Shrubs of the Great Basin: A Natural History by Hugh N. Mozingo (review)

Reviews 183 Shrubs of the Great Basin: A Natural History. ByHugh N. Mozingo. Drawings by Christine Stetter. (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1987. 342 pages, $27.95/$16.95.) This handsomely-produced volume, fifth in the “Max C. Fleischmann Series in Great Basin Natural History,” conveys a rather amazing amount of information about such species as Four-winged Saltbush, Shadscale, Winterfat, and White Burrobrush. Each of these shrubs, though perhaps lacking in natural-history glamor (as, indeed, the Great Basin itselfmay seem, in compari­ son with more-photographed areas), is tremendously important ecologically. These humble bushes help to hold together and nourish the biotic community in a region notable for punishing extremes of heat, cold, and dryness. Their many adaptations to rigorous conditions, presented here in thorough and scholarly detail, can tell us much about evolutionary history and the wonder­ fully creative, niche-filling powers of nature. 12,000 years ago, around the shores of giant Lake Lahontan, conifer forests grew; then came a turn toward a warmer and drier climate, and eventually the “shadscale desert and sagebrushgrassland communities began to occupy their present locations. . . .” The current spareness of the Great Basin, where a walking human looms above the vegetation in most areas, is “but one frame of a constantly changing motion picture.” Professor Mozingo presents a naturalistic view whose reference points are the immensities of geological and climatic history on the one hand, and tiny alterations in the genes of plants on the other. Some thriving clones of the creosote bush, the author points out, may be as much as 11,700 years old. The wide perspective latent within facts like this is both the precondition and a chief philosophical theme, of course, in nature writing of the past two centuries. Perhaps in time, in analogy to a subtle change in genetic material, the opened view will begin to have a tangible effect. THOMAS J. LYON Utah State University No Wild Dog Howled. By Bruce Embree. (Boise, Idaho: Limberlost Press, 1987. Letterpressed, 24 pages, $9.00 paper.) Although his poems have been filtering into small press publications in Idaho for several years, Bruce Embree’s is a name almost completely unknown outside his native state. One hopes the present volume will change this. Embree has shaped a personal vision of hell that only increases in power as the spirit of the poet, through his art, fights to rise above it. His method of composition is itself a shocking evocation of the landscape he writes from. ...