Raising Wild, Michael P. Branch
Raising Wild, Michael P. Branch
List: $19.95 | Sale: $13.97
Club: $9.97

Raising Wild
Dispatches from a Home in the Wilderness

Author: Michael P. Branch

Narrator: David Marantz

Unabridged: 8 hr 48 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 06/03/2022


Synopsis

Combining natural history, humor, and personal narrative, Raising Wild is an intimate exploration of Nevada’s Great Basin Desert, the wild and extreme land of high desert caliche and juniper, of pronghorn antelope and mountain lions, where wildfires and snowstorms threaten in equal measure.Michael Branch “earned his whiskers” in the Great Basin Desert of northwestern Nevada, in the wild and extreme landscape where he lives off the grid with his wife and two curious little girls. Shifting between pastoral passages on the beauty found in the desert and humorous tales of the humility of being a father, Raising Wild offers an intimate portrait of a landscape where mountain lions and ground squirrels can threaten in equal measure. With Branch’s distinct lyricism and wit, this exceedingly barren landscape becomes a place resonant with the rattle of snakes, the plod of pronghorn antelope, and the rustle of juniper trees, a place that is teeming with energy, surprise, and an endless web of connections. Part memoir, part homage to an environment all-to-often brushed aside as inhospitable, Raising Wild offers an intergenerational approach to nature, family, and the forgotten language of wildness.

About Michael P. Branch

Michael P. Branch is a professor of literature and environment at the University of Nevada, Reno, and the author of Rants from the Hill. He lives with his wife, Eryn, and daughters, Hannah Virginia and Caroline Emerson, in the western Great Basin Desert.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Mark

As if I needed any convincing, Michael Branch completely had me at "Bug." I too have a vivacious, curious, energetic daughter I raised in the Great Basin and that I nicknamed "Bug." Although mine was raised in Salt Lake City suburbs on the east edge of the Basin with only frequent trips to the Wasat......more

Goodreads review by Lauren

I love Michael Branch's writing. This is such a lovely book. I was obsessed with it while working on it briefly!......more

Goodreads review by Linda

Mike Branch’s "Raising Wild"—a collection of essays of life in the Great Basin Desert of northwestern Nevada-was a delightful, sometimes humorous, sometimes beautiful and deeply poetic book. His deep appreciation of the desert and its wildlife and his love for his family shone thru on every page. Th......more

Goodreads review by Lindsay

Branch is an incredible nature writer— some of his sentences were simply masterful, the kind you read over and over. Quick snippets that are so spot on it’s remarkable. But overall, this felt more like a memoir or perhaps a collection of essays that have his love of the Great Basin at the center and......more


Quotes

“[Raising Wild] is about our daily reality, not our fantasy possibilities…[and] is remarkably interesting, lively, non-theoretical, and hopeful…Michael Branch’s book points forward, not back.” Gary Snyder, author of Turtle Island

“In Raising Wild, [Branch] brings us an intimate look into one remarkable family’s life situated deeply in their place. Whether writing of antelope or antelope squirrels…Branch sweeps smoothly between downright mordant humor and stilling insight…His essays mean so much, I could enjoy reading them even upside down, or back to front." Robert Michael Pyle, author of Sky Time in Gray’s River

“In part a memoir of building a unique home in an extraordinary place, in part a treatise on cultivating, protecting, and loving the wild, and each other therein, Raising Wild is a wholly defiant, tender book bristling with spirit, intelligence, and mountains of laughs.” Claire Vaye Watkins, author of Battleborn