About this item
A powerful work of visual nonfiction about three generations of an Apache family struggling to protect sacred land from a multinational mining corporation, by MacArthur "Genius" and National Book Award finalist Lauren Redniss, the acclaimed author of Thunder & Lightning. Oak Flat is a serene high-elevation mesa that sits above the southeastern Arizona desert, fifteen miles to the west of the San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation. For the San Carlos tribe, Oak Flat is a holy place, an ancient burial ground and religious site where Apache girls celebrate the coming-of-age ritual known as the Sunrise Ceremony. In 1995, a massive untapped copper reserve was discovered nearby. A decade later, a law was passed transferring the area to a private company, whose planned copper mine will wipe Oak Flat off the map - sending its natural springs, petroglyph-covered rocks, and old-growth trees tumbling into a void.
About the Author
Lauren Redniss is the author of three books. She has been a Guggenheim fellow, Artist-in-Residence at the American Museum of Natural History, and finalist for the National Book Award. She teaches at Parsons The New School for Design. The National Book Foundation wrote the following in their citation of Radioactive, the first visual book to be named a finalist for the National Book Award in Non-Fiction:"Redniss' achievement is a celebration of the essential power of books to inform, charm, and transport. In marrying the graphic and visual arts with biography and cultural history, she has expanded the realm of non-fiction."
