With hundreds of beautiful photographs, Sandstone Rhythm seems at first glance to be just one of many guidebooks. But it is more than that! It takes a unique perspective on a fascinating corner of our world. Not only does it show you, but it gives you a hand and a companion on your journey through the world of National Parks of US Southwest!
This book is a story of my journey to the soul-warming beauty of the land of canyons.
The Grand Circle will bring back memories for anyone who has ever seen a Western movie - be it a costume film or an animated cartoon. We have seen a world then thought unattainable, called a promised land.
The book projects the arc of this life-travel onto a broadly interpreted map of the Grand Circle, whose main roads and dusty hiking trails I have explored, The book consists of two dozen separate stories interconnecting at the meeting points of this double arc. In this way, for example we can discover the Grand Canyon's most beloved hiking trails and Zion, Arches, Mesa Verde, Bryce, RM and almost all of the national Parks in the Gran Circle.
With hundreds of beautiful photographs, Sandstone Rhythm seems at first glance to be just one of many guidebooks. But it is more than that! It takes a unique perspective on a fascinating corner of our world. Not only does it show you, but it gives you a hand and a companion on your journey through the world of National Parks of US Southwest!
This book is a story of my journey to the soul-warming beauty of the land of canyons.
The Grand Circle will bring back memories for anyone who has ever seen a Western movie - be it a costume film or an animated cartoon. We have seen a world then thought unattainable, called a promised land.
The book projects the arc of this life-travel onto a broadly interpreted map of the Grand Circle, whose main roads and dusty hiking trails I have explored, The book consists of two dozen separate stories interconnecting at the meeting points of this double arc. In this way, for example we can discover the Grand Canyon's most beloved hiking trails and Zion, Arches, Mesa Verde, Bryce, RM and almost all of the national Parks in the Gran Circle.
Sandstone Rhythm is a lovely homage to the great American road trip. Part travel guide, part coffee table photo book, part memoir, Tom Cooper has written a unique and insightful meditation to the most iconic of landscapes, the American southwest. You could pick up this book, put the kids in the back seat and, as Mark Twain said, set out for parts unknown. You’d need nothing more than to better understand where to go, what to see, learn some history, understand some geology, all the while enjoying Tom’s unique and singular voice and photographer’s eye. You see, Tom is not local, not even to this continent. He is Hungarian and I am doubtful that anyone else, anyone from these lands, or even this country, would bring the curiosity and freshness to the task that Tom brings.
He writes early on that he is sharing his “example” as to how to travel. The ensuing pages read like an entertaining lesson in paying attention, in nurturing curiosity and adventure. “All these manifestations of beauty fill me with happiness, captivate me, and do not let me loose.” His happy candor in welcome in an age otherwise obsessed with less admirable goals. Along the way he entertains us with stories of desert-bound motels, pit-stops, observations that, I suspect, would go unheeded by the more cynical traveler.
Not so long ago this reviewer spent two years pulling an Airstream trailer across North America. Many of the places Tom writes about and beautifully photographs are places familiar to me. Yet, to read him as an experienced traveler is to grasp how much one can miss and overlook without the proper guide. His are fresh eyes in a fresh, to him, landscape. There is no accounting for the advantages that affords the non-native traveler. I only wish I’d had this book while making my own road-trip memories. If would have an afforded me a unique roadmap—literally!—of where to go and what to see. And his calm and happy voice, complimented with his keen eye would have brought much education and pleasure to my travels.
There is one especially poignant and personal moment deep in his travels where he reminisces about growing up watching the cartoon creations of the Hanna-Barbera studio, the Flinstones, Wiley Coyote and the Roadrunner—creations embedded into the landscape he is now, so many years later, exploring. He calls them youthful “messengers and ambassadors of the New World.” And as he now travels this New World he finds “the moment when you feel that this land is the home for both the unknown childhood heroes and the now-60-year-old kid.” That is a magical Proustian experience and I am grateful and happy that he has gone to effort of sharing it with us.
This book pleases on multiple levels. And even if road-tripping the American south-west is not on your agenda you will enjoy the photographs, the stories, and most of all the entertaining and refreshing voice of the author. I highly recommend Sandstone Rhythm.