GIFT BOOKS IN BRIEF : THE SONORAN DESERT, <i> Photographs by Jack W. Dykinga, text by Charles Bowden (Abrams: $49.50, 168 pp.)</i>

This unusually fine complement of subject, photograph and text combines the work of Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Dykinga with text by Charles Bowden, author of “Frog Mountain Blues” and, most recently, “Desierto.”

Bowden writes like the desert; you can tell it’s in his blood. “I feel a keening within me,” he writes, “My hearing is more acute, my nose savors the smells.”

The photographs have that other desert quality, clarity, the keening Bowden writes about. The colors and shapes are distinct and imperturbable. “The only thing that will save the desert,” he writes, is “the idea that deserts are places we cannot conquer, cannot turn to account.” If the photographs lead us to believe we are seeing something friendly and beautiful, the text slaps our hands. Bowden quotes Abbey: “The desert is also atonal, cruel, clear, inhuman, neither romantic nor classical.”