Winner, Rounce & Coffin Club Western Books Exhibition, 2004 Southwest Book Award, Border Regional Library Association, 2003 It takes a long time to get to know the Big Bend. Just to look at all the mountains and canyons and desert horizons can take weeks of driving and hiking. And to get acquainted with the independent, self-contained, slightly quirky people who call this place home ...well, that can take a lifetime. James Evans understands that. Recalling his decision to make the Big Bend his artistic muse and photographic subject, he says, "I moved here in 1988 to dedicate my life to the Big Bend and its people. I don't shoot pictures and leave and make a book. This work is a slow accumulation of years of being here. The mountains are familiar friends and the people my heroes. I am one of them." In this book, James Evans records the landscapes and the people of the Big Bend in all their beauty, harshness, and character. Images such as "South Rim with Agave," "Eyes of the Chisos," and "The Road to Candelaria" capture the distances, openness, and rough loveliness that draw people to this remote part of the Texas-Mexico border. Evans' photographs of people—legendary ranchwoman Hallie Stillwell, Kickapoo girls at a ceremonial dance, national park superintendent Ross Maxwell, school boys in Boquillas, Mexico, to mention only a few—show a deeply felt, but anti-sentimental understanding of his Big Bend neighbors. Other images, such as "Snake and Jesus," "Drug Blimp," and "Rope-O-Matic" reveal the whimsical, offbeat sensibility that sets Evans apart from others who have photographed the Big Bend. Also included are equally distinctive "Notes and Stories," in which Evans talks about how he came to photograph each particular person and each place and what they mean to him. Robert Draper's foreword pinpoints why Evans' work has such irresistible appeal. In his words, "The photographs of James Evans celebrate the unburnished beauty of Big Bend country as a way of celebrating the free spirit. I see no way out of voicing the cliché: this is a deeply life-affirming collection."

"Inferno is wonderful—reminiscent of Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire and Terry Tempest Williams' Leap, as well as some of Joy Williams' essays. I am also reminded of Annie Dillard's amazing work, For the Time Being... I think the book is incredibly timely—there is a lot of chatter about 'the death of environmentalism, ' and this work catches perfectly and passionately the sterility or lack of dirt and earth that has helped contribute to the extreme weakening of the movement. There is no one answer to the problem, but this is a beautiful and compelling treatment of the weakness." — Rick Bass Charles Bowden has been an outspoken advocate for the desert Southwest since the 1970s. Recently his activism helped persuade the U.S. government to create the Sonoran Desert National Monument in southern Arizona. But in working for environmental preservation, Bowden refuses to be one who "outline s\] something straightforward, a manifesto with clear rules and a set of plans for others to follow." In this deeply personal book, he brings the Sonoran Desert alive, not as a place where well-meaning people can go to enjoy "nature," but as a raw reality that defies bureaucratic and even literary attempts to define it, that can only be experienced through the senses. Inferno burns with Charles Bowden's passion for the desert he calls home. "I want to eat the dirt and lick the rock. Or leave the shade for the sun and feel the burning. I know I don't belong here. But this is the only place I belong," he says. His vivid descriptions, complemented by Michael Berman's acutely observed photographs of the Sonoran Desert, make readers feel the heat and smell the dryness, see the colors inearth and sky, and hear the singing of dry bones across the parched ground. Written as "an antibiotic" during the time Bowden was lobbying the government to create the Sonoran Desert National Monument, Inferno repudiates both the propaganda and the lyricism of contemporary nature writing. Instead, it persuades us that "we need these places not to remember our better selves or our natural self or our spiritual self. We need these places to taste what we fear and devour what we are. We need these places to be animals because unless we are animals we are nothing at all. That is the price of being a civilized dude."

Winner, Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, Domestic Photo, 2006 Juvenile crime rates have dropped dramatically since the early 1990s, yet more young people are in juvenile detention today than at any other time in America's history. Most are nonviolent offenders. Many have mental health or substance abuse problems. All have been failed by some combination of their families, schools, churches, and communities. But instead of addressing these young people's needs for treatment, rehabilitation, and basic nurturing, we lock them away in an overburdened juvenile justice system that can do little more than warehouse troubled children. This courageous work of photojournalism goes inside the system to offer an intimate, often disturbing view of children's experiences in juvenile detention. Steve Liss photographed and interviewed young detainees, their parents, and detention and probation officers in Laredo, Texas. His striking photographs reveal that these are vulnerable children—sometimes as young as ten—coping with a detention environment that most adults would find harsh. In the accompanying text, he brings in the voices of the young people who describe their already fractured lives and fragile dreams, as well as the words of their parents and juvenile justice workers who express frustration at not having more resources with which to help these kids. As Marian Wright Edelman asks in the foreword, "What does it say about us that the only thing our nation will guarantee every child is a costly jail or detention cell, while refusing them a place in Head Start or after-school child care, summer jobs, and other needed supports?" In the best tradition of photojournalism, No Place for Children is a call to action on behalf of America's at-risk youth.

The Southwestern desert—that tumultuous "zone claimed by two nations, and controlled by no one"—is Charles Bowden's home and enduring passion. In acclaimed books ranging from A Shadow in the Confessions of an Undercover Drug Warrior and Down by the Drugs, Money, Murder, and Family to Inferno and Exodus/Éxodo, Bowden has written eloquently about issues that plague the border region—the smuggling of drugs and people and the violence that accompanies it, the rape of the environment and the greed that drives it. Completing a trilogy that includes Inferno and Exodus/Éxodo, Bowden looks back in Trinity across centuries of human history in the border region to offer his most encompassing and damning indictment of "the murder of the earth all around me." Sparing no one, Bowden recounts how everyone who has laid claim to the Southwestern desert—Native Americans, Spain, Mexico, and the United States—has attempted to control and domesticate this ecologically fragile region, often with devastating consequences. He reserves special scorn for the U.S. government, whose attempts at control have provoked consequences ranging from the massive land grab of the Mexican War in the nineteenth century, to the nuclear fallout of the first atomic bomb test in the twentieth century, to the police state that is currently growing up around attempts to seal the border and fight terrorism. Providing a stunning visual counterpoint to Bowden's words, Michael Berman's photographs of the desert reveal both its harsh beauty and the scars it bears after centuries of human abuse. Bowden's clearest warning yet about the perils facing the desert he calls home, Trinity confirms that, in his words, "the \[border\] zone is a laboratory where the delusions of life—economic, religious, military, foreign policy, biological, and agricultural—can be tested. This time the edge is the center, this time the edge is the face of the future."

Alan Pogue began taking photographs during the Vietnam War, prompted by "an urge to record what shocked me as well as what was beautiful." His desire to bear witness to the full range of human experience matured into a career in documentary photography that has spanned four decades and many parts of the globe from his native Texas to the Middle East. Working in the tradition of socially committed photographers such as Jacob Riis, Lewis Hine, and the photographers of the Farm Security Administration, particularly Russell Lee and Dorothea Lange, Pogue has been a witness for justice, using the camera to capture the human context and to call attention to conditions needing remediation. This book offers a comprehensive visual survey of Alan Pogue's documentary photography. It opens with images of social protests of the 1960s and early 1970s, along with the countercultural scene around Austin, Texas, and prominent cultural and political figures, from William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg to Ann Richards and George W. Bush. Following these are suites of images that record the often harsh conditions of farm workers, immigrants, and prisoners—groups for whom Pogue has long felt deep empathy. Reflecting the progression of Pogue's career beyond Texas and the Southwest, the concluding suites of images capture social conditions in several Latin American and Caribbean countries (El Salvador, Nicaragua, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Mexico, and Haiti), the effects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on ordinary people, and the lives and privations of Iraqis between the two recent wars.