Desert Solitaire | Edward Abbey | Strikes close to home

Desert Solitaire | Edward Abbey | Fantastic

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Desert Solitaire

	Desert Solitaire Edward Abbey Touchstone, 1990 - 288 pages average customer review:based on 123 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Strikes close to home

I picked up this book on accident--I had maybe $6 left on my gift certificate and browsed through random books. It sounded interesting, so I bought it.

I was so moved the first time I read it. Everything written was so eloquent and Abbey expressed himself amazingly. It kept me drawn to read on and devour the entire text.

A year later, I volunteered for the National Park Service completely forgetting about Abbey's book, but I just so happened to bring it along with me on the plane 1700 miles from home. It was the first book I read while in Washington. Aside from the $10 stipend a day and government housing deals striking so close to home, it really made me realize what an amazing place I was in (Mount Rainier National Park). It makes you look at all the details of life and appreciate it all.

You tend to get a little critical of tourists though. Especially the ignorant ones...

"Are there any dangerous animals around here?" -visitor
"Only the tourists." -Abbey

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Fantastic

If only we could travel back in time to a world less paved... Abbey's adventures in Utah and Arizona are adventures many crave and find it harder and harder to find in today's small world. This book is special, provocative, a tad crazy, and above all, a wonderful experience. A must have for any lover of the wild.

The obvious Western classic

This book does a wonderful job at describing and invoking how it feels to be in the outdoor West--in the hot sun, on the barren mesas, wandering lost and happy through the deepest canyons.
Edward Abbey was a strange yet understandable contradiction of a man--a man who wrote that it would be worse to kill a man than a snake yet who once killed a rabbit with a rock just to see if he could do it. A man who passionately opposed the destruction of the West, yet who admitted to anarchistically throwing beer cans out his truck window as he drove.
Edward Abbey wrote about the West as if it was a place where not everything was ruined yet, as if there was still a sort of bright, outdoor innocence about things, as if it was a place where a person could soak in sunlight reflected off orange canyon walls, splash in a muddy desert stream, or drive a dusty road with the windows down.
And it was.
And it is.
This book is a protective love of the West in a nutshell. It's a series of orange canyon walls distilled into english. It's hawks and vultures and rising heat transmuted into letters and punctuation. It deserves its reputation.
I buy almost every used copy I can find of this book, and I give them away just as fast, to my friends from the East who come west, and to all my friends who love the desert.
Read it, buy it, and see what he's writing about for yourself. You'll be glad you did.

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A voice crying in the wilderness

This is one of only four or five books that I can say truly impacted my life. Many years ago my boss saw me reading "The Monkey Wrench Gang" (which did not significantly impress me). He suggested "Desert Solitaire" as a much better example of Edward Abbey's work. I took his recommendation seriously, and have been thankful to him ever since.

Having grown up in Idaho I had done a fair amount of backpacking in the mountains and forests, and I was somewhat of an outdoor enthusiast at the time. But the thought of recreating in the desert never held much allure to me--until I read this book. Now I make at least a couple of backpacking/camping trips per year into the desert. I still love the mountains, lakes, rivers, and forests, but I now know that the deserts are also full of wonder.

My favorite chapter told about Abbey's trip to Havasu Creek and Falls. While reading about it I remember saying to myself, "There can't possibly really be a place like this". I determined that I would find out if such a place actually existed and if it was as wonderful as Abbey described it. A few years ago I made the trip to Havasu Falls, and I found that the author's description of the place was perfect.

Not only did this book help me to appreciate the desert for what it is, it taught me to appreciate non-fiction writing in general and nature writing in particular--things I thought I did not care for previously. I highly recommend this book to anyone who has an appreciation for the outdoors.

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Reasoned poetry

Somehow this book has gotten the reputation of being an extreme environmental rant. In fact, Abbey's recommendation for traffic control has been implemented in Zion to excellent effect.

The book on the whole is very well written and is a poetic description of the desert southwest when it was still quite wild: before Arches became accessible and before the Glen Canyon dam created Lake Powell.

My only complaint is that the cover of my edition shows a photo of Monument Valley, which is only briefly mentioned, instead of Arches, which is the whole book.

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