With its emphasis on nocturnal and often secretive gatherings, speaking in tongues, and dance, “first-and second-century Christianity offered an experience in some ways similar to that provided by the Greek mystery cults and the “oriental” religions in Rome — one of great emotional intensity, sometimes culminating in ecstatic states.” It was not until the middle of the fourth century that the Church began to actively discourage euphoric dancing as part of worship, a crackdown that was still going on nearly a thousand years later. “The custom of dancing in churches was thoroughly entrenched in the late Middle Ages and apparently tolerated — if not actually enjoyed — even by many parish priests,” Ehrenreich claims. “Priests danced; women danced; whole congregations joined in. Despite the efforts of the Church hierarchy, Christianity remained, to a certain extent, a danced religion” until the 13th century.

Ehrenreich highlights this mostly forgotten phenomenon to illustrate her book’s intriguing central theme — that ceremonies of collective joy and exaltation were at one time a profoundly important part of human life, and their disappearance has greatly diminished us. Her latest book is a departure from her recent populist immersion studies, “Nickel and Dimed” and “Bait and Switch,” marking instead a return to the more scholarly stance of her brilliant 1998 analysis of mankind’s attraction to war, “Blood Rites.” According to the author, group dances and Dionysian festivals create what the French sociologist Emile Durkheim termed “collective effervescence: the ritually induced passion or ecstasy that cements social bonds and … forms the ultimate basis of religion.” Indeed, Ehrenreich wonders, along with many anthropologists, if coordinated dance might not have originated as a survival mechanism, with beleaguered bands of early humans joining together to stomp or bang sticks in unison to ward off larger predators. As one neuroscientist puts is, dance is “the biotechnology of group formation.” This early impulse to dance became formalized in various Dionysian orgeia, “literally, rites performed in the forest at night, from which we derive the word orgy.” The authorities, first the Roman state and then the Catholic Church, were not amused, and strove to root out cults that followed Dionysus under his many guises. (Ehrenreich’s favorite is the Etruscan god Fufluns, who sounds as if he might have presided over the early version of “Seinfeld’s” Festivus celebration.) The reason for this suppression was simple — ceremonies of collective joy offered participants unmediated, blissful communion with their god, effectively cutting out the civic or ecclesiastical middle man.

After being booted out of the chapel in the Middle Ages, collective ecstasy found a new home with the establishment of carnival, the loose series of festivals and processions that involved maypole dances, costumes, feasting, sports and, most dangerously, the ritualized mockery of institutions such as the church and the monarchy. It wasn’t long before the state and the church (in both its Catholic and, later, its Calvinist manifestations) began to clamp down on carnival, enacting a series of laws that greatly restricted the ability of laboring-class celebrants to revel. While the fear of diminished authority was still a central motivation for this crackdown, a variety of other reasons had cropped up, notably the problem of too many feast days in the calendar to allow for a productive workforce. “Without question,” Ehrenreich asserts, “industrial capitalism … played a central role in motivating the destruction of carnival and other festivities.” But there was also the fact that the carnival system restricted the ability of the state to build disciplined armies. “Any discussion of the suppression of carnival in Europe would be incomplete without mentioning the disciplining of Europe’s fighting men, who had to be forcibly restrained from the drinking and carousing that had once enlivened military service for so many reluctant conscripts.”

One of the uses to which these post-festive soldiers were put was to colonize distant lands, where the war against collective ecstasy still raged. “Europeans generally found themselves in furious opposition to the communal pleasures and rituals of the people whose lives they intruded upon,” Ehrenreich maintains. From Polynesia to the Horn of Africa to the Caribbean, ceremonies involving dancing and drumming were extirpated by scandalized conquerors. “European colonizers were often appalled both by the apparent laziness of the natives and by the energy they invested in purely ‘superstitious’ ritual activities,” the author claims. Collective ecstasy was a pursuit for the primitive, the jungle-dweller, not the educated sons and daughters of the European bourgeoisie.

According to Ehrenreich, one byproduct of this war against ecstasy was the “epidemic of melancholy” that swept Europe in the 17th century, at just the time when Calvin succeeded in almost completely removing collective effervescence from public life. Although she admits that there is no way of being absolutely certain about the etiology of this plague, Ehrenreich has a good idea about the culprit’s identity. “Could this apparent decline in the ability to experience pleasure be in any way connected with the decline of opportunities for pleasure, such as carnival and other traditional festivities?” Even if the repression of carnivals did not produce widespread melancholy, it certainly took away an obvious palliative, according to the author. “If the destruction of festivities did not actually cause depression, it may still be that, in abandoning their traditional festivities, people lost a potentially effective cure for it.”

Many modern readers will wonder what the fuss is about. As Ehrenreich points out, our perceptions of festivities of collective joy are mediated not only by Christian revisionism and colonial prejudice, but also by the recent horrors of fascism, particularly Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies, which at first blush had a grossly Dionysian aspect, what with all that torch-lit marching and worshipful chanting, leading up to the delirious arrival of the godhead. Ehrenreich quite brilliantly deconstructs this idea, however, showing that Nuremberg and its lesser replicas were in fact carefully stage-managed spectacles that bore little relation to Dionysian dances or medieval carnivals. “Where the carnival had been joyously irreverent, the nationalist rallies, and especially the fascist ones, were celebrations of state authority, designed to instill citizenly virtue or at least inspire awe.”

Despite the long war on joy, and its corruption by fascists, collective effervescence endured, albeit in a bootleg manner. African slaves, for instance, were able to keep their dancing and drumming festivals alive by merging them with Christian ceremonies, thereby giving birth to Haitian Vodou, Brazilian Candomblé and Caribbean Santeria, as well as the “ring-shout” dance worship of African-Americans. Ehrenreich, a child of the ’60s, sees the emergence of rock ‘n’ roll as a key means of sustaining collective effervescence. “The early rock audiences who stomped and jumped out of their seats to dance were announcing, whether they knew it or not, the rebirth of an ecstatic tradition that had been repressed and marginalized by Europeans and Euro-Americans for centuries.” (My only complaint against Ehrenreich’s argument here is that she fails to take note of post-rock musical forms such as trance and house, which perhaps conform more readily to her analysis than, say, the music of the Grateful Dead or the Rolling Stones. She also takes a swipe at the drug Ecstasy, though she does not seem to bear a similar animus toward wine or marijuana.) To Ehrenreich, people attending rock concerts, at least in the ’50s and ’60s, were not only practicing collective joy, but were also rebelling against the very idea of being part of a regimented Nuremberg-type audience. A similar phenomenon can be seen in contemporary sports stadiums, where costumed, drumming, wave-making fans are, as the author sees it, “‘carnivalizing’ sports events, coming in costume, engaging in collective rhythmic activities that [go] well beyond chants, adding their own music, dance, and feasting to the game.”

Ehrenreich is aware that some readers will be tempted to see her book as little more than nostalgia for a primitive innocence that will never return. She responds that the point of her essay is not to urge us all to paint ourselves red and dance around the maypole, or attend the Burning Man festival, but rather to remind us that the “capacity for collective joy is encoded into us almost as deeply as the capacity for the erotic love of one human for another. We can live without it, as most of us do, but only at the risk of succumbing to the solitary nightmare of depression.” On the question of what new forms collective joy will take in our Web-infected, cellphoned, iPodded times, she remains mute. I suspect that flash crowds might point a way forward, with people using seemingly divisive technology as a way of re-creating what Ehrenreich calls “the largely ignored and perhaps incommunicable thrill of the group deliberately united in joy and exaltation.” For now, however, the author’s inability to envision future forms of collective joy makes “Dancing in the Streets” a lively, intelligent elegy for lost happiness, rather than a prescription for a way back into the woods.

“The vettura (carriage) was a small, slow-moving vehicle pulled by a single team of mules, and the journey north would take six days and entail five overnight stops at rustic coaching inns along the way … for a flat fee a vetturino (driver) made all the sleeping and eating arrangements for his passengers, whoever they were, and in order to make as much profit as he could from the trip he would hire only one room for all of them at each inn.”

It is easy to see how Casanova and Lucrezia, sleeping just a few feet from each other while her oblivious husband snored away, wound up lovers. Throughout Summers’ book, proximity breeds promiscuity. Casanova’s famous loss of virginity to two Venetian sisters, Nanetta and Marta Savorgnan, happened when he was forced to “innocently” share their room due to a lack of a guest bed in their home. Despite a promise to behave, the boy just could not help himself once the three of them were tucked into the room’s sole bed. “By the time he opened his eyes again the candle had been snuffed out, the room was in total darkness and the sisters, dressed only in their loose linen chemises, lay curled up on either side of him, both apparently asleep. His word of honour that he would not molest them, which he had given only minutes earlier, suddenly counted for nothing.”

Sixteen years later, Casanova once again found himself in a communal bedroom situation with Donna Lucrezia, although this time the extra bedmate was Leonilda, the illegitimate teenage daughter from their first affair.

“For Casanova, who with good reason counted himself ‘the happiest of mortals’ to have both beauties in bed with him, the moment was so exciting that he lost his usual exceptional self-control. Forced to withdraw before he ejaculated, he left Lucrezia unsatisfied. ‘Moved to pity, Leonilda helped her mother’s soul on its flight with one hand, and with the other she puts a white handkerchief under her gushing father,’ [Casanova] later wrote … Leonilda then demanded that Casanova look at her while he kissed her mother. This three-sided doubly incestuous combat continued until late in the night and resumed at dawn.”

We’ll deal with Casanova’s disturbing penchant for incest later, but for now the reason for highlighting the sleeping arrangements is to point out that these were very different times from our own well-furnished era. Casanova and his lovers lived in a period where intimacy and constraint were commingled in ways it is often challenging for us to understand. Although it is tempting for us to think of our ancestors as living in a sexual Stone Age, in many ways they were capable of a sophistication that can only be bred when there are great obstacles to be overcome. This seems particularly true for Casanova’s women. Far from being ignorant virgins ripe to be tricked into the sack, or frivolous society women looking for hedonistic pleasure, they prove to be a remarkably resourceful and occasionally empowered group for whom sex with the libertine could be an act of rebellion instead of dalliance or capitulation.

Take Casanova’s mysterious “MM,” for example, who historians now agree was almost certainly Marina Morosini. Born into a patrician family, she wound up, like so many women of her time, an unwilling nun at the notorious Venetian convent of Santa Maria degli Angeli. As Summers points out, residency at a nunnery had more to do with grim socioeconomic reality than with any religious vocation. “Being forced to become a nun was a common fate of the unmarried daughters of Venice’s noble families, not least because the dowry required to become a bride of Christ was far less than that required to secure a good husband.” Bridling to find herself held in this de facto prison, the 22-year-old set out to seduce Casanova after spotting him in the convent’s chapel. (He was already romancing two other nuns.) Through a variety of maneuvers that would qualify her for membership in any spy agency, MM was able to get word to Casanova that she wanted him as a lover. (She was already sleeping with François de Bernis, the French ambassador to Venice.) Before long, they were making love in the secret apartment de Bernis kept for her, complete with “a pretty box filled with hand-made condoms” and a peephole so the voyeuristic Frenchman could watch her and Casanova make love.

This sort of empowerment was not available just to women of the upper classes. A decade later, in London, Casanova would once again find himself more prey than predator in his relationship with 17-year-old Marianne de Charpillon, a beautiful young gold digger “born into a family of unscrupulous prostitutes.” Arriving at a time when Casanova, “at thirty-seven, was beginning to show his age,” Marianne proceeded to run him ragged with flirtatiously manipulative behavior that had her extracting serious money from him. Fate, in the form of family and society, may have decreed she was to be a working girl, but that didn’t mean she was not going to work all the angles.

And then there is the case of Teresa Lanti, who, when Casanova met her, was disguised as a castrato named Bellino so that she could sing on stages that were off-limits to women. Her disguise consisted of much more than just a stuffed bodice.

“Since it was common practice for castrati to have to undergo intimate examinations by priests or theatre owners anxious to avoid prosecution by the Church for unwittingly employing a female singer, [her manager] supplied Teresa with a small prosthesis that would give her the appearance of having a penis. It was ‘a kind of cat-gut, long, limp and as thick as one’s thumb, pale, and of very soft leather’ [Casanova reports] surrounded by an oval of transparent skin five or six inches long. Teresa quickly learned to attach it to her own genitals with gum tragacanth, a glue made from a shrub.”

Casanova’s playful insistence that she wear this prototype strap-on during sex is endearingly deflating of his macho myth, as is his frank acknowledgment that by the time he hit 40 he was suffering from erectile dysfunction. In fact, Casanova turns out to be less of a swordsman than one would think, his reputation resting more on his willingness to write frankly about his sexual encounters than their sheer volume. If you simply do the math, Casanova’s lifetime total of 116 lovers is probably less than a second-string NBA power forward or heavy-metal bassist gets through in a year.

Of course, all is not fun and games here. In Summers’ account there are plenty of women who never had a chance to gain the upper hand on Casanova, or even achieve a moment’s equal footing with him. Venereal disease, pregnancy and social disgrace awaited many of those who responded to his blandishments. Another inmate of Santa Maria degli Angeli, 14-year-old Caterina Capretta, was basically pimped out to Casanova by her debt-ridden brother and soon found herself pregnant. Her subsequent miscarriage is described in horrific detail. “She lay propped up in bed on pillows, bleeding copiously into a large wad of linen napkins … when [Casanova] saw the number of blood-soaked napkins … he ‘nearly dropped dead. It was sheer butchery.’” And then there is the fate of Lucia, the beautiful, vivacious caretaker’s daughter with whom Casanova was infatuated as a teen. She eventually eloped with another young man, who ditched her after she gave birth to their child. Casanova was to bump into her 20 years later in an Amsterdam brothel, where her inevitable slide into whoredom hit rock bottom. “Debauchery and, no doubt, repeated cases of venereal disease had completely obliterated her natural beauty and vivacity, leaving her with no alternative but to make a living by becoming a pimp herself and procuring customers for younger, prettier girls.”

More troubling still for the modern reader are Summers’ accounts of Casanova’s sexual encounters with adolescent girls, some as young as 11. The author takes pains to place these acts in context. “In the eighteenth century, Casanova’s behaviour, which today would be regarded as criminal, was not that unusual. The concept of childhood as we know it scarcely existed at the time. In France there were no laws to prevent the rape or sexual abuse of children. In England, the age of female consent, which in 1275 had been fixed at twelve years old under canon law, had in the late sixteenth century been lowered to just ten.” Casanova’s activities as a seducer become even more transgressive with his attempts to sleep with two of his daughters, one of whom he wound up impregnating. Summers is less willing to chalk this up to the tenor of the times. “Nevertheless, the idea of committing incest with one’s young and beautiful daughter was far from repugnant to him … as he wrote, shocking even us today, ‘I have never been able to conceive how a father could tenderly love his charming daughter without have [sic] slept with her at least once.’”

Despite a wealth of vivid detail and salacious anecdote, one comes away from this book more tantalized than satisfied. Summers’ breathless, cliché-ridden style tends to undermine her authority, such as in the following passage. “Equally at ease in a palace, a merchant’s house or a brothel, and most at home between a woman’s legs, Casanova successfully straddled the worlds of the high life to which he aspired, and the low life into which he had been born. Steering a course through both, but putting down roots in neither, he followed only one precept in his life — to go where the wind blew him — and he crisscrossed the continent of Europe as often as the migrating birds.” There also does not seem to be much in the way of original research here — the preponderance of the author’s notes cite Casanova’s memoirs, suggesting a limited portrait of his “conquests.” In the end, Casanova’s women, or at least the cross section of them provided in this book, remain opaque. Despite the abundant detail on offer about their histories, there is precious little to suggest how they actually felt about their dangerous liaisons, or what brought them to risk so very much to be with Casanova. The one question you really want to ask remains unanswered — was it good for them?

Given Gellhorn’s iconic status, perhaps the greatest virtue of Caroline Moorehead’s dexterously edited selection of her letters is the way it depicts the irascibly human personality behind the legend. Though Gellhorn was usually on the side of the angels when it came to politics, she could also be willfully naive on the subject of Israel and downright repellent when speaking about the Arabs. Possessor of a remarkably full dance card of charming lovers, she was by her own admission indifferent to sex and continually disappointed by romance. A woman whose wartime reports were filled with compassion for children, she could be a mother from hell to her adopted son. Most notably, her letters reveal that her glamorous exterior and her cool journalistic prose concealed a volcanic, lifelong anger at the liars, frauds and politicians she deemed to be ruining the world she loved to travel.

Although the man with whom Gellhorn will always be most closely associated is Hemingway, he was by no means her first big love. That honor goes to Bertrand de Jouvenel, an unhappily married left-wing French journalist whom the 22-year-old Gellhorn met soon after her arrival in Paris with a typewriter and $75 in cash. Her letters from this time are among the book’s most poignant, not just for their tales of impossible love (de Jouvenel’s wife would not divorce him) but also for the prescience with which Gellhorn already viewed her role in a world hostile to ambitious, self-reliant women. “It’s all getting me down,” she wrote to a former high school teacher in 1931. “I think it’s horrible to scare people about life merely because they are female and have the emotional make-up — in certain respects — of males, or what males supposedly have.” Later, she writes with remarkable foresight about what will be her lifelong difficulty embracing domesticity. There is, she already knows at the age of 24, “too much space in the world. I am bewildered by it, and mad with it. And this urge to run away from what I love is a sort of sadism I no longer pretend to understand.”

After a break with de Jouvenel and the unexpected death of her beloved father, the 27-year-old Gellhorn met Hemingway at Sloppy Joe’s bar in Key West, Fla. Although the world’s most famous novelist was still married to Pauline Pfeiffer, it was Gellhorn who accompanied him to Spain, where she covered the civil war as a special correspondent for Collier’s magazine. Her letters from Spain to Eleanor Roosevelt are among the book’s most memorable (and its saddest, as it is doubtful that our current first lady cultivates similarly provocative and enriching correspondents). “And you know something else,” Gellhorn writes Roosevelt from Barcelona in 1938, “this country is far too beautiful for the Fascists to have it. They have already made Germany and Italy and Austria so loathsome that even the scenery is inadequate, and every time I drive on the roads here and see the rock mountains and the tough terraced fields, and the umbrella pines above the beaches, and the dust colored villages and the gravel river beds and the peasant’s faces, I think: Save Spain for decent people, it’s too beautiful to waste.”

Gellhorn moved with Hemingway to La Finca Vigia, their famous Cuban estate, in early 1939, but before long the spacious world beckoned her, and she was soon back in Europe to cover the Russian-Finnish war. From the beginning of their marriage, there is evidence in her letters that she was living with an egomaniacal child who did not like sharing a bed with a literary rival. A spoof pre-wedding contract contains what turns out to be some unintended truth when Gellhorn promises Hemingway that “he and his business are what matter to me in this life, and that also I recognize that a very fine and sensitive writer cannot be left alone for two months and sixteen days.” Readers who are tempted to look unkindly on Gellhorn’s wifely dutifulness here will be relieved to find that 10 years later, upon reading Hemingway’s “Across the River and Into the Trees,” she writes to a friend that “I feel quite sick, I cannot describe this to you. Shivering sick. I watch him adoring his image, with such care and such tolerance and such accuracy in detail … I weep for the eight years I spent … worshipping his image with him, and I weep for whatever else I was cheated of due to that time-serving.” After the bitterness wore off, Gellhorn was able (in a 1969 letter to her son, Sandy) to view her relationship with Hemingway with as much wisdom and equanimity as any of his celebrated biographers:

“He hated his mother, with reason. She was solid hell. A big false lying woman; everything about her was virtuous and untrue. Now I know enough to know that no woman should ever marry a man who hated his mother … Deep in Ernest, due to his mother, going back to the indestructible first memories of childhood, was mistrust and fear of women. Which he suffered from always, and made women suffer; and which shows in his writing.”

As their marriage dissolved during World War II, Gellhorn focused on her career, though she was frustrated by the U.S. Army’s refusal to let female correspondents serve on the front lines. To overcome this, she simply evaded her handlers and worked without escorts from D-Day until the war’s end. When she was picked up by soldiers of the 82nd Airborne, she managed to avoid deportation by causing their legendary young commander, Gen. James Gavin, to fall in love with her. At war’s end she adopted an infant from an Italian orphanage whom she named Sandy and moved to Mexico, then Rome, from where she watched the plague of McCarthyism squander European goodwill toward her native country. “Having spent my youth reporting on Fascism in Europe, I have a haunted sense of déjà vu, as I watch the ugly, pointless, witless process beginning at home and spreading back to Europe,” she wrote to two-time Democratic candidate Adlai Stevenson. “As a new experience, [Americans abroad] realize what it is to suffer from moral shame for one’s country.”

In 1954 she married former Time magazine editor Tom Matthews and settled down in London to a cozy life of socializing. “The main thing to keep firmly fixed in your mind is: Tom is not Ernest. Correspondence will reach the addressee, unopened. Lunch will never be à trois. Passes will be freely received in the spirit in which they are delivered. All is well. No purdah, no chains, no scenes, no one shooting out the living room windows. Times are different now.” Not surprisingly, security brought Gellhorn an ample dose of discontent. Marriage to Matthews taught her something most readers will have spotted 10 years earlier — she was not built for lengthy cohabitation. Although she was prone to intense relationships with remarkable men (a long, secret affair with Laurance Rockefeller, brother of David and Nelson, was to come), her heart was never wholly in it. Nor, it seems, was her body, according to this 1972 letter:

“I started living outside the sexual conventions long before anyone did such dangerous stuff and I may say hell broke loose and everyone thought unbridled sexual passion was the excuse. Whereas I didn’t like sex at all … all my life idiotically, I thought sex seemed to matter so desperately to the man who wanted it that to withhold was like withholding bread, an act of selfishness … what has always really absorbed me in life is what is happening outside. I accompanied men and was accompanied in action, in the extrovert part of life; I plunged into that; that was something altogether to be shared. But not sex; that seemed to be their delight and all I got was a pleasure of being wanted, I suppose, and the sort of tenderness (not nearly enough) that a man gives when he is satisfied. I daresay I was the worst bed partner in five continents.”

After her inevitable breakup with Matthews, Gellhorn remained in London, which was to be her home until her death in 1998, though she also spent time at her houses in Kenya and Wales. Late middle age was tough on her, as she watched her looks and energy fade at just the time her professional star dimmed. “I have always looked forward to my old age,” she wrote in 1960, “being more and more convinced that it would be far funnier than this neither fish-nor-fowl period of middle age, which I am bound to admit bores me.”

The one quality she did not lose was her anger, which only seemed to increase as she got older, allowing her to become the sort of feisty grand dame who always seems to be surrounded by a coterie of younger artists and intellectuals. “I never for a moment feared Communism in the U.S. but have always feared Fascism; it’s a real American trait,” she wrote after observing Barry Goldwater in 1964. She was particularly incensed by the Vietnam War. “I cannot endure this hideous wicked stupidity; to be at once cruel and a failure is too much,” she wrote about Lyndon Johnson. “Our President is a disaster and will get worse; never trust a Texan farther than you can throw a rhino.” Her white-hot rage at the war was only stoked by a 1966 trip to Vietnam for the Guardian newspaper (that she was forced to pay for herself). Her 1971 letter to Pentagon Papers liberator Daniel Ellsberg is eerily prescient about our current constitutional mess: “The President assumes that the American people are moral imbeciles … The Founding Fathers cannot have intended a President and his small group of appointed advisors to perform like a monarch surrounded by his court. As if the people’s representatives and the people themselves were a general nuisance, and the job is to keep the whole tiresome bunch quiet: manipulate them.” Even more prophetic is a 1962 letter to Stevenson, in which she claims that the “people of the United States of America need suffering to learn dignity; but I hope to Christ they are spared it, simply because they would not suffer alone and the rest of the world has had enough.”

Less inspired is her lifelong fealty to Israel (brought about by a 1945 visit to a newly liberated Dachau), which caused her to refer to an Egyptian soldier in the Suez crisis as a “Wog” and leads to the following regrettable passage in a letter to Leonard Bernstein: “[The Arabs] are not endearing … depressing and idiot, is my feeling, and inimical as well. I see perfectly why they hate Israel; it’s too clean, and it makes some sense out of real life.” Her bluntness also falls flat when turned upon her 20-year-old son Sandy, who is on the receiving end of a letter that might have just as easily come from the pen of Lady Macbeth. “You are a poor and stupid little fellow in my eyes. I’d be so damned ashamed to be you, I’d want to jump off a cliff.”

Despite these sour notes, Gellhorn’s capacity for anger remains the most beguiling aspect of this fine collection. Although there is plenty she can teach her successors about what it means to be a truly independent woman and a ferociously truth-seeking journalist in a world that does not always appreciate either of these virtues, it is her rage that truly endures, as freshly appropriate to our dark times as it was for the era in which it was born.

A perfect place to start would be Marc Reisner’s magnificent 1986 book “Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water.” At once a scholarly history and an impassioned piece of muckraking, Reisner’s book charts how the region, notably the ersatz-oasis of Phoenix and its surrounding agribusiness spreads, came to rely upon shortsighted water policies that are often little more than theft, particularly from Mexico, where the once-mighty Colorado River has been reduced to a trickle. One of the book’s many ironies is its observation that this politically conservative, supposedly self-reliant region owes its prosperity to big government programs. Also memorable is Reisner’s description of the creation of the Lake Powell reservoir, which was achieved by submerging one of the most beautiful spots on the planet, the Glen Canyon.

The great Western writer Wallace Stegner’s brief essay collection “The American West as Living Space” (1988) provides a quieter, but equally memorable, look at the region’s resonant myths and fragile ecosystem. Stegner’s theme is the folly of man’s attempt to dominate the desert; to dam up its rampaging rivers and pump precious water from its aquifers to support an alien lifestyle. As he writes in the chapter “Living Dry,” the West has been “misinterpreted and mistreated because, coming to it from earlier frontiers where conditions were not unlike those of northern Europe, Anglo-Americans found it different, daunting, exhilarating, dangerous, and unpredictable, and entered it carrying habits that were often inappropriate and expectations that were surely excessive.”

More Arizona lore is on offer in Alex Shoumatoff’s idiosyncratic and informative “Legends of the American Desert” (1997), a comprehensive and well-written collection that covers just about every iconic site in Arizona, from Tombstone to Route 66; from the vast Navajo reservation in the state’s northeast to the Biosphere 2 dome outside of Tucson. He is particularly good at equating Arizona’s wild frontier past with its untamed contemporary reality. He claims, with ample justification, that “after tourism, land fraud is the number two industry in the state.”

Shoumatoff’s extensive bibliography is also the perfect jumping off point for more detailed journeys into the state’s history, legends and future. “Geronimo: His Own Story,” the 1906 autobiography of the great Apache leader, is rich with details of a once-ascendant Native American culture’s legends and military tactics. One reads it with a sense of loss for the Gila River paradise in which the great warrior was raised: “This range was our fatherland; among the mountains our wigwams were hidden; the scattered valleys contained our fields; the boundless prairies, stretching away on every side, were our pastures; the rocky caverns were our burying places.” Another valuable study of native life is David Roberts’ “In Search of the Old Ones” (1996), a penetrating look at the lost civilization of the Anasazi, who disappeared more or less without a trace from their remarkable cliff dwellings in northern and central Arizona 700 years ago. Their vanishing was most likely due to their hubristic efforts to live in an environment that could not sustain them — something the state’s contemporary suburb-dwellers might want to think about.

Upon contemplating all that has been lost in Arizona and the grim prospects for its future, the traveler might feel tempted to hurl himself into its most famous tourist attraction. If so, he would be in good company, as detailed in Thomas M. Myers’ and Michael P. Ghiglieri’s creepy 2001 survey “Over the Edge: Death in Grand Canyon.” It turns out that the main cause of death is ignoring warning signs — a fitting lesson for humankind’s attitude toward the entire region.

Arizona’s parched landscape has also provided fertile ground for fiction. Tony Hillerman’s Navajo crime mystery “Coyote Waits” (1990) takes place in the state’s remote Four Corners border region and combines a cultural anthropologist’s broad scope with a truly suspenseful narrative. That area is also the setting for Edward Abbey’s 1975 cult classic “The Monkey Wrench Gang,” which details the often bumbling attempts of a ragtag crew of eco warriors to stop construction of a dam. Barbara Kingsolver’s “Animal Dreams” (1997) is far better than her perennial book group favorite “The Bean Trees.” Set in the fictional small town of Grace, Ariz., her story of a daughter’s return to look after an ailing father deals, well, gracefully with the topics of ecological degradation and Native American tradition.

The greatest poet of Arizona’s unique landscape, however, is the film director John Ford, whose images of Monument Valley capture what is perhaps the state’s most unforgettable panorama. The noted film historian Edward Buscombe’s studies of Ford’s two greatest films, “Stagecoach” and “The Searchers,” provide fascinating details of his work in what remains, despite our best efforts to strike it down, nature’s greatest soundstage.

As for drugs, that victory has been even more decisive. Ever since Richard Nixon ordered an “all-out war, on all fronts” against narcotics over a 1972 Oval Office cocktail with H.R. Haldeman, the drug menace has been swept from the land. One need only look at the millions of POWs we have taken in daring raids on such hotbeds of enemy activity as Detroit, East St. Louis, Ill., and Newark, N.J. Or the 10-year prison sentence handed down to enemy propagandist (and MC5 manager) John Sinclair for selling not one, but two joints. Or the imprisonment of comedian Tommy Chong for engraving his countenance on glass bongs — a man who, as his prosecutor pointed out in her closing arguments, “was a bad example because he made fun of drugs and cops in his movies.” You’d have to be smoking something to worry that a government that conducted these campaigns will falter in securing us from Islamic terrorists.

OK, seriously — do people actually believe in the war on drugs anymore? Did they ever? If so, I suggest they read Dean Kuipers’ “Burning Rainbow Farm: How a Stoner Utopia Went up in Smoke,” which captures the paranoid absurdity of our current drug laws as well as does any book in recent memory. This well-researched, compassionately written study of the 2001 killings of pot activist Tom Crosslin and his lover, Rollie Rohm, by FBI and police snipers on their Michigan farm is a memorable portrait of the war on drugs at its ugliest. It is also a timely reminder of the dangers inherent in ceding our basic civil rights to combat a nebulous menace.

By the time of the deaths of Tom and Rollie, Rainbow Farm had become a popular outpost for the pro-legalization movement in America, listed by High Times magazine as “fourteenth on the list of twenty-five Top Stoner Travel Spots in the world.” Scene of regular festivals with names such as Roach Roast, Hemp Aid and WHEE (World Hemp Expo Extravaganza), it provided refuge to citizens of the nation’s floating pot underworld, who would simply arrive with a tent and some weed to stay for as long as necessary. There were few rules, though hard drugs were not allowed, and no one was permitted to sell dope of any sort, including marijuana, on the premises. Sharing pot, on the other hand, was definitely encouraged. Guns were forbidden and cops might be allowed in every now and then to keep the place from being raided, though they were followed by drummers to alert partyers. Rainbow Farm was, in other words, a sort of stoner utopia, a mini-Woodstock where the rules of the straight world did not pertain.

At first glance, Tom was an improbable Prospero for this enchanted isle in the farm country of southwest Michigan. Born in working-class Indiana, he practiced a rough-and-ready brand of libertarianism that had a lot more to do with good old boy hell-raising than with allegiance to radical politics. “Tom was making revolution, but not with the political design that was then driving the radical left,” writes Kuipers. “He was just against hassle. He was really like a Goldwater conservative: against government intrusion into the private lives of Americans and laws governing drugs and helmets and sodomy and guns.” In other words, he liked bikes, bar brawls and getting high. He also liked men, which often made for an uneasy fit in his blue-collar world, especially when he started a construction business that forced him to deal with people who didn’t have much truck with the gay life.

Two things changed Tom forever. First was meeting Rollie, a shy, handsome young man who’d just emerged from a mistaken marriage that had produced a son. It was love at first sight, especially for Tom, who soon took Rollie under his wing, where he would remain until FBI marksmen separated them forever. The second transformative event was Tom’s purchase of 34 acres of beautiful land that he soon dubbed Rainbow Farm, not to denote any sort of gay political agenda — Tom was never much for that — but rather to signify his and Rollie’s belief in the inclusive, tolerant microsociety they planned to build on their small patch of the upper Midwest. It would be “a new world, an entire universe, that could contain them all — his friends, his family, the people he loved — and anyone else who felt like he did — the freaks and hairies, the ex-cons, dissenters and one-percenters, the dishonorable discharges, closeted gays, potheads and hippies.” The farm had no specific agenda other than to become a laid-back Emersonian arena of self-discovery. “This is a place about alternative lifestyles,” Kuipers quotes Tom as often saying. “Being gay is just one of ‘em. Smoking pot is just one of ‘em. There’s a bunch more, and this is a place where people can be free.”

For a while, it seemed to work. In the mid- to late ’90s, Rainbow Farm functioned more or less according to plan, its main problems being financial — the festivals tended to cost a lot more than they raked in. Acts such as Chong, Merle Haggard and Big Brother and the Holding Company would perform, along with various luminaries on the legalization circuit, who would deliver speeches about the salubrious effects of marijuana. Frisbees filled the summer sky; the tractors were painted in psychedelic colors; there was a dog named Thai Stick; the hill in the middle of the farm was dubbed Mount This.

Darker elements also descended, Altamont style — in this case the Michigan Militia, whom Tom hired to work security at some festivals (provided they left their guns at home) and who one night famously managed to chase off a nosy state trooper. This involvement with the militia movement reflected a worldview that stubbornly resisted easy classification. “Tom’s position on pot was basically a right-wing critique,” writes Kuipers. “He thought drugs should be legal not because the government should provide some kind of utopian experience; he thought drugs should be legal because policing them was unconstitutional.” In those post-Waco days, it was reasonable that such a person would form an alliance with the anti-government militia so active in his state. As Kuipers points out, the “hemp movement meshed perfectly with the work of the patriot and militia movements, despite the apparent clash of values over guns.”

It wasn’t long before these strange bedfellows drew the critical attention of the Man. Tom’s Inspector Javert proved to be a buttoned-down local prosecutor named Scott Teter, whose aversion to a bunch of countercultural types minding their own business on private property blossomed into an obsessive desire to nail Tom at all costs. Tom’s arguments that no hard drugs were allowed on the property, and that the sale of narcotics was forbidden, fell on deaf ears. Teter, after all, represented a system that insanely sees pot as the equivalent of crack cocaine but finds rotgut vodka and cigarettes perfectly acceptable. After a few years of unsuccessfully trying to gather evidence using undercover cops, the prosecutor decided to stage a bogus tax raid whose sketchy justification would make even Alberto Gonzales blush (OK, maybe not). Led by the state police’s South West Enforcement Team, or SWET, the raiders found Tom’s paperwork to be perfectly in order, though they also stumbled upon a few racks of hydroponic pot in the basement. Not only were Tom and Rollie arrested on felony manufacture charges, but Rollie’s beloved son, Robert, was taken into foster care.

Neither of these results, however, met the real goal of Teter’s campaign. What he really wanted was to get his hands on Rainbow Farm itself under the broad asset forfeiture laws brought in by Ronald Reagan, whose Omnibus Crime Bill of 1984 basically said that law enforcement agencies could keep the money from the sale of any assets they seized during drug raids. The suspect did not even have to be guilty — and in most cases in which he or she was proved innocent, the procedure for getting back seized property was so onerous that many simply gave up. According to Kuipers, Michigan was among the worst practitioners of this unconstitutional obscenity, nicknamed “collars for dollars.” “Michigan’s prosecutors and local fuzz aggressively pushed the logic of asset seizure all the way out to the limits of constitutionality and then beyond, out into a cop fantasyland where even thought-crime might cost you your life’s honest work.” The moment Teter’s men found those budding plants in Tom’s basement, Prospero stood to lose the paradise he’d sweated over for the past decade.

Unfortunately for everyone, Tom was not one to take such an affront lying down. The militia man emerged from the stoner’s warm haze. Having lost his Fourth Amendment protection against illegal search and seizure, he decided to exercise his Second Amendment right to bear arms, getting his hands on some assault rifles and letting it be known that the farm had been mined and booby-trapped. (It was not.) That now-familiar American danse macabre, the barricade standoff, developed. Believing they were outgunned, the local authorities called in the FBI. Kuipers details the inevitable conflagration with chilling matter-of-factness. Any outrage a nation might have felt over the killing of two gay stoners was buried by the events of 9/11, which happened within a week of the raid.

Although it will be hard for any reader not to feel the injustice and sheer waste of these deaths, it is also difficult to direct all of one’s outrage at the cops on the ground. Feeling besieged and friendless, Tom and Rollie had clearly decided to make some sort of desperate last stand. They were, after all, armed with semiautomatic weapons. What’s more, after burning down many of the farm’s structures, they had fired several times at the police, striking both a helicopter and an armored vehicle. Tom’s blustering threats of larger weaponry must have also played in the minds of the foot soldiers who found themselves on what seemed like foreign soil a hundred miles east of Chicago. The blame, rather, lies with the prosecutors who hounded Tom and the lawmakers who have decided to wage war against a naturally occurring weed. Their persecution of Tom caused him to “become a dreadful enemy: a loving, well-intentioned man who had looked into the heart of the law and found himself erased.”

In 1967, London Times editor William Rees-Mogg famously quoted Alexander Pope in an editorial on the looming imprisonment of the Rolling Stones’ Mick Jagger and Keith Richards for simple possession: “Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel?” In the case of Tom and Rollie, the butterflies were not only broken but nuked, steamrollered and buried a mile beneath the earth. Drug war ideologues argue that one of the reasons smoking pot is bad for you is that it makes you paranoid. Having read “Burning Rainbow Farm,” you realize that it is not the pot that makes people freak out but rather our government’s insane campaign against it.