Because It Is So Beautiful

A Finalist for the PEN/DiamonsteinSpielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. Yes every inch of the globe has been seen mapped photographed and measured but is it known? Robert Leonard Reid doesnt think so. To draw a circle and calculate its diameter is not to know the circle. In this collection Reid distinguishes himself from many sciencebased nature writers using the natural world as a springboard for speculations and musings on the numinous and the sacred injustice homelessness the treatment of Native Peoples in the United States and what pushes mountaineers to climb. Ranging in their settings from eastern New Mexico to northern Alaska Reids essays illustrate his belief that the American West is worth celebrating and caring for.. Taking its title from an affecting speech given by renowned author Barry Lopez Because It Is So Beautiful is a response to desperate questions surrounding Americas wildlands. Lopezs words resonated with the young mountaineermusicianmathematician Robert Leonard Reid who was struggling to understand his relationship to the world to find his vision as a writer. What he learned on that longago evening is knit throughout the nineteen pieces in the collection which include essays from Reids previous books Arctic Circle Mountains of the Great Blue Dream and America New Mexico; three essays that appear here in print for the first time; as well as revised and expanded versions of essays that appeared in Touchstone The Progressive and elsewhere.