Filled with “honest” writing and “wise” observations, “Russell’s well-written essays describe her life as an urban immigrant to the rural Southwest” (Library Journal). In 1981, newlywed Sharman Apt Russell moved with her husband to an agricultural valley in southwestern New Mexico, hoping to create a simpler life. From building their adobe house to the home-birth of their firstborn to growing their own food and navigating the seasonal flooding of the Mimbres River, these luminous essays chart Sharman’s journey toward self-sufficiency in a land as mythical and remote as the...

An award-winning science and nature writer “presents a lively, confident, and free-flowing history of archaeology in America” (Booklist). Digging up the relics of the past is not without controversy. With insight and eloquence, Sharman Apt Russell reveals here that when it comes to archaeological study, there is more than one way to examine history. Raising provocative questions anew about subjects such as the role of humans in the extinction of the large land mammals of the Pleistocene epoch and the repatriation of Native American graves, Russell, winner of the John Burroughs...

A critically acclaimed nature writer explores the citizen scientist movement through the lens of entomological field research in the American Southwest. Award-winning nature writer Sharman Apt Russell felt pressed by the current environmental crisis to pick up her pen yet again. Encouraged by the phenomenon of citizen science, she decided to turn her attention to the Western red-bellied tiger beetle, an insect found widely around the world and near her home in the Gila River Valley of New Mexico. In a lyrical, often humorous voice, Russell shares her journey across a wild, rural landscape...