Time: Summer, 1990. Place: Yucca Valley, CA. Scott Faraday, sixteen, is fun loving, in a small town rock band, and out - but only to a select few. Isolated in his high desert town Scott doesn't know anyone else who's gay. When Ryan St. Charles, a troubled seventeen-year old, moves to town, everything changes. Ryan is brash and hot headed, the complete opposite of Scott's demeanor. In fact, Ryan has just severed a long-term relationship with a man, but still considers himself straight. As Scott and Ryan's unusual friendship develops, Scott begins to suspect Ryan might be covering up that he's gay. When Scott comes out to Ryan, their friendship is transmuted and it becomes Scott's first intimate relationship. Tightly focused on these two characters, Desert Sons follows the ups and downs of a young adult gay relationship. Filled with first-time wonder, teenage angst and the swirl of emotions that can only be expressed by youth, readers are pulled headlong into a highly charged drama.

In Desert Daughters, Desert Sons, professor Rachel Wheeler argues that a new reading of the texts of the Christian desert tradition is needed to present the (often) anonymous women who inhabit the texts. Though these women may have been included by storytellers to provide a foil to the exemplary men in the stories' foreground, Wheeler demonstrates how women's persistence in places they were not welcome witnesses to truths about where wisdom may be sought and found. In this book, Wheeler allows these women's stories to critique the desert impulse that can create a spiritual life devoid of social relationships and responsibility.

Fashion model, UN ambassador and courageous spirit, Waris Dirie was born into a family of tribal desert nomads in Somalia. She told her story - enduring female circumcision at five years old; running away through the desert; being discovered by Terence Donovan and becoming a top fashion model - in her book, the worldwide bestseller, DESERT FLOWER. In DESERT DAWN she wrote about becoming a UN Special Ambassador against FGM (female genital mutilation) and returning to her family in Somalia. DESERT CHILDREN tells us how she and the journalist Corinna Milborn have investigated the practice of FGM in Europe - they estimate that up to 500,000 women and girls have undergone or are at risk of FGM. At the moment, France is the only European country in which offenders are convicted and no European country officially recognises the threat of genital mutilation as a reason for asylum. Here are the voices of women who have felt encouraged and emboldened by Waris Dirie's courage. They speak out for the first time and move us to action.

Desert Sons by Rebecca York\Ann Voss Peterson\Patricia Rosemoor released on Apr 12, 2005 is available now for purchase.

Traditional Indian pāṇḍitya (scholarship) has a long and distinguished history but is now practically extinct. Its decline is remarkably recent—traditional pāṇḍitya flourished as recently as 150 years ago. The decline is also paradoxical, having occurred precipitously following a broad and remarkable flowering of the tradition between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. The important questions this decline poses are the subject of much ongoing work. The intellectual history of the period is still under construction, and the present book represents a major contribution to the project. A notable impediment has been the lack of critical biographies of significant thinkers in this tradition. The importance of personal and social context for reconstructing intellectual histories is widely understood. In the classical Indian intellectual tradition, however, authors systematically exclude such context, making intellectual biography something of a rarity—very rare in English and sparse even in the regional languages. This book contains translations from the original Kannaḍa of the biographies of Garaḷapurī Śāstri, Śrīkaṇṭha Śāstri, and Kuṇigala Rāmaśāstri of nineteenth-century Mysore, all representing the highest echelons of traditional pāṇḍitya at this critical period of transition. Their fields are literature, grammar, and logic, respectively. The biographies focus on the personal lives of these scholars and their many contexts. These biographies are almost contemporaneous accounts, reflecting firsthand knowledge. The translations are accompanied by copious footnotes as well as appendices drawn from the relevant primary sources.

Recreation of Pitjantjatjara children, food hunting, water holes, language notes, story telling; family structure, evil spirit Mamu, Mingkulpa (tobacco plant), cave drawings Musgrave Ranges; educational activities Ernabella Mission, natural ability to draw, clothing, corroboree, walkabout; extensively illustrated; photographed by Noel Wallace.