Edna In The Desert

"Edna is a precocious trouble-maker wreaking havoc at her Beverly Hills school. Her therapist advocates medication, but her parents come up with an alternative cure: Edna will spend the summer in the desert with her grandparents. Their remote cabin is cut off from cell phone service, Internet, and television. Edna naturally finds this arrangement unacceptable. She's determined to rebel until she meets an older local boy and falls in love for the first time"--Back cover.

Desert and Virtue: A Theory of Intrinsic Value presents a comprehensive examination of desert and what makes people deserve things. Stephen Kershnar demonstrates how desert relates to virtue, good deeds, moral responsibility, and personal change and growth through the life process. He persuasively argues that desert is a function that relates well-being, intrinsic value, and a "ground," which is defined as a person's character or act. Kershnar also explores whether his theory is consistent with the limited responsibility people have for who they are. Desert and Virtue's insightful analysis will be particularly useful for those interested in philosophy, religion, and other fields that touch on value theory.

North American deserts—lands of little water—have long been home to a surprising diversity of aquatic life, from fish to insects and mollusks. With European settlement, however, water extraction, resource exploitation, and invasive species set many of these native aquatic species on downward spirals. In this book, conservationists dedicated to these creatures document the history of their work, the techniques and philosophies that inform it, and the challenges and opportunities of the future. A precursor to this book, Battle Against Extinction, laid out the scope of the problem and related conservation activities through the late 1980s. Since then, many nascent conservation programs have matured, and researchers have developed new technologies, improved and refined methods, and greatly expanded our knowledge of the myriad influences on the ecology and dynamics of these species. Standing between Life and Extinction brings the story up to date. While the future for some species is more secure than thirty years ago, others are less fortunate. Calling attention not only to iconic species like the razorback sucker, Gila trout, and Devils Hole pupfish, but also to other fishes and obscure and fascinating invertebrates inhabiting intermittent aquatic habitats, this book explores the scientific, social, and political challenges of preserving these aquatic species and their habitats amid an increasingly charged political discourse and in desert regions characterized by a growing human population and rapidly changing climate.

A memoir of one young woman’s decade-long adventure with her husband in one of the most uninhabitable and inhospitable places on Earth. Raised as a well-to-do Virginia girl, Edna fell head-over-heels in love with a semi-literate and restless young man whose dreams of adventure and freedom were as wide as the California sky. “I can’t take a soft life,” he told his bride. “It rots a man.” Thus began an uncommon love story. For ten happy years, 1931 to 1941, Edna and Bill Price abandoned city life and roamed sun-scorched Death Valley and the Arizona badlands on foot with their string of pack burros. They slept under the stars, scratched out a meager living from the wasteland, and hobnobbed with prospectors, outlaws, herders and hobos. “In this place,” Bill explained, “a man can find his God.” Far from feeling displaced, Edna thrived as a desert flower. In her extraordinary memoir, a jewel of Western Americana, Edna writes with wit and grit, recalling “those years when we knew no bed but the ground, no roof but the sky, when we were known all over the deserts simply as Burro Bill and Mrs. Bill.”