The Void,Grid & Sign

Fox, William L.

"In this tour de force of inquiry and thought, Fox leads us through the roughly one-quarter million acres - spanning much of Utah and most of Nevada - that comprise the Great Basin, the highest and driest of the American deserts. Explorers and carto-graphers found it imponderable; pioneers and settlers found it uninhabitable. Even today the Great Basin remains a largely unknown and forbidding landscape, one that continues to exercise a powerful influence on human desire and imagination.". "In "The Void," Fox walks us through this landscape, investigating our responses to the Great Basin's appearance - a pattern of mountains and valleys on a scale so large, so empty and undifferentiated by shape, form, and color, that the visual and cognitive expectations of the human mind are confounded and impaired." ""The Grid," focuses on the evolution of cartography in the nineteenth century and...

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