Revenge of the Saguaro: Offbeat Travels Through America’s Southwest

Who killed that saguaro outside Phoenix? What is the sound of one billboard falling? Cochise who?

Tom Miller’s Southwest is a vortex of cockfights and cantinas, of black velvet paintings and tacky bolo ties, of eco-militants, border-crossers, and eccentric characters whose outlook is as spare and elemental as the desert that surrounds them. This is Miller’s turf. With wit and insight, he reveals how the clichés of romanticism and capitalism have run amuck in his homeland. When a saguaro cactus outside Phoenix kills its own assassin, it becomes clear that no other guide to the Southwest manifests such a clear moral vision while reveling in the joy of this magnificent land and its people. Originally published by National Geographic as Jack Ruby’s Kitchen Sink, it received the Gold Award for Best Travel Book in 2000 from the Society of American Travel Writers.

Tom Miller has been writing about the American Southwest and Latin America for more than three decades. Miller began his journalism career in the underground press of the late 1960s, and has written articles for the New York Times, Washington Post, The New Yorker, Smithsonian, Natural History, and Rolling Stone. He lives in Tucson, Arizona with his wife, Regla. Pete Hamill is a novelist, essayist and journalist whose career has endured for more than forty years.