Long frequented by pirates and inhabited by pariahs, Baja California is today a favorite destination for whale watchers, hikers, and other adventurers. For Bruce Berger it has been more. In Almost an Island, he takes readers beyond the Baja of guidebooks and offers a wildly entertaining look at the real Baja California.

Eight hundred miles long, Baja California is the remotest region of the Sonoran Desert, a place of spectacular cliffs, endless beaches, fantastical boojum trees, and some of the greatest primitive murals in the Western Hemisphere.

In Almost an Island, Berger recounts tales from his three decades in this extraordinary place, embellishing with details of the peninsula's history, its politics, and its probable future, and rendering a striking panorama of this land so close to the United States, so famous, and so little known.