How to Cuss in Western: And Other Missives from the High Desert

How to Cuss in Western from Michael P. Branch provides more than twenty fascinating rants from the High Desert. Branch is a professor at University of Nevada, Reno, who studies and produces literature about the environment. He has been influenced by Cactus Ed and Edward Abbey, who also fought with humor from the desert. The collection of essays included were published originally as Rants from the Hill in The High Plains Dealer. The author moved his family, a wife and two daughters, to a hill 6,000 feet high in Nevada’s Great Basin Desert and built a passive solar house and named it Ranting Hill. This is his third book of collected essays from the newspaper column he wrote.
From Branch one will get a general sense of some of the sensibilities of those from his part of the west. He is not an environmental extremist, but a defender with a mission. He sometimes uses unconventional means, like humor, to reveal stark and hard-to-digest truths. As stated in the acknowledgments, he and his many colleagues do not forget the fierce moral seriousness of the aims of environmentalism, but he tries to tackle it with more entertaining means, especially for those at the end of a long day who want something that will also entertain them. Here one will also find some interesting subjects explored and some of his adventures surviving in a forbidding place, making this a fascinating encounter with the wild also. Transgressors of certain sorts, watch out.