ONCE UPON A CAMEL

Whenever I embark upon a new project, I usually start with books. As I write, the stack of books gets taller. By the end of the project, it’s not unusual to have a small library of books that I read. Some of them were more useful than others, but almost all of them offered up something useful.

 Here are five of them for your viewing pleasure…

?CAMEL, by Robert Irwin, Reaktion Books Ltd., London, 2010. This very cool book is part of series  of unique “animal history” books.

?THE LAST CAMEL CHARGE: THE UNTOLD STORY OF AMERICA’S DESERT MILITARY EXPERIMENT,  by Forrest Bryant Johnson, Berkley Publishing, New York, 2012.  My husband Ken loved this book. He doesn’t ordinarily read all of my resource books, but he picked this one up and  couldn’t put it down. It’s got a lot of info and a bunch of terrific photos.

?NATURALIST’S BIG BEND, by Roland H. Wauer & Carl M. Fleming, Texas A&M University Press, College Station, TX, 2002. This might have been my most useful book. It’s a straight-ahead compendium of the flora and fauna of Big Bend. Includes a short history of the impact that humans have made on the region.

?ROCK ART OF THE LOWER PECOS, by Carolyn E. Boyd, Texas A&M University Press, College Station, TX, 2003. As it turned out, I didn’t really need anything from this book, but I just loved reading about the rock art that has been recently uncovered, and what it symbolized. So interesting.

?UNCLE SAM’S CAMELS: THE JOURNAL OF MAY HUMPHREYS STACEY SUPPLEMENTED BY THE REPORT OF EDWARD FIRTZGERALD BEALE (1857-1858), Ed.by Lewis Burt Lesley, Huntington Library Press, Los Angeles, 1929, reprinted 2006. Firsthand account of the Camel Experiment. It’s hard to get more original than this daily journal of the camel corps.