Raising Wild

Dispatches from a Home in the Wilderness

By: Michael P. Branch

Narrated by: David Marantz

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-too-often brushed aside as inhospitable, Raising Wild offers an intergenerational approach to nature, family, and the forgotten language of wildness.

©2016 Michael P. Branch (P)2022 Blackstone Publishing

Much Love

The authors love for the high desert, and his children makes for such a rewarding read.