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The author had done due diligence. The first time I heard of Marshal South is when we pulled up to the bottom of Ghost Mountain in the Anza Borrego State Park and read the story of the South's on the kiosk there. She'd spoken to people who knew the family, and walked the mountain herself, the piles of tin cans thrown off the side of the mountain an attestation to the hypocrisy of this being an experiment in primitive living.Then this book came out, only published because Tanya South had died, and her children, mostly Rider, felt comfortable in rehabilitating his father's tarnished memory. I remember my young wife commenting on how ambiguous the story was. Shortly after that, within a year, a scathing article appeared on Marshall South in the San Diego Reader that painted him as a cruel controller who tricked his wife into moving to the desert, and that the children were traumatized by the whole experience. I'm grateful for this book, it lets me get back to dreaming of the magic of the desert, and not seeing monsters where there might be kindred souls.
An acrimonious divorce ended the "experiment in primitive living" and with Marshal's death in 1948, fifty years of silence and speculation followed. For seventeen years (1930 to 1947), poet, artist, and author Marshal South and his family lived on the remote, waterless mountaintop in California's Anza-Borrego Desert State Park and is referred to as "Ghost Mountain". Family secrecy, altered names and dates, lost and burned records and letters, left Marshal's grand experiment in obscurity, hidden from even his surviving family members. For nine of those years, Marshal South chronicled his family's controversial primitive lifestyle through popular monthly articles written for "Desert Magazine". The articles reflected his passion for the desert while praising its early inhabitants and their lifestyle. This was the state of affairs when historian Diana Lindsay brought Marshal's recorded experiences back into public purview with the publication of his writings, gleaned from the pages of Desert Magazine and anthologized in Marshal South And The Ghost Mountain Chronicles: An Experiment In Primitive Living. Illustrated with black-and-white photography, this unique account is enhanced with introduction commentaries by Rider and Lucile South and is highly recommended reading for anyone with an interest in "back to nature" movements and experiments with alternative lifestyles.
If we could only do it for just one year.This book is for anyone who loves nature, especially the desert kind. Every one is like a visit with the last tribal elder of a vanishing tribe.This is a haunting story.
This book is not only priceless in terms of making South's work available again, it is also a timely reminder of why connecting with nature is vital to our existence. The first section of the book is a short history of Marshal and how his family built their dream on a waterless mountain in the Anza-Borrego Desert.
After being quiet for more than 50 years, Marshal South is finally being introduced to a new generation. The rest (and major portion) of the book reprints Marshal's monthly columns that appeared in Desert Magazine.
Diana Lindsay has done a phenomenal job investigating and revealing the truth about the South's and what really happened in the end. Then Rider, the oldest of the South's three children, reflects on what it was like to live with nature in the raw during the first 12 years of his life.
To imagine what is was like to live apart from civilization from birth and experience nature in a way the rest of us only dream of draws out feelings that are hard to describe. South's philosophy and words about modern life are more valuable than ever.
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