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Praise for The Oasis This Time

“Rebecca Lawton’s powerful and poetic The Oasis This Time celebrates water as a precious natural resource. The collection is as diverse as it is illuminating. Each essay addresses a unique topic, but all are anchored by keen observations of the environment and musings on alternative solutions to pressing environmental problems.”

—FOREWORD REVIEWS

“Part memoir, part conservation treatise, and part history lesson … Lawton’s focus is on how human lives are urgently shaped by their connection to water, whether it is in pieces on her love for her favorite river, the Stanislaus in California; a past Native American community’s connection to that same river; or the 1970s-era engineers who built the dam that inundated it and erased those connections.”

—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

“A collection of strong, smart, wise, and deeply knowledgeable essays on water in the West, what it means and has meant to the author throughout her life, and what it means to all of us who depend on nature—the biggest oasis of all—for our lives. I came away from this book better informed, deeply touched, and quietly recommitted to the work of living more gently in our fragile world.”

—JULIA WHITTY, author of Deep Blue Home and The Fragile Edge

“The essays in The Oasis This Time flow like tributaries in a desert river. They meander and eddy and braid. They offer respite and challenge. Rebecca Lawton, as both intimate friend and knowledgeable guide, takes the reader on a dynamic journey from Las Vegas to Alaska, from the Grand Canyon to Ottawa. Her musings on this beloved arid land and its water shimmer with wonder at the life around us—birds, birds, and more birds!—and within us, and burn with urgency.”

—ANA MARIA SPAGNA, author of Uplake and The Luckiest Scar on Earth

“I opened The Oasis This Time assuming I was going to read about water. But what I read about instead is thirst. In straightforward, sometimes rascally, prose, Lawton digs into all the ways we want to be satiated. Our thirst for adventure, for love, for power and control, for ambitious development with an often warped sense of ‘progress.’ Hers is a wake-up call, shaped by Lawton’s deep knowledge and love of place, and mostly her commitment to waterways, streams and creeks and rivers and oceans. We need this book.”

—DEBRA GWARTNEY, author of Live Through This and I’m a Stranger Here Myself

“In a parched and burning land, humanity’s crimes against fresh water stand out with increasing starkness as crimes against ourselves. Through deft, spirited storytelling, Rebecca Lawton faces with compassionate courage the painful truths of our defiled and dwindling waterways; The Oasis This Time bids us to nurture the vital wellsprings we have too long taken for granted.”

—SARAH JUNIPER RABKIN, author and illustrator of What I Learned at Bug Camp

“Rebecca Lawton brings a poet’s eye to the landscapes she loves, but she is, at heart, a warrior. With every sentence she fiercely defends what remains, totals her losses, and moves on to the next critical confrontation. In the end The Oasis This Time offers us a surprising amount of hope. Hope that we can survive even the worst of mankind’s depredations. Hope that this planet is more resilient than we ever imagined.”

—ANDY WEINBERGER, author of The Ugly Man Sits in the Garden