Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness by Edward Abbey Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness
Book Review: An Ironic Icon
Summary: 5 Stars
Abbey's "Desert Solitaire" is a classic, and I can hardly add to the adoring comments others have already made.However, I can point out the irony the book itself represents. The people who hold the book up as an icon of the wilderness movement are often the very people Abbey would have deplored. For example, the mountain bikers who treat the Arches National Mounument as their own personal playground--who throw beer bottles around, play loud music, and leave bycicle skid marks on the slick rock--love Abbey's book and think of him as a "righteous dude," but their cavalier treatment of this natural wonder represents the very thing that Abbey condemns in "Desert Solitaire."
I shed a tear everytime I reread "Desert Solitaire," for Arches has become worse than Abbey's greatest fears.
Book Review: Another world besides 9 to 5
Summary: 5 Stars
A classic book that I have read over and over and never tire of. A book for all of those out there who believe there is more to life then 9 to 5, paying bills and waiting to retire. A glimpse of another way to live...and see life. Thank you, Mr. Abbey.Book Review: Beautifully-textured account of a soon-to-be-lost landscape
Summary: 5 Stars
I discovered the Desert Southwest a decade ago, and re-read this classic whenever I long to return but can't. Abbey's spare descriptions of an equally spare country that he obviously loves are an eloquent plea for the preservation wild places around the planet, not just in the slickrock regions of the Colorado Plateau.Book Review: Best book on nature and conservation since Walden
Summary: 5 Stars
In this book Abbey said: "... most of what I write about in this book is already gone or going under fast. This is not a travel guide but an elegy. A memorial. You're holding a tombstone in your hands. A bloody rock." Abbey is not demon-possessed to behave so well as Thoreau, he is more opinionated and his opinions can be pretty pungent and prickly (for example, see "Polemic: Industrial Tourism and The National Parks").
However, being opinionated does not make a good book. Abbey's writing is surprisingly polished. The slick rocks, the canyon lands, the sagebrush and cacti all have a authentic texture in them. You can smell the desert dust in this book. Abbey is not called "Thoreau of the American West" for nothing. I think under Abbey's rough shell, he actually had a sensitive heart; he just enjoyed the natural world more than the human one. It is a good thing that he turned some of his attentions to writing, and we are left with some of the best nature writings since Thoreau.
I actually read this book before I read Walden. In fact for me this is the book that started my interest in reading nature and conservation, after I took a trip to Grand Canyon, Bryce, Zion, Canyonlands and, of course, Arches National Park. I have read a few more of Abbey's books since but none have had the impact of this one. I also read in one of those that in his later years he wasn't very satisfied with Desert Solitaire because he was still too "well-behaved". Yet, for me, this is the book that defines him and it achieves the perfect balance between narratives of nature and discourse of opinions. Now I keep a copy by my bedside and if I ever get strangled on an island, I will carry this book and Walden with me.
Book Review: Boldy sits along side Thoreau on my bookshelf.
Summary: 5 Stars
Crass, abbrassive, crude, brilliant and poetic. A vivid look at a vanishing sanctuary and the piece of humanity that is fading with it. One of the most profound pieces of work I have come across.