectations of the human mind are confounded and impaired.The Grid focuses on the evolution of cartography in the nineteenth century and the explorations of John Charles Fremont in his search for the legendary Buenaventura River. Fox invites us on a Great Basin road trip, tracing the net of maps, section markers, railroads, telegraph lines, and highways that humans have thrown across the void throughout history.The Sign considers the language and the metaphorswe continue to place around and over the void, revealing the Great Basin as a vast palimpsest where the neon-lined boulevards of Las Vegas overlay and interplay with millennia-old petroglyphs and pictographs.Through vivid and arresting prose drawing from the disciplines of natural history, art history, cognitive psychology, western history, archaeology and anthropology, The Void, the Grid, & the Sign traverses the knowns and the unknowns of the Great Basin, offering a tour de force of inquiry and thought.

Über diese Auflage

• Verlag: University of Nevada Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0874176182
• ISBN 13: 9780874176186
• Einband: Paperback
• Anzahl der Seiten: 240