YUCK: The Birth & Death of the Weird & Wondrous Joshua Tree, Yucca brevifolia
Winner of the 2023 Wandering Aengus Book Award for Nonfiction. Coming 3/25/25.
“Barret Baumgart’s appropriately tangled and marvelous ode to the Joshua tree—part poetry, part cultural history, part confrontation with a Mojave mystery—deftly honors one of the Southwest’s most compelling and symbolically rich inhabitants. It also confirms Baumgart’s status as one of the leading chroniclers of the California weird.”
—Erik Davis, author of High Weirdness (MIT Press, 2019) and The Visionary State
“YUCK is a prismatic collage, a poetic wandering, a compact history of the West as twisted and weird and ominous and beautiful as the plant it obsesses over. From divine providence to gaseous landfill to Instagram paradise, YUCK deftly traces the modern history of a small patch of desert to leave us with a big warning about America’s demented relationship with the land. Baumgart’s brief book will turn your Joshua Tree vacation into a terrifying revelation and so should be required reading at the gates of the national park.” —Joshua Wheeler, author of Acid West (FSG, 2018) and The High Heaven (Graywolf, 2025)
To learn more visit barretbaumgart.com
CHINA LAKE: A Journey into the Contradicted Heart of a Global Climate Catastrophe
Winner of the 2017 The Iowa Prize in Literary Nonfiction. Published by The University of Iowa Press.
“An apocalypse of the weird.” Richard Preston, author of The Hot Zone
“An astonishing debut.” John D’Agata, author of The Lifespan of a Fact
“Nearly indescribable and utterly engrossing, this book is an urgent and terrifying cultural reflection, a startling look in the mirror.” Kirkus (Starred Review)
“A devastating artistic achievement.” Anna Call, Foreword (5/5)
Visit barretbaumgart.com for more information.
Read an interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books here. A great review from Kirkus, who named China Lake one of the best nonfiction books of 2017, is below.
Buy China Lake on Amazon or from UIowa Press
If your name is Werner Herzog, or you would like to acquire the documentary rights to China Lake, please click below.
“In 2013, Baumgart was granted a rare visit to China Lake, a 1.1-million acre bombing range in California’s Mojave Desert, by way of a tour of the petroglyphs in the Coso Range. Accompanied by his mother, an ailing New Age climate change denier lured by the spiritual significance of the landscape, the author sought to investigate the military’s work in atmospheric alteration, examining our global climate crisis and its deep cultural roots through the lens of weather modification and geoengineering. Baumgart delves into the history of cloud seeding and its role as a Cold War weapon. Despite a dubious scientific reputation, related conspiracy theories, and public calls for caution, research in controlling weather progresses today at China Lake as modern cloud seeding is now used in the U.S. and around the world. Baumgart’s dreamlike, nonlinear narrative is composed of dizzying juxtapositions, illuminating the parallels and paradoxes of modernity and antiquity, devastation and healing, science and the supernatural. Resisting simple answers and constantly challenging assumptions, the author explores collective and personal anxieties surrounding human-nature relationships and the planet’s current peril, interwoven with childhood nostalgia and reflections on family, loss, and time. Summoning the absurd in the ordinary and exposing our rejection of our earthly home, he analyzes technocratic fixes to cultural problems and the unintended consequences of humans playing god, attempting not only to control nature, but to render it a weapon. Can man ultimately harness the world? Will the stars disappear? How will humanity respond to looming extinction? Can the Western world adopt a new narrative? How might we find meaning and cope with despair? In this striking, poetic literary debut, Baumgart examines these questions and others that are profoundly resonant in our time.
“Nearly indescribable and utterly engrossing, this book is an urgent and terrifying cultural reflection, a startling look in the mirror.” —Kirkus (Starred Review)
Prehistoric shamans, weather warfare, chemtrails, geoengineering: Baumgart ties these disparate threads into a fast-paced, engaging and very personal narrative about our greatest existential threat: rapidly changing global climate. This is an important book, marking the appearance of a talented and distinctive new literary voice.” —David S. Whitley, author, Cave Paintings and the Human Spirit: The Origin of Creativity and Belief
