Desert Solitaire

Description

When Desert Solitaire was first published in 1968, it became the focus of a nationwide cult. Rude and sensitive. Thought-provoking and mystical. Angry and loving. Both Abbey and this book are all of these and more. Here, the legendary author of The Monkey Wrench Gang, Abbey's Road and many other critically acclaimed books vividly captures the essence of his life during three seasons as a park ranger in southeastern Utah. This is a rare view of a quest to experience nature in its purest form -- the silence, the struggle, the overwhelming beauty. But this is also the gripping, anguished cry of a man of character who challenges the growing exploitation of the wilderness by oil and mining interests, as well as by the tourist industry.

Abbey's observations and challenges remain as relevant now as the day he wrote them. Today, Desert Solitaire asks if any of our incalculable natural treasures can be saved before the bulldozers strike again.

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Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire, the noted author's most enduring nonfiction work, is an account of Abbey's seasons as a ranger at Arches National Park outside Moab, Utah. Abbey reflects on the nature of the Colorado Plateau desert, on the condition of our remaining wilderness, and on the future of a civilization that cannot reconcile itself to living in the natural world. He also recounts adventures with scorpions and snakes, obstinate tourists and entrenched bureaucrats, and, most powerful of all, with his own mortality. Abbey's account of getting stranded in a rock pool down a side branch of the Grand Canyon is at once hilarious and terrifying.

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Customer Reviews

The place of human beings in nature
Desert Solitaire is not a new book. However, it speaks to major issues, namely the proper relationship between human beings and nature. It is true that in general our vision is too anthroprocentric,: We are considering ourselves as much too important. In this process of our exaggerated self-importance, we tend to disturb nature and destroy the planet that is our home. Abbey provides a corrective to that faulty vision and adds much to our appreciation of nature and our ability to see it in terms of its own beauty and not its utility to us. His description of the beauty of the wilderness and the canyonlands is rich. Abbey's tone can be abrasive, but his argument is sound. He is well read in literature and philosophy, and his arguments have a philosophical bent.

2010-08-30 (Muncie, IN, US) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Made me want to head straight to the desert...
Just finished reading Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness. I like to think of them as essays by a curmudgeon who truly celebrated the wild and being out in it. Alone but hardly lonely, here was a man who cared deeply for our wildest places and wrote about them as he lived in them: passionately. A true conservationist, we could all learn from him and his desire to keep the natural places as they are. Keep the motorized vehicles to a minimum in National Parks. Keep the paved roads out. Get out of our refrigerated boxes and breathe the fresh air and have a look around! Walk and actually see the beauty that surrounds you!

Whether he was writing about rafting down the Colorado River before it changes forever due to the addition of another dam, or his "ownership" of the arches at the end of his first summer as a park ranger at Arches National Monument, you feel every bit of his fierce desire to protect the land coming through in every word. You feel his kinship with every tree, rock and tumbleweed that he comes across, every snake he brings into his camper to take care of the mouse population.

I am grateful for his words, his many pilgrimages, his anger and his willingness to show it. It is the fierce protectors who are the guardians and stewards of this beautiful land.

He is one minute cranky environmentalist and the next touching wordsmith. "If no one is looking for you write your will in the sand and let the wind carry your words and signature east to the borders of Colorado and south to the pillars of Monument Valley - someday, never fear, your bare elegant bones will be discovered and wondered and marveled at."

This is a great collection of essays which I recommend. I look forward to reading more of his work.

2010-07-27 (Wisconsin) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Freedom vs. civilization
When Edward Abbey died in 1989 he left behind a body of work--both fiction and essays--tolling his anarchistic, environmentalist social criticism. Yet his 1968 nonfictional "Desert Solitaire" remains the book for which, appropriately, he is most remembered.

Based on his seasonal job as park ranger at Arches National Monument during the 1950s, it is an unforgettable book. It makes the reader want to follow Abbey out into the desert, with a parting raspberry for "syphilization," as he calls it.

Alone and at times lonely, Abbey lived three summers in a tin trailer 20 miles from Moab, Utah--though sleeping under the stars and avoiding his government-supplied home as much as possible. Occasionally he jawed with a smattering of tourists, at times pursued outdoor adventures with likeminded misfits and cowboys, but generally remained solitaire. Just Abbey, the desert and its array of living things--animal, vegetable, and, for him, mineral. The mountains and sand, the rocks and rivers, became for Abbey a living organism, the desert, that would outlive all others.

Taken largely from his desert journals, the book quenches like cool water from an oasis. A first glance, however, would show only scattered essays, polemics, travel adventures, philosophy, science, sarcasm, hearsay, and amateur anthropology (Abbey's ongoing study of "rattus urbanus," which summers in the desert). But dig just a bit and you find issuing forth a steady, sustaining and vivifying narrative: The story of a sensual man (admittedly driven somewhat insane by his hermitage) striving, with great verve and courage, to live fully and, with great wit, intelligence, and heart, to comprehend his world.

Our protagonist, Abbey, holds these disparate musings and adventures together by the force of his character: his iconoclasm, his thoughtfulness, his raw energy. Like Thoreau he sets out "to confront the elemental," non-human world in the desert--a typically American urge, particularly manifest out West, to seek solace in solitude. And like Thoreau what he finds there is himself.

An admitted sensualist, he relishes sleeping on hard ground and feeling the fluid motion of his own body as he climbs mountains and swims rivers; he cherishes the hardscrabble life of a cowboy (work he performs on his days off) and the smooth feel of good whiskey or a friendly woman. But most of all he loves freedom. And here in the desert he finds it and wonders how Man can keep it.

The question and quest of freedom are never far from his mind, whether waxing poetic or polemical. He muses on the spareness and simplicity of the desert--two qualities he admires in most things--where "the living organism [including Abbey] stands out bold and brave and vivid against the lifeless sand and barren rock."

But then, typically, he adds to his aesthetic judgment his philosophic: "Love flowers best in openness and freedom." This, like most of Abbey's judgments here, has the ring of truth and rightness and leaves the reader nodding in agreement and regret.

Despite such occasional philosophic delicacy, Abbey is anything but sweetness and light. His pen pours corrosive acid on modernity, government (namely, the Park Service, dam builders, and Bureau of Indian Affairs), and Industrial Tourism, as he calls it, which works to enrich the auto and hotel industries at nature's expense.

Yet his unbridled contempt for contemporary culture, mankind, and mechanistic life is leavened by his wit, as when he refers to himself not as an atheist but an "earthiest." And when he cautions an uncomprehending elderly tourist on the dangers of television: a vacuum tube capable of sucking out her brain.

Though Abbey rises through these pages rough-edged, misanthropic, vitriolic, or vulgar, we never forget that we are in the company of an intelligent, educated writer, Stanford-trained and invoking Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, Lawrence (both of them), Balzac, and Hegel. But we enjoy his company nonetheless, for his reverence for nature and wilderness, for his risking his life (which he almost loses on a few occasions) in his worship of it, for his humanity and honesty. And for the lessons he teaches us and the poignant journeys he invites us on--like his raft trip down Glen Canyon, now lost to view thanks to the damming of the Colorado.

Along the way he finds God--or some facsimile--in the eternal resiliency of the desert: "Let men in their madness blast every city on earth into black rubble and envelope the entire planet in a cloud of lethal gas--the canyons and hills, the springs and rocks will still be here, the sunlight will filter through, water will form and warmth shall be upon the land and after sufficient time, no matter how long, somewhere, living things will emerge and join and stand once again, this time perhaps to take a different and better course."

Such is optimism Abbey-style. Yet the reader senses our species' tenacity and combativeness in Abbey's informed fierceness, and leaves his desert reassured and reverent.

2010-07-06 (Key West) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

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One of my favorite books of all time.
The first of many great books by Edward Abbey. This one concerns his early trips to the southwestern US to work in National Parks and Monuments. This is a series of essays about his experiences as a young man from New York adapting to the desert southwest. Highly recommended. I bought this hardcover edition for my library after I gave away my paperback to a friend who will be vacationing this summer in some of the parks mentioned in the book.

2010-06-03 (Baton Rouge, LA USA) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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It was the rabbit that bothered me the most...
Edward Abbey has become an icon of the American environmentalist movement. He left the green rolling hills of Western Pennsylvania, graduated from the University of New Mexico, and felt most at home in the American Southwest. Hum! Desert Solitaire, published in 1968, is his most famous work. It is an espousal of an anti-"developmental" creed; the setting is his one year's employment at Arches National Monument in Utah as a park ranger. He later went on to write The Monkey Wrench Gang (P.S.) no doubt this book is one of the main reasons you have to go through a metal detector and have your bags searched if you visit Glen Canyon Dam. The main character in the MWG is George Washington Hayduke, who is modeled on the very real life, Doug Peacock, a long-time friend and associate of Abbey, and if you want Peacock's side of the story, I highly recommend "Walking It Off."

When Abbey is "on", he is definitely on, and few could write so evocatively of the desert areas of the Southwest, with the implicit plea to: "let's just let things be." Try: "The fire. The odor of burning juniper is the sweetest fragrance on the face of the earth, in my honest judgment; I doubt if all the smoking censers of Dante's paradise could equal it. One breath of juniper smoke, like the perfume of sagebrush after rain, evokes in magical catalysis, like certain music, the space and light and clarity and piercing strangeness of the American West. Long may it burn." Abbey is erudite, and has read of the deserts of the world. How many others have read the works of a fellow curmudgeon, C. M. Doughty, Travels in Arabia Deserta? (p 239). How many others would reference the atonal work of Schoenberg?: "...although both Schoenberg and Krenek lived part of their lives in the Southwest, their music comes closer than any other I know to representing the apartness, the otherness, the strangeness of the desert" (p 255).

But it is his social commentary, and yes, conscious, that is the real cornerstone of his fame. Consider: "They cannot see that growth for the sake of growth is a cancerous madness, that Phoenix and Albuquerque will not be better cities to live in when their populations are doubled again and again. They would never understand that an economic system which can only expand or expire must be false to all that is human." And he goes to make the harsh prediction that these latter-day seven cities of Cibola will likewise be abandoned and buried, as were their predecessors. Succinct expressions of the fate of the American Indians are tied to the dispossessed and lumen-proletariat of the world: "...or the tarpaper villages of Gallup, Flagstaff and Shiprock, it's the same the world over--one big wretched gamily sequestered in sullen desperation, pawed over by social workers, kicked around by the cops and prayed over by the missionaries."

Others have compared Abbey, or at least his vision, to Thoreau, Muir, Leopold, and other environmentalist pioneers. I can't. Both Peacock and the solid biography of Abbey by James Bishop, Epitaph For A Desert Anarchist: The Life And Legacy Of Edward Abbey," describe his numerous flaws; a strong strain of misanthropy being one of them. You don't love nature more but heaping abuse on the humans who have, all too many times, abused it in turn. But I didn't have to rely on the opinions of others to reach this conclusion, it is right there in this book: picking up the stone, and killing the rabbit, not for food, but just to see what it is like. Why, oh why? And could one imagine any of the other three at the beginning of this paragraph doing same.

It is a fundamental problem for readers, and those who want to consider espousing the ideas of an individual, be that person Jean Paul Sartre, William Faulkner, Graham Greene, Robert Graves or so many others. When the person has "feet of clay," and the flaws are even evident in his/her writings, should not a person dock at least one star for the flaws, despite the fame?

2010-05-07 (Albuquerque, NM, USA) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

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Black Sun: A Novel

Description

BLACK SUN, a bittersweet love story, is about a forest ranger -- loner, iconclast, lover of the rugged life -- who falls for an utterly beguiling freckle-faced "American princess" half his age.

Like Lady Chatterley's lover, he initiates her into the rite of sex and the stark, hidden harmonies of his wild wooded kingdom and canyons. She, in turn, awakens in him the pleasures of loving and being loved. Then she disappears, plunging him into a gloom he can barely support.

"If the ending is sad and haunting, the book is not. It's a lyrical romance with the kind of passion and scenery that Abbey alone can conjure up." (B-O-T Editorial Review Board)

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Customer Reviews

Connects some of Ed Abbey's passions - wildness and women
I'm working on getting though all of Edward Abbey's books. Black Sun was first published in 1971, and the two books I've read to date that were published prior to this one are Desert Solitaire and Fire on the Mountain. From these three, I see patterns that are repeated in some of this other books (such as The Monkey Wrench Gang, Hayduke Lives!, and Good News), particularly regarding his preoccupation with wildness, the desert southwest, the failures of government and society's institutions, and his love of women.


What does Abbey think about marriage?

"Marriage in our society is rotting away from too much love. They're killing it with love. Romantic love. They marry for love, the bloody fools, turn their backs on the world and start sucking each other's blood. They poison marriage with love. They feed on each other, they cling to each other, all these lonely desperate couples all over America cut off from the earth, cut off from the past, cut off from any sense of a common life, just these miserable lonely, frightened couples with their miserably lonely, frightened brats, all feeding on another like parasites, each man demanding from his wife what no single isolated woman could possibly give or be, each woman demanding from her husband the strength and security and tenderness which is beyond the power of any single isolated man. Because they have nothing else they bank all their hopes on marriage and inevitably they are disappointed. Love and marriage cannot give anyone more than a token of what we all need. Love and marriage in themselves are not enough. And so in disappointment they turn against each other, those stranded and lonely couples, and their love soon sours into hate" (p. 50, Capra Press edition).

But it is his vision of nature, seen through his eyes and his pen, that captivates me:

"In the late afternoon, early evening, the sun yielding at last, they lay on the sand under the willow tree and watched their supper cook on the clear slow passion of burning juniper. One lizard crawled with care down the veined face of a granite boulder, watching them, and slipped with a twitch of tapering tail into the black shadow beneath the rock. They scooped up the fine river sand in their hands and let it flow through their fingers. Talking quietly" (p. 74).

The edition I read, by Capra Press (Black Sun), has an afterword/tribute written by Abbey confidant Charles Bowden in 1990. Bowden discusses the impact of Abbey on him as a writer, and on the rest of us as readers. "Ed Abbey invented the Southwest we live in. he made us look at it, and when we looked up again we suddenly saw it through his eyes and sensed what he sensed - we were killing the last good place. His words were driven by a moral energy, a biting tongue, and, thank God, by an abundant sense of humor. ...when I'm dead and dust, people will still be reading Edward Abbey, because the stuff he wrote is alive" (p. 164).

And Bowden mentions how Abbey wrote: "He worked hard at his writing. An Abbey draft was blitzkrieged with crossed out words, clauses and sentences moved, and had the general appearance of a bed of writhing serpents" (p. 164).

Enough about Abbey. As a story, Black Sun is about love found, love lost, and love lust. It's about his experiences, real or fictional, working at a fire lookout station. It's about his desires for the flesh of women. In other words, it's about Edward Abbey, his experiences and his dreams. As a story, it's not the best and brightest. But it does help the reader watch the evolution of a writer and an environmental consciousness.

2009-08-16 (Honolulu, HI USA) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

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You've Got To Earn This Book
Henry Miller once wrote that a book is only valuable when read at the right time in a person's life. Ed Abbey's Black Sun is a book for those in transition. It is a book that has to be earned.
The story of a jaded college professor who at some point dropped out of the system to man a solitary station in a fire tower, the book is alive with descriptions of the high country on what I assume to be the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. Abbey's writing is vibrant evoking chilly mornings and arid, hot trips into the canyon. Along the way he meets a girl and feels a connection so complete that the writing aches with desire, contentment, and ultimately, despair.
I too am walking away from a life that has been misguided but fulfilling. I too have wanted someone so badly the very thought of her still makes me see sunshine, only to see it evaporate in heat waves that shimmer in the distance where the possibility of dreams coming true meets reality.
In the end the biggest dreamers wind up as the butt of their own joke...the funny little story that that which makes our lives complete will one day wander down a trail and appear before us. It doesn't happen and at some point we have to decide to get the hell out and go about the business of discovering where we fit into a system that is the best fit for the masses, where our reveries of the perfect girl are confined to books, and we have to vacate our real lives to catch a glimpse of what we wanted everyday to be.

2009-08-08 | Freemanwalking (Nashville, TN) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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clunky, but enjoyable read
I tore through "Black Sun" in a couple days. I find Abbey's dialogue, both here and in his more famous "Monkey Wrench Gang," to be a bit clunky, but his nature descriptions are spot on.

The main character, Gatlin, is a ranger who works alone on a fire lookout tower in some unnamed western locale (though by the clues given it seems to be somewhere near the Grand Canyon). Gatlin's crisis: Can he leave nature for the love of a woman? For anyone enthralled by wild places, adventure, travel, or any other pursuit that supersedes relationships, this dilemma is remarkably prescient.

Readers looking for the curmudgeonly environmental polemicist Abbey in "Black Sun" will be disappointed. Readers can expect an easy read, beautiful nature descriptions, and a simple, tragic, poetically elegaic love story. Abbey never was very good at portraying the human condition. He regarded our species as a scourge on the landscape. But "Black Sun" is the most human book he ever wrote.

2006-01-27 (DeKalb, IL USA) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 4

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Wilderness and Loneliness
This is probably Edward Abbey's least political work, and the cranky old desert conservationist came up with a surprisingly emotional and bittersweet love story. The main character has escaped his painful past by taking up a very lonely job at a fire tower near the Grand Canyon, getting closer to nature and further from other people, as a way to battle his demons. He then unexpectedly falls in love with a younger woman who is working at the park, but can't figure out how to make her part of his lonely existence, which may or may not be bringing him true happiness. But in the end, he has loneliness forced upon him again anyway, as the girl disappears back into nature herself. One problem with this novel is the stilted interpersonal dialogue, which was never Abbey's strength, while he was even less adept at building a believable romance. But on the good side, this novel, based to an unclear degree on Abbey's true experiences, is a remarkably emotional exploration of the true loneliness that can be found when one communes with nature for the long haul, and how this loneliness can both lift and crush one's spirits. [~doomsdayer520~]

2005-07-21 (Pennsylvania) | Helpful Votes: 2 | Rating: 5

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black sun
Beautiful, lyrical, magical - the best book Abbey ever wrote, in my opinion. I suppose many would argue the point, as Abbey doesn't address environmental issues at all, and the story is strictly a love story. But it is a wonderful story written in remarkable metaphorical prose - fantastic.

2002-04-16 (colorado) | Helpful Votes: 2 | Rating: 5

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Down the River (Plume)

Description

"Be of good cheer," the war-horse Edward Abbey advises, "the military-industrial state will soon collapse." This sparkling book, which takes us up and down rivers and across mountains and deserts, is the perfect antidote to despair.

Along the way, Abbey makes time for Thoreau while he takes a hard look at the MX missile system, slated for the American West. "For 23 years now I've been floating rivers. Always downstream, the easy and natural way. The way Huck Finn and Jim did it, LaSalle and Marquette, the mountain men, and Major Powell."

"Abbey's the original fly in the ointment. Give him money and prizes. Don't let anything happen to him." --Thomas McGuane

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Customer Reviews

A paradise lost, and a civilization headed in the same direction
Abbeys prose are strong, harsh, and often humorous. The title story portrays an early journey down the Colorado river through a splendid canyon that has since been buried by Lake Powell. It is a great adventure, but the story goes far beyond the whitewater and beautiful scenery. The brilliant style portrays a deep love of the natural world and a horror for what is happening to it in the name of greed and stupidity. Dancing on the Edge of an Endangered Planet

2009-05-06 | adventure writer (Nederland, CO) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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It's an Okay book by Abbey
I have read many of Abbey's non-fiction books, but I don't think any of them matches the coherence (as in theme) and consistency (as in quality) of Desert Solitaire. Abbey himself thinks "Down the River" is better than Desert Solitaire, but I think otherwise. A recurring problem with Abbey's later books is that they are collections of his essays written over a span of years, some already published in other magazines and books, this rather makes them disjointed, and the quality of the essays sometimes vary a great degree too.

Nevertheless, the first essay in this book, "Down the River with Henry Thoreau" is one of my favorite of Abbey's writing. It weaves a river rafting journey with a review of Thoreau's life and work, the format is quite original (although I suspect it had been used before) and refreshing. Other essays in this book are not nearly as impressive.

A side note: this book does not include an essay about "rafting Glen Canyon before it was dammed". That is the essay "Down the River" (which is itself a beautiful piece) in Desert Solitaire, don't get them confused. Also, "The Damnation of a Canyon" in "Beyond the Wall" touches on the topic as well.

2008-04-08 (North by Northwest) | Helpful Votes: 3 | Rating: 4

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Several good essays about the West
I don't believe this is Edward Abbey's best work, but it is a nice collection of several very well-written essays.
The book includes good examinations of the issue of silt in Lake Powell and a decent look at the Colorado River hermit Bert Loper.
It's a great book to read on river, or in the desert, and Abbey's salty character comes through in every page--though the book does drag a little toward its end.

2005-09-29 (Albuquerque, NM) | Helpful Votes: 4 | Rating: 4

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An addventurs book that you will love!
Many things I liked about this book was that it had alot of addventure and excitment. The characters always have exciting attitude's. Jessice is the main character she is 15 and only has a dad. She gets along with all group members once she gets to meet them.
One of the things I didn't like about this book was that they really didn't tell about their home lives much. like why pug was sent to this camp.
P.S. For the most part I thought that this book was extoridanory.

2003-04-25 (Versailles, OH USA) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 5

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drifting along Ed's river
As a longtime Abbey fan, down the river is as powerful and exciting as any. The stories capture the imagination, and are filled with flowing, humorous, forceful prose. a gem to read!

2001-10-25 (Walton, NY United States) | Helpful Votes: 5 | Rating: 5

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The Monkey Wrench Gang (P.S.)

Product Details

• Notes: BUY WITH Self-reliance, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and usage to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed
• ISBN13: 9780061129766
• Equip: New

Description

Ex-Green Beret George Hayduke has returned from war to find his beloved southwestern desert threatened by industrial development. Joining with Bronx exile and feminist saboteur Bonnie Abzug, wilderness guide and outcast Mormon Seldom Seen Smith, and libertarian billboard torcher Doc Sarvis, M.D., Hayduke is ready to fight the power—taking on the strip miners, clear-cutters, and the highway, dam, and bridge builders who are threatening the natural habitat. The Monkey Wrench Gang is on the move—and peaceful coexistence be damned!

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Ed Abbey called The Monkey Wrench Gang, his 1975 novel, a "comic extravaganza." Some readers have remarked that the book is more a comic book than a real novel, and it's true that reading this incendiary call to protect the American wilderness requires more than a little of the old willing suspension of disbelief. The story centers on Vietnam veteran George Washington Hayduke III, who returns to the desert to find his beloved canyons and rivers threatened by industrial development. On a rafting trip down the Colorado River, Hayduke joins forces with feminist saboteur Bonnie Abbzug, wilderness guide Seldom Seen Smith, and billboard torcher Doc Sarvis, M.D., and together they wander off to wage war on the big yellow machines, on dam builders and road builders and strip miners. As they do, his characters voice Abbey's concerns about wilderness preservation ("Hell of a place to lose a cow," Smith thinks to himself while roaming through the canyonlands of southern Utah. "Hell of a place to lose your heart. Hell of a place... to lose. Period"). Moving from one improbable situation to the next, packing more adventure into the space of a few weeks than most real people do in a lifetime, the motley gang puts fear into the hearts of their enemies, laughing all the while. It's comic, yes, and required reading for anyone who has come to love the desert. --Gregory McNamee

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Customer Reviews

Fun...and a classic read
Experience a new outlaw justice in this classic Abbey work. Although you may groan at the sometime sophomoric humor, the storytelling outs and the environmental questions are worth considering, even when voiced by terrorists.

2010-08-26 | Jack H. (Cape Cod) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

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trying to understand the position of the Earth First!ers
I put this on my reading list because it's ground zero of the Earth First! environmentalist movement, the vandalism as civil disobedience. And I am not an Earth Firster, tree spiker, SUV dealership destructor, rescuer of bunnies from cosmetic labs, kind of girl. But how who doesn't not love virgin stands of redwoods and the wide, wide, endless sky of the American west and the watersheds of the Colorado? There was no doubt that this author loved the American west, knew the plateaus and cliffs, the wildlife. The descriptions in this book remind you to fall in love with this country all over again, the American Southwest is beautifully, lovingly portrayed in this story. Where's my pack and my sleeping bag because I need to go and rest on the slick rock under the milky way far from the ways for men.

I read this novel to give them 400 pages of my time to explain to me why they do what they do. But progress delayed is not progress defeated. A bulldozer destroyed is not victory. That without our exploding population we wouldn't need to capture the rivers for power, strip the forests for timber and ravage the earth for resources. At one point in the novel, a character actually proposes gathering stones and building houses from them so that we wouldn't need lumber, which would work if the population of the US was a million rather than 100s of millions. The engineers are the bad guys who want to put a chip up the hero's butt and make him calculate exponential factorials, pave the earth, dam the rivers, cloud the sky.

There is a tendency of people who live on the margins to make the assumption that anyone could live on the margins, that anyone could just say no and unplug from the grid. But for the rest of us, it's a lot more complicated than that.

2010-08-16 (Silicon Valley, CA) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 3

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Serious issues, questionable handling
In The Monkey Wrench Gang, Abbey addresses serious issues of our style of living on this planet, addressing a variety of of ways in which we rape the earth, from building large highways to mining, logging, and building dams. There is no question that in the last thirty-five years, since the publication of this book, we have continued the same unsustainable trends. Our practices harm the environment and the other living creatures inhabiting it with us. Our desire for comfort and our greed have led us to ignore the damage we are doing. Currently we cannot escape the knowledge of the devastating of our environment through the blown well from our off shore drilling. We have denied the fact that overpopulation is a major problem. Birth control remains a hot political issue. Unless we curb our population and learn to curb our appetites, we continue to damage the earth we live on. Certainly the book will offend many by the lifestyles of its four major characters and by the methods they use to fight expansion into the West. On the other hand, many of us are politically powerless to stop the large corporations. If you can overlook the scruffiness of the major characters and want to live in harmony with nature, this book is for you.

2010-07-26 (Muncie, IN, US) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

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Best of Class!
The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey is not so much about environmentalism as it is about environmentalists. The story doesn't abound with sprite-like creatures living in a lush world of ferns and flowers; for the most part it takes place in the barren desert. The landscape plays well with the lives of the characters, which are also windswept and bleak, except for Smith, whose life is like the river's edge, here the desert blooms and like Smith's multifamily life, is almost too lush.
The doctor, the nurse, the vet and the river guide are the true endangered species in this story and dealing with the complexities of modern life threatens them all, and all like them, with extinction. Unlike the other helpless creatures being crushed by developmental progress, these are people who can and do fight back.
The war is on! And it's goes from sad to heroic to hilarious. Abbey is probably the best author there is when it comes to illustrating the real villains: ignorance, arrogance, and greed. When these forces collide with determination, intelligence and resourcefulness the result is a comic battle that will leave you choking with laughter.
The characters will live on in your head long after the book is finished, especially George Washington Hayduke. He is at times the most wonderfully stupid genius, but is never insincere or completely in control.
In our modern, electronic world we have authors like Abbey to thank for helping us to discover the boundaries we needed to keep us from destroying the very things from which our humanity springs.

2010-06-30 (Sunnyvale, CA) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Seeing through Abbey
I read this book in the early 80s when I had just moved to Moab, Utah, where Abbey lived for a while and where he worked for the Park Service. I was appalled by what others have already noted, the glib tacit approval of vandalism.

Abbey was a talented and entertaining writer and could weave magic out of the landscape. I am one of the people who moved to Moab because of Desert Solitaire, a decision I never regretted, altho I left when the town became ruined for anyone but the very rich - See Brave New West by Jim Stiles. But in all Abbey's work, not just Monkey Wrench Gang, a nasty streak surfaces now and then, and at some point I quit reading him.

2010-03-03 (Dead Cat, AZ USA) | Helpful Votes: 4 | Rating: 1

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The Journey Home (Plume)

Product Details

• ISBN13: 9780452265622
• Notes: BUY WITH Trust, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and ritual to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed
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Description

Long considered an underground classic, The Journey Home stands beside Desert Solitude as one of Abbey's most important works. In a voice edged eith chagrin, Abbey offers a portrait of the American West that readers will not soon forget, presenting the reflections and observations of a man who left the urban world behind in pursuit of the natural one and the myths buried therein.

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"I am not a naturalist. I never was and never will be a naturalist." So Ed Abbey opens The Journey Home, a collection of essays that turns every page or two to some aspect of the natural history of the desert West. Abbey had recently been compared to Henry Thoreau as a writer who had made a home both literary and real in the wild, and he was having none of it: he wanted to be thought of as a novelist and environmental activist, not as the author of gentle essays on self-sufficiency and the turn of the seasons. The Journey Home is thus full of politically charged, often enraged essays on such matters as urban growth ("The Blob Comes to Arizona"), the gentrification of the small-town West ("Telluride Blues--A Hatchet Job"), and wilderness preservation ("Let Us Now Praise Mountain Lions"). He raised a few hackles with this book, but he also found many devoted readers, fans who wanted and got an update of and rejoinder to Abbey's Desert Solitaire. Agree with him or not, you can't fault Abbey for his honest self-assessment: "I am--really am--an extremist," he wrote, "one who lives and loves by choice far out on the very verge of things, on the edge of the abyss, where this world falls into the depths of the other. That's the way I like it." --Gregory McNamee

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Customer Reviews

Abbey's books
I purchased both Desert Solitaire and The Journey Home by Edward Abbey as gifts for friends, having read both and loved them. These are both American classics as far as I am concerned and anyone who loves the southwest, has traveled there,wants to travel there, or even is an armchair traveler must read at least one of them.

Each chapter is a short story, each short story is a picture within a mural that represents a time, purely Americana.

2010-07-01 | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Austere
The American West can be a harsh land of beauty and contrasts. There can be blistering heat and fierce blizzards separated by the span of only a few hours. Some of the World's most beautiful places mingle with landscapes far less sublime in a fascinating quilt work.

Edward Abbey has captured much the intriguing starkness of these wonderful places in The Journey Home. The book is a collection of essays, many of which were published separately of times and lands clearly dear to his heart. As such, I'm sure that different essays will strike different emotional chords with different readers depending upon her or his prior background or experiences, but as a whole, this is a work of haunting, Spartan beauty.

For me, his reminiscence of hitchhiking through the West in 1944 (Hallelujah on the Bum), `The Second Rape of the West', his wonderful descriptions in `Down the River with Major Powell', `Mountain Music', and `Freedom and Wilderness' rank among the best writing in its genre. Many of these describe places dear to my own heart and are written in a harsh simplicity that evokes strong emotion. Perhaps the strongest work in the book, though, is `Death Valley', an essay written so tellingly that I feel that I already know a part of the valleys character even though I've never been near its desiccated surfaces.

This is not a perfect work. Some of the essays do not reach the heights of those noted above but that mirrors in many ways the very nature of the West. Edward Abbey lived his life without apology, and here has created a wonderful collection of essays describing a land that he and so many others have deeply loved.

2010-03-31 (Louisville, Colorado) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Fantastic
Great read by a fantastic author. Haven't been disappointed by anything written by Abbey.

2009-09-08 (Wonderland) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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A few gems from Edward Abbey
"The Journey Home" is a collection of 22 essays by Edward Abbey originally published in 1977. While Abbey and I are kindred spirits in lamenting the destruction and desecration of the natural world, the collection on the whole is only moderately satisfying.

Abbey is at his best when he combines his deeply personal recollections with a narrative thread. He accomplishes this best in "Hallelujah on the Bum" (retelling his hitchhiking and train-hopping trip from Pennsylvania to the West Coast and back in 1944), "Down the River with Major Powell" (an account of Abbey and two friends' trip down the Green River in Utah 101 years after John Wesley Powell made the first exploratory trip), and the second half of "Mountain Music" (in which Abbey recounts a climb to the knife-edged col between Mt. Wilson and Wilson Peak in Colorado). I also loved the three-page "Shadows from the Big Woods," but that's because it struck a particularly personal chord with me, but does not follow the "personal narrative" pattern of the other three excellent essays.

Slightly less effective are five other essays: "Disorder and Early Sorrow" (a very humorous recounting an ill-advised and ill-fated trip in a passenger car on an abandoned jeep track in Big Bend National Park in 1952), "Death Valley," "Manhattan Twilight, Hoboken Night" (written about the time Abbey spent in Hoboken, NJ, before the city became gentrified), "The Crooked Wood," and "Freedom and Wilderness."

Abbey stumbles in the remainder of the 13 contributions when he tries to be a naturalist and when he laments the loss of natural places. He's certainly spot on about his sentiments, but the essays come across as cynical and snide. Some are also outdated, especially "Return to Yosemite: Tree Fuzz vs. Freaks" and the longest contribution, "The Second Rape of the West" about strip mining for coal.

The book's only 239 pages long (in the hardcover edition I read) so it's not a major commitment. Plus, the great essays are gems to be savored. But, there's much that readers will find less enthralling.

2009-08-27 | Restoration ecologist (Philadelphia, PA) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 3

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The Journey Home
As usual Abbey was brilliant. It was one of the best novels I ever read.

2006-07-08 (Tucson,AZ) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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One Life at a Time, Please

Description

From stories about cattlemen, fellow critics, his beloved desert, cities, and technocrats to thoughts on sin and redemption, this is one of our most treasured writers at the height of his powers.

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In his passionate defense of wilderness and wild-ness, Edward Abbey is always worth reading for those who value a wolf's howl more than the ka-chink! of a cash register, and no matter what the subject, Cactus Ed always shoots from the hip. This collection of essays is no different, and contains the invaluable "A Writer's Credo," wherein Abbey tells would-be scribes to rock the boat and make a stand, else the noble craft is reduced to a mess of pottage, and the muse has no reason for staying.

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Customer Reviews

classic abbey
This collection of essays is a wonderful snapshot of Abbey's talent. If you like these, try some of his books.

2009-12-10 | bug man (indiana) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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More insight into Abbey the man, and Abbey the writer...
This book is a collection of shorter pieces published by Edward Abbey in magazines, newspapers, newsletters, and other venues. It is organized (roughly) into the following sections: politics, travel, and literature/art. Some chapters were of greater interest to me than others, but all gave me greater insight into Edward Abbey the man, and Ed Abbey, the writer.

Highlights and controversies:

Abbey has been called lots of things, but when he was accused of being "...arrogant, incoherent, flippant, nonsensical, nasty, and unconstructive..." after publishing an anti-cattle-on-western-public-lands rant, he commented, "'Nasty and unconstructive' - I love that" (p. 3).

"The rancher (with a few honorable exceptions) is a man who strings barbed wire across the range; drills wells and bulldozes stockponds; drives off elk and antelope and bighorn sheep; poisons coyotes and prairie dogs; shoots eagles, bears, and cougars on sight; supplants the native grasses with tumbleweed, snakeweed, povertyweed, cow[manure], anthills, mud, dust, and flies. And then leans back and grins at the TV cameras and talks about how much he loves the American West" (p. 17-18).

"And if the wilderness is our true home, and if it is threatened with invasion, pillage, and destruction - as it certainly is - then we have the right to defend that home, as we would our private quarters, by whatever means are necessary" (p. 31).

"'Paw,' says my little brother, as the old man loads the shotgun, 'let me shoot the deer this time.'
'You shut up,' I say.
Our father smiles. 'Quiet,' he whispers, 'both of you. Maybe next year.' He peers down the dim path in the woods, into the gathering evening. 'Be real still now. They're a-comin'. And Ned -' He squeezes my shoulder. 'You hold that light on 'em good and steady this time.'
'Yes, sire,' I whisper back. 'Sure will, Paw'" (p. 39-40).

[This is one of Abbey's most controversial essays, in a life full of controversial essays.] "Poverty, injustice, overbreeding, overpopulation, suffering, oppression, military rule, squalor, torture, terror, massacre: these ancient evils feed and breed one one another in synergistic symbiosis. To break the cycles of pain at least two new forces are required: social equity - and birth control. Population control. Our Hispanic neighbors are groping toward this discovery. If we truly wish to help them we must stop meddling in their domestic troubles and permit them to carry out the social, political, and moral revolution which is both necessary and inevitable. Or if we must meddle, as we have always done, let us meddle for a change in a constructive way. Stop every campesino at our southern border, give him a handgun, a good rifle, and a case of ammunition, and send him home. He will know what to do with our gifts and good wishes. The people know who their enemies are" (p. 44).

"Only a fool envies the joy of a child; a grown-up man or woman shares in that joy" (p. 63).

"It seldom fails: there's something about a progress down a river that brings out the best in anyone. Getting bored with your neuroses? Drop your analyst - drop him/her like a cold potato - and make tracks for the nearest river" (p. 108).

The entire chapter titled "A Writer's Credo" is very thoughtful - pages 161-178. "He who sticks out his neck may get his head chopped off. Quite so. Nevertheless it remains the writer's moral duty to stick out the neck, whether he lives in a totalitarian state or in a relatively open society such as our own. Speak out: or take up a different trade" (p. 164).

[Quoting Joseph Wood Krutch from a recorded interview] "You see, I have this private, subjective feeling that killing things for the sake of sport is wrong. I think hunting is bad for hunters because killing for pleasure tends to brutalize those who do it" (p. 184).

And also from that interview with Krutch, "As I've said before, too many people use their automobiles not as a means to get to the parks but rather use the parks as a place to take their automobiles" (p. 185).

Intriguing, entertaining, sobering, shocking, and sometimes "nasty and unconstructive" - take these chapters one life at a time. Please.

2009-09-01 (Honolulu, HI USA) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 5

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Good, but not great.
It is a collection of essays across the years. As usual in a book like this, it is uneven. Some essays are funny, inspiring, hard-hitting, others are dull. I found the best essays were when he was describing the desert Southwest. The worst were those where he was talking about the art of writing. All in all, I was glad I bought this book. It has enough good in it to overcome the bad. Thus, it is rated a 4, although some of the essays were 5's, other's were 3's.

2009-01-06 | Darrel the librarian (Bunch, OK United States) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

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Hit and miss collection of Abbey essays
Edward Abbey's curmudgeonly persona permeates this collection of essays organized by topic (politics, travel, books and art and nature love). This is one of Abbey's later books, a mish-mash of essays, magazine articles and book prefaces, and it has a disjointed feel.

When Abbey describes a journey, like his description of a houseboat trip on Lake Powell, he is magical. When he decides to be political or critical, when the desert rat Abbey comes to fore, he just comes off as too ranting, too artful, trying to hard to be clever and angry at the same time. This is always Abbey, or, I could argue, any artist, at their worst -- when they become so self conscious of their persona that they have to pander to it to maintain the illusion of it. That's at least how Abbey comes off to me in the rantings in this book.

His article about a trip to San Francisco shines when it describes his visit to Robinson Jeffers house, but could do without the pithy descriptions of his daughter and meeting with the magazine editor.

Read "One Life..." one story at a time. If you don't like one, skip it and move on. There are enough pleasing nuggets to satisfy both avid fan and neophyte alike.

2006-06-14 (DeKalb, IL USA) | Helpful Votes: 2 | Rating: 3

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Abbey reveals some weakness in his character and writings
I had great expectations after reading the first essay: Free Speech. I feel like the book went downhill from there. Abbey seems particularly fond of wandering off by himself, but frankly, when he's part of a white-water rafting excursion, I have serious doubts that they would even let him do that. I'm certain now that he's taking considerable "artistic license" in some of these essays. For me the low point was "Writer's Credo". I felt a strong level of insincerity in this piece - How can a writer feel it's his duty to criticize everyone around him without first subjecting himself to the same standards. Frankly, at best, "Credo" is just a justification for Abbey's misanthropic tendencies. At worst, it's a lie.

"Krutch" was just plain boring. "Sex" was somewhat redeeming.

I'm not sure what to say about "Sportsmen" - which as Abbey puts it, is simply excerpts from a printed leaflet. It sure was scary. The question is, with the questions raised about Abbey's honesty of description, and sincerity of purpose, how factual is this piece titled "Sportsmen"? I don't want to believe it, and Abbey spent the whole rest of the book crying wolf. I don't know.

I absolutely love some of Abbey's books. We all love "Desert Solitaire", and the charicatures of "The Monkey Wrench Gang", etc., are wonderful. But this patchwork of rehashed essays seems just like a cheap way to make some extra cash. In summary, a careful read of this bookwill likely expand your image of this writer, but leave you with questions about his veracity. I guess the next book for me will have to be "Confessions". Don't make this your first foray into Abbey's world. You're likely to miss the best.

2000-10-01 | zencoyote (San Diego, California USA) | Helpful Votes: 4 | Rating: 3

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