Rating: 
Summary: A Pleasurable and Informative Read!
Review: "The Secret Knowledge of Water" is prose poetry, without a single word wasted. Three or four months after reading it, many of the images are still in my head: images of ancient trails to waterholes; large, unexpected swimming holes, microbes so hardy their environment can go dry and they just curl up and wait... This book will become even more valuable and compelling as drinking water supplies diminish in quality and quantity. Childs leads us with great flair to a subject of unparalleled importance. His musings blend with touches of humor, history and fascinating naturalism. "Secret Knowledge" should be on every nightstand and in every science (and literature) classroom. It's truly a work of art!
Rating:
Summary: A Pleasurable and Informative Read!
Review: "The Secret Knowledge of Water" is prose poetry, without a single word wasted. Three or four months after reading it, many of the images are still in my head: images of ancient trails to waterholes; large, unexpected swimming holes, microbes so hardy their environment can go dry and they just curl up and wait... This book will become even more valuable and compelling as drinking water supplies diminish in quality and quantity. Childs leads us with great flair to a subject of unparalleled importance. His musings blend with touches of humor, history and fascinating naturalism. "Secret Knowledge" should be on every nightstand and in every science (and literature) classroom. It's truly a work of art!
Rating:
Summary: A Pleasurable and Informative Read!
Review: "The Secret Knowledge of Water" is prose poetry, without a single word wasted. Three or four months after reading it, many of the images are still in my head: images of ancient trails to waterholes; large, unexpected swimming holes, microbes so hardy their environment can go dry and they just curl up and wait... This book will become even more valuable and compelling as drinking water supplies diminish in quality and quantity. Childs leads us with great flair to a subject of unparalleled importance. His musings blend with touches of humor, history and fascinating naturalism. "Secret Knowledge" should be on every nightstand and in every science (and literature) classroom. It's truly a work of art!
Rating:
Summary: Subtle Desert Poetry
Review: Author Craig Childs offers an intimate, poetic account of his experiences with the phantom of water in the deserts of the American Southwest. Choosing his words with artistic abandon, Childs introduces an array of little-known features of the land, from the handmade beauty of the tinajas to the ephemeral wonder of the fairy shrimp to the incredible power of the summer flood. "Secret Knowledge" is a wondrous balance between rational scientific concepts and deeply-felt experience.
Rating:
Summary: Subtle Desert Poetry
Review: Author Craig Childs offers an intimate, poetic account of his experiences with the phantom of water in the deserts of the American Southwest. Choosing his words with artistic abandon, Childs introduces an array of little-known features of the land, from the handmade beauty of the tinajas to the ephemeral wonder of the fairy shrimp to the incredible power of the summer flood. "Secret Knowledge" is a wondrous balance between rational scientific concepts and deeply-felt experience.
Rating:
Summary: the true nature of the desert
Review: Childs' book remains one of the very best works of nature writing about desert landscapes and their effects upon a sensitive and adventurous explorer. There are few works were the reader so conceptually understands and emotionally feels the value of water. I've recommended this book to many over the years when giving lectures across the country about water management and water ethics. And I quote Childs' book 6 times in my own recently published Deep Immersion: The Experience of Water (nominated for top environmental book of the year, 2003. The author's message about staying wet even in deserts is a great one. For as master hydrophile Thoreau wrote " That part of you that is wettest is fullest of life" (Quoted from Profitably Soaked: Thoreau's Engagment With Water, Green Frigate Books, 2003).
Rating: 
Summary: Craig Childs, the Craig Claiborne of desert writers
Review: Craig Childs savors the desert and all its happenings in his quest for water. He tastes storms, let sands flow through his fingers like so much spice, explores caves and canyons. In short, he gives us a poetic, knowing, sensual and thorough survey of the territory he tramps for weeks at a time. Highly recommended for those who don't know the desert as well as for those who do.
Rating:
Summary: Vicarious desert travel
Review: For desert hikers, the only substitute for "being there" is to be there through someone else's eyes. Childs has opted for a life that few can or will choose...although many of us may wish we had. His experiences are uncommon enough that a simple telling would be sufficient to keep the reader engaged. I could actually feel fear myself during his description of entry into a canyon-side spring against the flow...40 stories up. This book will keep me going a while longer while I wait to get back to this landscape again.
Rating:
Summary: A water journey
Review: For two years in 1976 & 1977, I rode horseback from San Diego to Maine, zig-zagging over 7,000 miles while living outside for two years. I called this adventure a "Ride For Nature." I have also travelled into Africa's Sahara, Australia's Outback, and Israel's Negev Desert. As well, I am the author of "The Holy Order of Water."
To me, the best quote in Child's book is on page 55, "...that species in water holes, the ones that can't get up and fly away, do not move around very often. They become genetically isolated over thousands, and then millions, of years. In 1992, after nearly all of the temproary vernal pools of California were destroyed by human development, researchers went out to catalog those still intact. Of the sixty-seven species of crustaceans found in the remaining pools, thirty had never been documented anywhere on the planet. People had to suddenly set about inventing names. A quarter of these newly found species were each found in its own pool among the fifty-eight pools studied, meaning there is not much motion between one pool and the next. What was lost in the hundreds of destroyed pools is unknown."
Besides the above, I can fully appreciate Childs' writing about modes of desert walking; thinking, and dressing. In the desert, any expenditure of energy or exposure results in the loss of water and one's ability to surive. Therefore, one becomes more conscious and thoughtful of body movement and clothing, as well as toward the sun, night, and the surrounding environment.
Perhaps it is this heightened state of desert consciousness that has helped give birth to so many enlightened prophets.
I highly recommend this book to anyone thinking of hiking in the desert, as well as to those who wish to understand the importance of deserts in the adventure of life on Earth.
Rating:
Summary: very good
Review: I was surprised that I liked this book as it started out so slow. But stick with it. It's fascinating.
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