Craig Childs – författare

To whom does the past belong? Is the archeologist who discovers a lost tomb a sort of hero - or a villain? If someone steals a relic from a museum and returns it to the ruin it came from, is she a thief? Written in his trademark lyrical style, Craig Childs's riveting new book is a ghost story - an intense, impassioned investigation into the nature of the past and the things we leave behind. We visit lonesome desert canyons and fancy Fifth Avenue art galleries, journey throughout the Americas, Asia, the past and the present. The result is a brilliant book about man and nature, remnants and memory, a dashing tale of crime and detection.

THE ANIMAL DIALOGUES tells of Craig Childs' own chilling experiences among the grizzlies of the Arctic, sharks off the coast of British Columbia and in the turquoise waters of Central America, jaguars in the bush of northern Mexico, mountain lions, elk, Bighorn Sheep, and others. More than chilling, however, these stories are lyrical, enchanting, and reach beyond what one commonly assumes an "animal story" is or should be. THE ANIMAL DIALOGUES is a book about another world that exists alongside our own, an entire realm of languages and interactions that humans rarely get the chance to witness. "The author has a talent for bringing his encounters home and fashioning them into chromatic, immediate accounts. Some of the experiences chronicled here are quite simply breath-catching and heart-gladdening...Each of these pieces is a personal invitation to get outdoors and celebrate all things furred, feathered and scaled."-Kirkus Reviews "Eloquent...Childs's captivating essays, rich in sensuous imagery...are hauntingly beautiful and replete with evocative observations of animal life."-Publishers Weekly (starred)

The greatest 'unsolved mystery' of the American Southwest relates to the Anasazi, the native peoples who in the 11th century converged on Chaco Canyon (now New Mexico) and built a flourishing cultural center that attracted pilgrims from far and wide, a vital crossroads of the prehistoric world. The Anasazis' accomplishments - in agriculture, in art, in commerce, in architecture and engineering - were astounding, rivaling those of the Mayans in distant Central America. By the 13th century, however, the Anasazi were gone from Chaco. Vanished. What was it - drought? pestilence? war? forced migration? mass murder or suicide? Craig Childs draws on scholarly research and a lifetime of adventure and exploration in the American Southwest, to pursue the mystery of their disappearance. Considering many possibilities - drought, suicide - he points the way to a new understanding of how a vibrant civilization collapsed.HOUSE OF RAIN is a landmark work in the literature of ancient Native American culture, a key to a fascinating and mysterious lost civilization.

- A breakout book from a writer increasingly celebrated as the 21st-century bard of the American Southwest--a writer in the tradition of Barry Lopez, Peter Matthiessen, Terry Tempest Williams, among others. - In March 2003, Craig Childs received the Spirit of the West Literary Achievement Award, given to a writer whose body of work captures the unique spirit of the American West. - As a chronicle of adventure, as emotionally charged human drama, as confessional memoir, The Way Out is a transcendent book, a work destined to earn a lasting place in the literature of extremes. - Not since John Krakauer's bestselling Into the Wild has a book so compellingly explored the boundary between wilderness adventure and madness.

Like the highest mountain peaks, deserts are environments that can be inhospitable even to the most seasoned explorers. Craig Childs, who has spent years in the deserts of the American West - as an adventurer, a river guide, and a field instructor in natural history - has developed a keen appreciation for these forbidding landscapes: their beauty, their wonder, and especially their paradoxes. His extraordinary treks through arid lands in search of water are an astonishing revelation of the natural world at its most extreme.