With his rambling style and multiplicity of sources, Roberts 'jumps around the ages,' seamlessly blending memoir, history, and reportage to describe the region’s human story ... One last fond look at a favorite place? A swan song of a prolific author? Roberts adds inviting details throughout this must-read book, adding poignancy to an already fascinating read.
An engrossing history of an area that’s become enveloped in controversy. Roberts’s episodic 'human history' ignores chronology to 'jump around among the ages' and stretches back to the Ancestral Puebloans ... Roberts intersperses his own exploration of the land as he surveys a place with great historical significance, physical beauty, and expansive cultural import. The result is a masterfully rendered portrait of Bears Ears as an endangered land worth celebrating and protecting.
The popular historian and explorer of the Southwest digs deep into the secrets of a remote slice of the American wilderness ... The author, who for some reason continues to use the now-discredited term Anasazi for the ancient peoples of the region, delivers a fluent, anecdotal history that includes accounts of his own travels ... The author is strong on both history and anthropology, aware of the most recent theories on such matters as Navajo origins ... Roberts’ latest combines research, journalism, and memoir in a satisfying whole that will please fans of his earlier books of both travel in wild places and key moments in Native American history. At the top of the half-dozen books recently published on Bears Ears and a pleasure for travelers in the Southwest.
