Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Hidden Wars of the American West

In 1851, a war began in what would become Yosemite National Park, a war that has yet to come to a real conclusion. A century later and about a hundred and fifty miles away as the crow flies, another war began when the U. S. government began setting off nuclear bombs at the Nevada Test Site, in what was called a nuclear testing program but functioned as a war against the land and people of the Great Basin. Savage Dreams is an exploration of these two landscapes, the arid and forbidden expanse of the Nevada Test Site, and the celebrated, crowded landscape of Yosemite National Park. Together they serve as our national Eden and Armageddon, though their real histories complicate the meanings of such mythical places.

Savage Dreams is a story about civil disobedience, landscape painting and photography, Indian wars, place names, Henry David Thoreau, many heroines, a few conquistadors, Adam and Eve in and out of Paradise, physicists, country music, nuclear fallout, gardens, storytelling, walking, traveling, home and friendship.