"Katie Lee takes us on a journey of the senses into the most voluptuous landscape on the continent, back to the days before the rising waters of Lake Foul flooded the loveliest of canyon cathedrals. Here was the last vast unexplored region in America, only known by a lucky few. No one else has such tales. Katie Lee's plaintive stories, like her songs, are a voice crying out for lost wilderness."
-Doug Peacock, author of Grizzly Years
"Writing about Glen Canyon, Lee offers us one of the most complete accounts of what an erotic relationship with a landscape can be like. In her view this interaction is inspired by the region itself. For she tells us that 'There never was, or will be, a landscape as erotic as Glen Canyon's.' Butu she is no sentimental dreamer. For this love affair has led her to campaign actively against the building of the dam, a struggle which she lost, but which may ultimately be won in future decades as the reservoir continues to silt in."
-Stephen K. Hatch
"Some people appreciate things, others love them. I always go with the lovers. Katie Lee has lived life at a shout and yet made it all into a song. I once heard her bring a crowded Phoenix bar to its knees singing river songs a cappella. Hell, I damn near spilled my drink. She shows us who we were, who we are and what we must become if we are ever to deserve this place. Don't read her and weep. Read her and join the fight, the only one that will really matter when all that dust settles."
-Charles Bowden, author of Down by the River and Blood Orchid
"Katie Lee gets my vote as the all-time foxiest girl in the West. And she's got more chutzpah than a bag full of bobcats. She can sing like a nightingale and write like Scott Fitzgerald would've written if he'd ever had the guts to run the Colorado River down through Glen Canyon and beyond. Sandstone Seduction is so full of gusto, high times, good people, and outright beauty that it makes you want to laugh, cry, and head for the wilderness right now. Katie's life is a rich, joyful, funny, touching, wonderful and inspiring journey. We should all be so lucky. Move over, Ed Abbey. There's a new sheriff in your town!"
-John Nichols, author of The Milagro Beanfield War and If Mountains Die
"First favorite line: 'They're still "out there," not at all ready for this brain-battering rivet machine we live in and must deal with.' Second favorite line: 'Then I met Glen Canyon.' Katie is a ferocious woman. She is a writer with an I.V. straight to her heart from the past. She serves her love and her muse as a warrior must."
-Mary Sojourner, author of Solace, Delicate and Bonelight
How many 80-year-old women out there begin an essay with the line, "It was hotter'n a fresh-fucked fox in a forest fire"? I know one. Her name is Katie Lee. Her latest book, Sandstone Seduction: Rivers and Lovers, Canyons and Friends, offers more of the same spunky, impassioned writing that has made her the foremost figure in the effort to restore Glen Canyon to its pre-Lake Powell condition. . . In Seduction, Lee does more than give a good show. She gives us a great book.
-Jarret Keene, Tucson Weekly, August 5, 2004
"Her book captures the essence of a river...While experts toss out statistics about evaporation loss, species decline, and the greatest good for the greatest number, Katie speaks from the heart. 'There never was a place as beautiful as Glen Canyon and we wrecked it. It's time to fix it.' If Katie Lee comes within a thousand miles of where you live, go see her!"
-Ken Ransford, American Whitewater
"Outrageous, mischievous, and never shy about calling a shithead a shithead, Lee is a woman so far ahead of her time, we are still catching up. She writes with fists and flesh to the wall, rendering an acid hatred for the canyon's destroyers and a near perfect sense of the deep pleasure that comes when a few companions float downriver and share beauty by instinct rather than conversation. The women who live on the red-desert rivers of the Colorado Plateau are helplessly, hopelessly bound to them. Glen Canyon (for her) was intoxication, refuge, and, in it's loss, despair...With Lee's book in hand, Glen Canyon returns to eyes and skin. Such fierce attachments resurrect the river itself."
-Ellen Meloy, author of Raven's Exile, for Northern Lights magazine
"In so many ways, this is a woman who embodies the power and tenacious beauty of the Colorado Plateau. Her spitfire intelligence and redrock resolve provides us with an individual conscience that we would do well to adopt. Katie Lee is a joyful raconteur, a woman with grit, grace and humor. She is not afraid to laugh and tease, cajole and flirt, cuss, rant, howl, sing and cry. Katie Lee is the desert's lover. Her voice is a torch in the wilderness."
-Terry Tempest Williams, for Wild Earth magazine
"In her performance...singer, famous river runner and writer Katie Lee described a secret nook she discovered as the "first holy place" she'd ever been. As she read from her book, All My Rivers are Gone, you could feel the heartfelt anguish in her words as she described this sacred place. She related scenes of unbearable beauty, where she and her companions wept at the splendor surrounding them."
-Steve Skinner, The Aspen Times
"Edward Abbey's spirit lives on in Katie Lee...With grit and humor that combine the late Abbey's mischievous passion with the determination of "The Unsinkable Molly Brown," Lee has entertained audiences nationwide with her stories and original folksongs."
-Carrie Click, Roaring Fork
"Katie Lee is much like the river she loves--at times raucous, uncompromising stubborn. But underneath the tough exterior emerges the essence of the Colorado and Glen Canyon. . . All My Rivers Are Gone will remind you of the intricate, inexplicable, reverential, sacred, and emotional bond that develops between humans and the remote, the wild, the solitary, the rock, and the sand."
-Steve Mann, Online Review
"Lee would like to see Lake Powell drained and Glen Canyon restored. She writes poetically and soulfully of her years as a river runner in the 1950's and of the beauty, solitude, and excitement of a wild place visited by very few. It now seems surprising that there is support, in the form of the Sierra Club and Glen Canyon Institute, for the dismantling of some dams and water projects ...Recommended for all libraries in the Southwest and those with Southwest collections."
-Thomas K. Fry, University of Denver
Katie takes us through the initial flush of first love, to an infatuation overwhelming her mind and body, and on to the inevitable heartbreak as Glen Canyon is snuffed out before her eyes by Glen Canyon Dam. Now Katie, a devout Pagan, and her audience await, like Christians awaiting their entombed Christ, for the rolling back of the stone, the voiding of Glen Canyon Dam.
-Brad Dimock, author, Sunk Without a Sound
"All My Rivers Are Gone" is a delightful combination of autobiography and folklore, an important contribution to Glen Canyon history...Her book brings Glen Canyon alive again. And although it seems almost incomplete without her CD or audio tape of Colorado River songs, songs she wrote and sang on her canyon trips, her voice rings true and clear in her writing."
-Verne Huser, Albuquerque Journal
"Katie Lee's book AMRAG should be read by all wilderness lovers. It beautifully invokes what it is like to have the freedom to explore one's deepest values within the intimacy of nature's rapture...Lee's works are paeans to the "wild secret heart" of a paradise lost...Oh, to have heard Katie sing in Music Temple, the first "real" church she ever sang in."
-Richard Martin, The Waiting List
"The symbolism of the Cattails Canyon photo [in Katie Lee's book] is that like those (bare) rocks, nature by itself is far bigger than we are and doesn't want puny humans fooling with it; that when we strip ourselves of our pretensions (which, after all, pieces of clothing are), we are closer to nature; that there's something unnatural about clothes and dams. How can anyone dislike a woman of 80 who recalls a thunderstorm decades ago in Glen Canyon as an erotic delight: "the passionate power of Thor's wild sex with the Glen."
-Martin Naparsteck, Salt Lake Tribune
"She's content to be what she has always been, a cranky outsider who never once thought leaving Hollywood was a mistake. 'I've always accomplished what I set out to do', says Lee. 'But think of what I would've missed if I'd never seen the Glen. All that incredible beauty, feeling the sun on my back, listening to the river, slipping into a cold pool. I never stepped in front of a spotlight and got that feeling."
-Leo Banks, Boston Globe & Tucson Weekly
"Katie Lee is sharing her memories of Glen Canyon in a witty, angry scrapbook of journal entries, songs and stories. From the start of AMRAG, it's clear that her passion for the Colorado isn't just nostalgia for what used to be...and you get the feeling that she never puts aside her hard shell unless she REALLY has something to say. In AMRAG, she most definitely does.
-Michelle Nijhuis, High Country News
"But most of all (Katie's book) is about the Canyon itself--the steep walls, natural bridges, sandbars and hidden passages and offshoots--and the author's to-the-bones aching for it. And in Lee's tough-edged language, Glen Canyon is an object of beauty and affection, a natural wonder that offers a visceral thrill on a par with the best sex."
-Stewart Oksenhorn, The Aspen Times
"Earthy, grounded as solidly as the river was in its stone-worn path, honest to the point of bluntness, creative and colorful, Katie is a gifted storyteller who writes from the passion of her soul's experience. The hauntingly beautiful music she sings and plays, stays in the listener's head long after her hands have stilled"
-Sandy Moss, Daily Courier
"Lee comes the closest of any author I've encountered to expressing what a woman's love affair with wilderness can be like. In Sandstone Seduction and All My Rivers Are Gone [now reprinted as Glen Canyon Betrayed] , she refers to the Colorado River as a 'he' and to the canyons it carved as 'she.' Writing in unabashedly erotic terms, she describes the river as 'surging, rolling, laughing in his vernal orgy, probing the rock's fissures -- fecund, virile, wild! Coming hard onto Trachyte Riffle,...Gringing boulders, growling with glee...' Even when trapped within the [reservoir], the river is still engaged in, licking the sandstone, and leaving a spittle of salt against the orange cliffs" of Glen Canyon. "
-Stephen K. Hatch
