Product Description

Eight hundred miles long, Baja California is the remotest region of the Sonoran desert, a land of volcanic cliffs, glistening beaches, fantastical boojum trees, and some of the greatest primitive murals in the Western Hemisphere. In this book, Berger recounts tales from his three decades in this extraordinary place, enriching his account with the peninsula's history, its politics, and its probable future--rendering a striking panorama of this land so close to the United States, so famous and so little known.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #413112 in Books
• Published on: 1998-07-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 211 pages

From Publishers Weekly
While the natural marvels of the 800-mile-long Mexican peninsula called Baja California are not scanted in this freewheeling exploration, it's the human inhabitants that underscore its uniqueness. Berger, award-winning author of The Telling Distance (1990), erstwhile piano player ready for adventure, chronicles his three-decade love affair with this timeless landscape of desert, lagoons, caves and remote ranges, as well as the people of its cities and towns. One of those cities is LaPaz in Baja California Sur, to which a third of the book is devoted. ("LaPaz was one of those places that bored the tourist while whispering to a struck minority: here you must live.") As a resident foreigner whose affection does not close his eyes to contemporary societal evils, Berger is an objective observer. As a "specialist in the state of Baja California," he treats the reader to a pithy history of the upper and lower peninsula, with views of the Spanish colonizers, the controversial missionaries, especially the Jesuits, and the ongoing flinty relationship of the U.S. and this Mexican territory. Berger the raconteur entertains as he cautions against the intrusions made possible by paved roads and highways.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Berger, a Western States Book Award Winner for The Telling Distance (Univ. of Arizona, 1990), lived and traveled in Baja, CA, for three decades. Here he paints a vivid picture of this unique place he refers to as "almost an island." In a fight to protect this shrinking wilderness, he covers the history of the native peoples, the invasion of the Spaniards, modern-day tourists, contemporary settlements, and the everyday life of the permanent and transient residents of the peninsula. He also charts how the 20th century has finally caught up with Baja; as tourism flourishes, the rich history disappears. More homage to a once-wild corner of the North American continent than guidebook, this is recommended for public and academic libraries.?Sandra Knowles, Univ. of South Carolina Sch. of Medicine Lib., Columbia
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
Here is a wide-eyed writer with the curiosity, patience and observational skills to follow leads, pursue histories and apply the artistry that takes the reader down the same paths he visits. -- The Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review, Susan Salter Reynolds

Customer Reviews

It's worth the trip
I enjoy travel and have just returned from a wonderful trip to Baja, CA. Well, I didn't actually get to go in person but I did the next best thing. I just finished reading Berger's story of his experiences over three decades in the remotest region of the Sonoran desert, Baja, CA. Berger is a prolific writer and author of numerous books including There Was a River and The Telling Distance, which won both a Western States Book Award and a Colorado Book Authors award. He has an ongoing love affair with Baja(30 years) and it shows no sign of abating. Almost an Island is not your typical travel book.They are a dime a dozen. This book is a collection of stories, history, politics and reminiscence of the real Baja. It's a human story about real characters, agonizingly beautiful and harsh geography, and a future as uncertain as the paved highway recently built in part to encourage "economic development" and bring the "advantages" of modern living to the populace via tourism. When you go with Berger you are a traveler rather than a tourist. You will visit remote places and meet people that most tourists never see. The characters are unforgettable and, well, eccentric to say the least. Come along and meet Brandy, a Marine Corps veteran with scarred lungs, that traverses the desert in a dune buggy and oxygen tanks. How about spending some time with an innkeeper from Hollywood, nuns that raise pigs under questionable circumstances, and a former Detroit auto executive that walked away from a career and settled on a beach. The story of the activities surrounding a total eclipse is hilarious. There are stories of a pet tarantula, pronghorn antelope, and a million points of light in between. Berger is a keen observer of every thing he sees and experiences. He brings you the feel, the smell, the taste of the incredible diversity of the eight hundred mile long peninsula of desert surrounded by the sea we know as Baja. It is remote, close to the United States, famous, and little known. If you want to meet this area up close and personal, go with Bruce Berger. It is a trip you will never forget and you can't beat the price.

Highly Recommended
I loved this book! It is very informative as well as an interesting read.

A 30-year perfect exposure of Baja California
The double vanishing points of personality and place create travel writing. They make a literature that runs from eccentric guidebooks to the geographies of ecstatics and tortured souls. Bruce Berger's Almost an Island occupies the middle ground where composition graces its sometimes dramatic spans with no show of force, no telltale ripple of perspective. His method is the sidewalk artist's whose drama is the blank space scored quickly and economically to sketch, then with return visits turning lines to 3-D webs, armature modeled and eventually blending in the final surprises of local color. It's the outline method out of predigested sequence. His flashes forward and retrospectives follow the natural learning curve of discovery, or its artful analog. Berger is obviously taken with the whole peninsula, and it shows. "Lovingly detailed," bled of sentimentality, describes his renderings of Baja California's barely adulterated bedrock, its vegetable adventurers, and its animal life scheming and occasionally teeming in the face of obstacles redolent of a whimsical and marginally malign experimenter. Particulars are best read in the original, a representative sample of which is feeding time at the evaporation ponds of a vast saltworks: "... We paused to watch more than two hundred waders making an angular design with the spindly legs that give them their English name, stilt, and the white bellies and black backs that give them the Spanish monjita, little nun. Eared grebes skimmed the surface by the hundreds in lines of smoke; northern shovelers and lesser scaups gathered in separate flotillas; flocks of sandpipers turned in flight like filings of a single mind-dark and striped backs that pivoted en masse, nearly disappearing, to reform as clouds of pale breasts. Certain areas featured a preponderance of white: white pelicans with their black wingtips hidden in folds, great and snowy egrets, blue herons in the white phase, as if they had all been dipped in salt. Marbled godwits suddenly burst from the surface with perfect spacing between each bird, forming an elongated cloud that swelled, shrank and drew itself out like a single sky serpent in a shifting lens. Some rectangles of water were so wide, their horizons so low, that they seemed the sea itself, and their spume blew onto our tracks like meringue. Occasionally we were jolted by having to make room for yellow trucks whose tires were as big as our jeep and whose gondolas were blinding with salt. Over subsequent censuses this skimming of the salt ponds became my favorite driving anywhere, and Fernando remarked that he had a colleague who drove the 30 kilometers of causeways for sport, attaining nonbirdwatching speeds of up to 120 kilometers per hour." Gradually, from four-wheel forays in the 60s to half-year residency in the 90s, Berger became an unofficial dual citizen, part observer and part protagonist in local battles over pronghorn preserves, whale breeding grounds and myopic multicultural change. Friends and all-too-understandable adversaries complete his moral landscape and anchor what is in the end the author's real and fully imagined almost-island.