Washoe County Library System

"It is the only absolute desert in North America, a four-hundred-square-mile dry lake bed so desolate that nothing ever grows there. Vast and featureless, Nevada's Black Rock Desert defies visual measurement - much to the consternation of off-roaders who venture out onto this playa only to run out of gas before reaching the other side. It is the largest flat area on the continent, where the sound barrier was broken in a car. And it is a place of total...

"Writer-poet William L. Fox has spent much of his career contemplating the complex ways that landscape, human cognition, and history collide to create our perceptions and treatment of place. In Playa Works, Fox considers the West's emptiest spaces - the playas, or dry beds, of the ancient lakes that once filled much of the Great Basin. Among the flattest, most barren places on the planet, the West's playas have haunted the American imagination since...