Craig Childs, among the best non-fiction writers today making sense of the Southwest, reads from his newest work, "Atlas of a Lost World," Sunday, May 13, 5-7 p.m. in the back room of the Little Toad Creek Brewery and Distillery, on the corner of Broadway and Bullard.

A past keynote speaker for the Gila River Fest, Childs says that his current book tour is in "home country," 16 stops in Salt Lake, Tucson, and Colorado's Front Range. Silver City will be his first New Mexico reading and signing.

Childs' "Atlas" describes the last 1,000 years of the Ice Age. Earth wobbled on its axis. Solar radiation dimmed. Glaciers advanced and retreated. Meanwhile a scattering of human beings, hunters from other continents, confronted gigantic beasts, including that giant sloth whose fossilized tracks were recently found in the White Sands, enclosing the footprints of human pursuers. The age dominated by mastodons and saber tooth tigers has relevance for us.

The story of harsh survival from that distant time is made immediate and personal, one of the characteristics of Childs' writing. Stewart Warren, a Silver City poet and publisher, upon hearing that Childs was going to be in town, immediately recalled Childs' book "House of Rain," that commenced with an account of a monsoon flood at Chaco. In "House of Rain" a journey from Chaco to Mesa Verde, down the mountainous spine of Arizona to Paquime, was also a journey to make ancient connections often discounted by conservative archaeologists. "He's Indiana Jones for intellectuals," says Warren.