Audiobook Review: Salt Lakes: An Unnatural History by Caroline Tracey, Narrated by Cassandra Campbell

Salt Lakes: An Unnatural History by Caroline Tracey,

Narrated by Cassandra Campbell

Blurb from Goodreads:

More than a hundred salt lakes dot Earth's surface, most of them hidden away in remote desert valleys. But today nearly all of them are at risk of drying up. Their death is a harbinger of rising sea levels, life-threatening dust storms, and environmental collapse.

Writer and geographer Caroline Tracey didn't know this when she began crossing paths with salt lakes during her early twenties. From the Great Salt Lake to the Aral Sea, across the American West and around the world, the unusual beauty of these shimmering, uncanny bodies of water captured her imagination. In Salt Lakes, Tracey travels across four continents to seek out and describe these extraordinary vanishing lakes and the people dedicated to saving them.

Running parallel to Tracey's environmental journey is an intimate, human her story of finding queer love and building a home in a world fast being remade by ecological crises. By the end of Salt Lakes, she shows us how seeing the environment through a queer lens could help save our water system.

An exquisite blend of travel writing, memoir, and reportage, Salt Lakes is an inspiring call to fight for all that is fragile in our lives.

My Review:
Where do I begin?  I like nonfiction -- to an extent.  It's not what I usually reach for but I enjoy audiobooks in this genre, particularly.  I typically do not like memoirs.  That said, this book resonated so deeply with me.  It is part history, part memoir, part environmental dissertation and it is so well told.  It was fascinating.  I knew a lot of the places described in the book and I could never have written about them so well.  I can't recommend this one enough -- add to your TBR!

Salt Lakes: An Unnatural History came out recently on March 17, 2026, and you can purchase HERE!  I love this book!!

Since leaving ranching, I've never recovered the sense of feeling part of the ecosystem that I experienced while working outside all day no matter what.  Measuring rainfall, estimating forage, doctoring calves, butchering.  Looking back at my photos, the sensorial richness of the life overwhelms me.  The clothes we wore, the tools we used, the smell of the animals.