For over a decade Michael P. Branch has been writing about life in Nevada’s Great Basin Desert with an audacity, lyricism, and wit all his own. In Raising Wild, Branch offers an intimate exploration of the western high desert. Here we find the wild and extreme land of caliche and juniper, where pronghorn antelope run and mountain lions stalk, where wildfires and snowstorms threaten in equal measure, and where Branch, his wife, and their two curious little girls brazenly live among the packrats and ground squirrels, rattlesnakes and scorpions.In Branch’s hands, this exceedingly barren and stark landscape becomes a place teeming with energy, surprise, and an endless web of connections that ultimately includes his family and home. It is here where one can build a ladder to the stars and find a link to the past and to the heavens; where his children’s first garden becomes not the quaint blossoming of seed to flower and fruit but a smoke bomb–drenched site of futility in the face of an inhospitable desert environment; where the surprise of fire acts as a reminder all too real of the unknowable that awaits us and for which we can never fully prepare.In this inspired and hilarious exploration of natural history and parenting, Branch reveals a desert wilderness in which our ideas about nature and ourselves are challenged and transformed.
