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Desert Solitaire

4.25 of 5 stars 4.25 · rating details · 13,582 ratings · 1,044 reviews

"A passionately felt, deeply poetic book. It has philosophy. It has humor. It has its share of nerve-tingling adventures...set down in a lean, racing prose, in a close-knit style of power and beauty."
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOKREVIEW
Edward Abbey lived for three seasons in the desert at Moab, Utah, and what he discovered about the land before him, the world around him, and the...more

Paperback, 337 pages

Published January 12th 1985 by Ballantine Books (first published 1968)

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Oct 07, 2007 Cara rated it 1 of 5 stars Recommends it for: no one

Edward Abbey is a pompous, hypocritical ass-wipe who likes to make as if his day hikes and drives to the general store are heroic, life-altering adventures. He is also a pathetically sexist and patronizing (not only to women but to basically all people but himself) author who apparently assumes his entire audience consists of suburban white males. In fact, this is one thing he may be right about.

Yes, he may be an old fart who was writing in the sixties or whenever, but his ignorance and utter l...more

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Oct 12, 2009 Will Byrnes rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction, biography-autobiography-memoir, nature

Desert Solitaire seemed the right book to take along on a trip to the southwest in September 2009

Abbey writes of the beauty of the southwest. As a ranger at Arches National Park he had a close relationship with some of our country’s most exquisite scenery. In the 18 essays that make up the book, he offers not only his appreciation for the sometimes harsh environment of Utah and Arizona, but his notions on things political. Those are not so compelling. He tells tales of people he has known and in...more Desert Solitaire seemed the right book to take along on a trip to the southwest in September 2009

Abbey writes of the beauty of the southwest. As a ranger at Arches National Park he had a close relationship with some of our country’s most exquisite scenery. In the 18 essays that make up the book, he offers not only his appreciation for the sometimes harsh environment of Utah and Arizona, but his notions on things political. Those are not so compelling. He tells tales of people he has known and in doing so enhances an image of his southwest as at once a beautiful and terrible place.

However, I have concluded, with apologies to Ernest Thompson, that Edward Abbey is an old poop. It is one thing to have a deep and abiding appreciation for a place, a thing, an experience, an environment, but Abbey seems determined that only certain sorts should be allowed to share that joy. And while he may wish for us as readers to appreciate what he appreciates, he seems uninterested in allowing for other joys by other people. While he offers detail and poetry about the desert and about untouched places, he sneers at the urban, at those he sees as lesser than himself. As such he taps into some tried and true American themes such as the romantic myth of self-sufficiency and our persistent national history of anti-city bias. Toss in some other dark impulses when he suggests that perhaps birth control for some poor people should be mandatory. Add a dose of survivalist paranoia as he sees one strong reason to support National Parks to be preserving a staging area for rebel militias after big government comes after us all. But don’t forget a gift for language, for description, for story-telling, and a strong poetic sensibility.

For those of us who, for whatever reasons, may not be able to manage ten-mile hikes, or who cannot rappel down canyon walls to experience the full range of experience available at our national parks, for those who may not have dedicated our existences to living as closely to the land as possible, we also are Americans, we also are people, and it is possible to take joy in natural wonder without the benefit of Abbey’s athleticism. He clearly winces at the possibility of roads being built that allow the non-hikers among us a chance to see at all, up close, or, at least closer, some of the parts of our parks that are currently inaccessible and he decries as abominations the possibility of mechanisms being constructed that provide an enhanced experience to those in wheelchairs, as if that were somehow shameful. Having just returned from several of the national parks mentioned in this book, I can safely report that I saw much stunning beauty, felt my appreciation of my country’s natural wonders swell, and believe that it is my entitlement as an American, no less than 20-something backpackers, to take joy in this common heritage. My inability to manage a back-country hike should not prevent me and others like me from sharing in our nation’s natural wonders. Surely there is a happy medium between the paving over of everything that Abbey fears and allowing reasonable access to our nation’s natural treasures to those of us who are not outdoorsmen.

Beyond my gripes about his notions concerning who should be allowed into our parks, and other dark political impulses, Abbey is a very gifted writer. He has many stories to tell both about his personal experiences and about other characters he has encountered in his southwest existence. His love of the land comes through like a cactus barb into an unshod foot. You will get a feel for the lands he portrays, the land he loves. In addition, he seasons his narrative with references to more refined culture that one might find a bit surprising in a guy who presents as a mountain man.

I have not read Abbey’s later writings so will keep an open mind on where he wound up regarding his politics. I may not harbor particularly warm feelings for the guy overall, but I do share his love of our national parks, his visceral appreciation for natural beauty and appreciate his great skill as a writer. Hold your nose over some of the darker parts of this book, but it is a special read when he is not ranting.
(less)

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Sep 14, 2007 Rachael rated it 5 of 5 stars

This is one of the few books I don't own that I really really really wish I did. I love this book. It makes me want to pack up my Jeep and head out for Moab. I love Abbey's descriptions of the desert, the rivers, and the communion with solitude that he learns to love over the course two years as a ranger at Arches National Park.

Abbey explores environmentalism and government policies on the national parks. It wasn't my favorite part of the book, but he manages to do it in such a way that it's not...more

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Jun 22, 2012 Emily rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: adult, book-club, could-not-finish

I'm sorry, I know I should finish Book Club books. But they guy is an arrogant a**hole and I'd rather spend my little free time reading something I enjoy.

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Apr 23, 2013 Chris rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: summer-reading-2012

This languished on my "Currently Reading" list for nearly three years, through no fault of its own. I read three knock-out chapters, was distracted, lost track of the book, and stumbled back into it a week ago. I have been living inside it since. This is an exquisite and vital and damn near flawless book. Abbey is a curmudgeon if not an asshole, and he here screams and clamors against the rising tide of industrial tourism and dam-building bastards and that German bastard who rolled up in a Porsc...more This languished on my "Currently Reading" list for nearly three years, through no fault of its own. I read three knock-out chapters, was distracted, lost track of the book, and stumbled back into it a week ago. I have been living inside it since. This is an exquisite and vital and damn near flawless book. Abbey is a curmudgeon if not an asshole, and he here screams and clamors against the rising tide of industrial tourism and dam-building bastards and that German bastard who rolled up in a Porsche ("I could have opened his skull with a bottle of his own Lowenbrau, and was powerfully tempted" (332)) and brain-sucked TV drones and everything that stands between us and the untramelled earth including our shoes. Abbey is a necessary good, a bulwark against the corruption of wild space, and this book traps a bit of its essence. It's an elegaic distillation of wild space unflooded and unpaved and unmolested.

The man can craft a helluva sentence, taboot. Try these on for size:

"I'm in the stifling heat of the trailer opening a can of beer, barefooted, about to go outside and relax after a hard day watching cloud formations" (23).

"The wind blows, unrelenting, and flights of little gray birds whirl up and away like handfuls of confetti tossed in the air" (46).

"To refute the solipsist or the metaphysical idealist all that you have to do is take him out and throw a rock at his head: if he ducks he's a liar" (122).

"We need wilderness whether or not we ever set foot in it. We need a refuge even though we may never need to go there...We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope; without it the life of the cities would drive all men into crime or drugs of psychoanalysis" (162-3).

Perhaps above all Abbey is a mystic trying to provoke us into reconnection. "Down the River" in particular should be required reading for all human beings and any other creatures of emerging literacy. If the beauty of a passage below doesn't work for you, then this glorious bastard might not be your bag. And if it doesn't, you should probably just stop talking to me. Forever.

"I want to be able to look at and into a juniper tree, a piece of quartz, a vulture, a spider, and see it as it is in itself, devoid of all humanly ascribed qualities...I dream of a hard and brutal mysticism in which the naked self merges with a non-human world and yet somehow survives still intact, individual, separate. Paradox and bedrock."(less)

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Jul 11, 2008 Scott rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to Scott by: Ted Kaczynski

Shelves: walks, rivers, nature, 1960s

Part Walden, part Mein Kampf ... Desert Solitaire (1968) is to a certain extent sand-mad Edward Abbey's homage to the beauty of the American Southwest and to the necessity of wilderness ... but mostly, the book is an autobiographical paean to the sheer wonder of Abbey himself. Like the pioneers, prospectors, and developers who preceded him, Abbey lays claim to all the canyonlands and Four Corners region of southern Utah and northern Arizona: "Abbey's Country" he calls it, and he seeks to fill ev...more Part Walden, part Mein Kampf ... Desert Solitaire (1968) is to a certain extent sand-mad Edward Abbey's homage to the beauty of the American Southwest and to the necessity of wilderness ... but mostly, the book is an autobiographical paean to the sheer wonder of Abbey himself. Like the pioneers, prospectors, and developers who preceded him, Abbey lays claim to all the canyonlands and Four Corners region of southern Utah and northern Arizona: "Abbey's Country" he calls it, and he seeks to fill every twisting canyon and windswept plateau of his private playground with his own immense, misanthropic ego. His collected jottings form a notebook of random, often paranoid observations cast in anemic prose. He throws in everything that crosses his mind: a wearisome narrative of his float down the Colorado with a laconic traveling companion; bare, boring lists of plant names; a violent short story about prospecting; a dishonoring and disgusting story about finding the body of a lost tourist; jejune meditations on death and mortality; all of it crusted over with inane metaphysical babbling, insulting rants, and absurd polemics directed against technology, development, Native Americans, tourists, religion, the Park Service, the aged, the young, the government, and anyone or anything that is not Ed.

Yes, there are a few colorful descriptions of the scenery, but they are obscured by beer-swigging, cigar-chomping, beefsteak-chewing, bacon-burping, Bull-Durham big-mouth Ed's constant grab for attention. Abbey needs solitude about as much as a jackass needs a flush toilet. Ed's like your 10-year-old brother who torments you by jumping in front of your camera while you're trying to take a picture of a sunset or like a blathering guide who can't stem his prattle long enough to let you listen to the wind blowing through the canyons. All too often I found myself thinking, "Ed, shut up already and let me look around!" But he won't because he's got to tell me how he's crushed a rabbit's skull with a rock (it was an "experiment"), or how in a lovelorn moment he carved his name in an aspen -- graffiti that will be twice as big in fifty years, or how he tore up dirt roads in his government-owned Chevvy pickup, or how he insulted some tourist or some tourist insulted him, or how he burned everything in sight with his paraffin-coated matches.

Desert Solitaire is gonzo environmentalism, and it's showing its age. The immense majesty and haunting beauty of southern Utah's canyons deserves a far better panegyrist.(less)

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Nov 21, 2011 Angie rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to Angie by: Shane, Mike

Shelves: angie-n-mikes-library, north-american-west, non-fiction, biographies-memoirs-letters, philosophy-religion, mike-likes, angie-s-big-read

with Edward Abbey.

4|25|2008: The day I finally finished Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness by Edward Abbey.
Usually I read books very quickly and all at once. Most books don't take me longer than a few days to finish. I just love stories so much that I don't like to stop once I've started. Desert Solitaire, however, has taken me years to get through. I've started it half a dozen times, and every time I love it, but when I set it down I don't pick it back up again. Then in a month or tw...more

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Jan 18, 2008 Jenna Los rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: for-school-mla

Edward Abbey has a wonderful love of the wild and his prose manages to actually do justice to the unique landscape of the West. That said, I don't like him. He contradicts himself quite often in this book - hatred of modern conveniences (but loves his gas stove and refrigerator), outrage at tourists destroying nature (but he steals protected rocks and throws tires off cliffs), animal sympathizer (but he callously kills a rabbit as an "experiment"), etc.

His "Monkey Wrench Gang" also upset me - h...more

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Mar 07, 2007 melissa rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Anyone who loves the outdoors and longs to be there instead of here

This was my first Edward Abbey book. I read it while spending a somewhat lonely and isolatory summer conducting a reasearch project at my undergraduate school. After I read this book, I proceeded to clean out the library's entire collection of Abbey books. Abbey was completely irreverant, arrogant, and self-obsessed at times, and I love him. For anyone who's ever dreamed of escaping real life for a while and living all alone in the desert, this is the book for you. Well, because that's what Abbe...more

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Jun 19, 2012 Stefani rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: of-it-s-time, west

With great difficulty, I sometimes think about my own mortality, the years I have left on earth, how with each year that I get older, the years remaining disproportionately seem shorter. Admittedly, it's a depressing train of thought to entertain, and makes me want to crawl under a proverbial rock and die...it also has a sickening domino effect with my thoughts then residing in the eternal questions of life—why am I here, what is my purpose in life, etc...and all the anxieties and regrets that g...more With great difficulty, I sometimes think about my own mortality, the years I have left on earth, how with each year that I get older, the years remaining disproportionately seem shorter. Admittedly, it's a depressing train of thought to entertain, and makes me want to crawl under a proverbial rock and die...it also has a sickening domino effect with my thoughts then residing in the eternal questions of life—why am I here, what is my purpose in life, etc...and all the anxieties and regrets that go along with those ponderings. *Sigh* I think I know now what it's like to be Scandinavian or French.

In any case, I feel a little calmer about everything after reading this book.

Although Abbey is admittedly a bit of a hypocritical prick with an axe to grind against humanity—calling the world overpopulated when he himself had five children is among one of several such statements he makes—he seems to have a very tender reverence for the natural world, and devotes much of the novel to prodigiously recording the natural beauty of Arches Natural Park from his six-month tenure as a park ranger. At the same time, he abhorrently rejects man's infringement on nature and lack of respect for the natural world, opposing development of all forms (including the dam that was being constructed in the park circa 1968).

But if you can overlook all these short-lived rants, there is something meaningful to be gleaned from Abbey. I think the below passage sums it up pretty well:

A few of the little amphibians will continue their metamorphosis by way of the nerves and tissues of one of the higher animals, in which process the joy of one becomes the contentment of the second. Nothing is lost except an individual consciousness here and there, a trivial perhaps even illusory phenomenon. The rest survive, mate, multiply, burrow, estivate, dream and rise again. The rains will come, the potholes shall be filled. Again. And again. And again.

Despite the sentimentalities we humans heap on the significance of our individual lives, we are only a small part of a much larger universe. (less)

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May 10, 2010 Ken-ichi rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to Ken-ichi by: Shawn

Shelves: nature, environmentalism

Anyone who thinks about nature will find things to love and despise about Desert Solitaire. One moment he's waxing on about the beauty of the cliffrose or the injustice of Navajo disenfranchisement and the next he's throwing rocks at bunnies and recommending that all dogs be ground up for coyote food. He says "the personification of the natural is exactly the tendency I wish to suppress in myself" (p. 6) and then proceeds to personify every rock, bird, bush, and mountain. He's loving, salty, pet...more

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Dec 06, 2008 Abeer Hoque rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: i-recommend

If I had more courage, "Desert Solitaire" would change my life. If I were to do what I felt, I would give up everything else, go outside and stay there. But because I'm too beholden, too afraid, too old? I am merely and simply renewed in my conviction that there are a million different ways to be, and a billion more ways to see.

Edward Abbey's ode (or elegy as he calls it) to the desert, specifically Arches in Moab, the canyonlands of Utah, is like they say (they, in this case, is the New Yorker...more

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Apr 25, 2008 Chaz rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Naturalists, ecologists...

Recommended to Chaz by: a rock and ice climber -- just from a journey

Abbey's 'Desert Solitaire" Is a deeply poetic book, ingrained with the philosophy of ragged individualism and environmental preservation. There's no doubt that Abbey is the Henry David Thoreau of the American West. I found his eloquent descriptions of the flora and fauna of Arches national Park in Utah to be both breathtaking and meditative. There is romance -- but it is the romance between man and nature. At times -- and Abbey states this as well his adventures and ruminations are contradictory...more

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Mar 11, 2008 Jessica rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Some people are armchair historians. I'm starting to think I’m an armchair outdoorswoman (it being two years since I've been on a proper backpacking trip). At first I found myself envying Abbey. Not just his chapter-long adventures, but his human need to be "out there" - way out there. He describes the eroded country, flash floods, runaway horses, footprints, quicksand, and the panic that comes when you are miles down a canyon with a dry canteen. It's not just a memoir, but instructional and pol...more

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Mar 21, 2008 Myridian rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: environment, nonfiction

This book is wonderful, amazing, and has absolutely no story line. It's an amorphous, stream-of-consciousness-like series of vignettes into Abbey's mind and world (as seen by that mind) while he was Rangering in Arches National Park in the 60's(?). I've guiltily thought and felt Abbey's rabid misanthropy for many years, and was pleased that he made it sound natural and reasonable. The book also had the amazing affect of making me happy and sad at the same time. I spent many weekends throughout m...more

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Aug 16, 2008 Lotte rated it 4 of 5 stars

Abbey's poetic writing about the desert landscape of Arches National Park and surrounding areas is breathtaking. Enjoy the journey; don't rush; stop occasionally and read a couple of paragraphs out loud and enjoy the brilliance of the images. Abbey spent many years working as a ranger, but Desert Solitaire deals with 2 summers in the late 1950s when he was a ranger at Arches (before any roads in the park were paved and I didn't even enjoy all the driving in it after they were paved!). He exhibit...more

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Mar 18, 2008 Dustin rated it 5 of 5 stars

For better or for worse, Edward Abbey become a hero of mine many years ago at the age of 17 when I first read Desert Solitaire. More than any other book, this book shaped my philosphical and political attitudes towards the environment. I must admit that I have mellowed with age, I no longer think that it would be great to blow up Glen Canyon Dam, ( I actually enjoy Lake Powell too much) but the desert soutwest is one of my favorite places on earth. Most people do not understand how anyone could...more

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Feb 16, 2008 Doug rated it 4 of 5 stars

The thing old Ed Abbey never figured out is that modern society can't save wilderness without government intervention. But Abbey harbored anarchist views and seemed to hate both government and modernity.

Oh well. This book is full of great tales about South Eastern Utah. Reading this book, it's pretty obvious that Ed Abbey likes to portray himself as a womanizer and a man of many appetites. I attended a book signing for one of his biographer's and learned that many of Abbey's seemingly autobiogra...more

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Jan 11, 2010 Claire rated it 5 of 5 stars

I am reading this for the second time - and it is as good as the first, in fact, perhaps even better, as I am applying ideas within it to my life in different ways this time. I recommend it!

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Feb 02, 2008 Jaimee rated it 4 of 5 stars

Even if you haven't spent much time in the desert, Edward Abbey does a great job of describing the landscape so that you can almost see it yourself. While a little much at times, he is very candid about the typical American tourist mentality as well as the people who don't appreciate nature for anything other than how they can profit from it. I definitely respect his opinion as he is seeing it first hand. The exchange between him and a group of tourists on pages 233-234 had me laughing out loud....more

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Jan 28, 2009 Kelly rated it 1 of 5 stars

"Take off your shoes for a while, unzip your fly...dig your toes in the hot sand, feel the raw and rugged earth." (pp290)

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Feb 04, 2008 Jean rated it 1 of 5 stars

This man is such a hypocrite! He is preaching respect for the wild outdoor spaces, then he has the audacity to relate how he kills a little hidden rabbit just for the fun of it! His philosophy of locking up wild places with no roads, so they are only accessible to the fit hiker is also very exclusionary. Roads are tools, allowing old and young, fit and handicapped, to view the wonders and beauty of this country. Yes teach love and respect of this beauty and of the wildlife, but allow people to p...more

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Ruby roads are for people that dont like to get out of their cars and walk around the beauty that we are destroying. he killed the rabbit, making sure he c...more
Aug 02, 2012 08:42am

Jean Ruby - If you will read my comment better you will see that I am especially advocating roads for people who can't get out and walk through and enjoy t...more
Aug 02, 2012 03:54pm

Ruby Thank you for explaining yourself better. I did read the passage again, and I still think that he killed the rabbit to see if he could if he ran out o...more
Aug 02, 2012 07:26pm

Feb 13, 2009 Matt rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Some people argue that the difference between infatuation and love is your attitude towards the recipients faults. In infatuation, we do our best to pretend the person is faultless; put them on a pedestal and turn a blind eye towards failings. Love, on the other hand, sees the person as a whole - and rather than ignoring the faults, acknowledges them, and loves them, too. If that is true, than Desert Solitaire is Edward Abbey's love poem to the desert of Southwestern Utah.

The book recounts a su...more Some people argue that the difference between infatuation and love is your attitude towards the recipients faults. In infatuation, we do our best to pretend the person is faultless; put them on a pedestal and turn a blind eye towards failings. Love, on the other hand, sees the person as a whole - and rather than ignoring the faults, acknowledges them, and loves them, too. If that is true, than Desert Solitaire is Edward Abbey's love poem to the desert of Southwestern Utah.

The book recounts a summer Abbey spent, in his youth, living as a park ranger at Arches National Monument, in Utah. Now, I confess a deep affection for that part of our country - but I feel like my love pales in comparison to Abbey's. He loves the country, warts and all - not just the impressive rock formations, but also the harsh, waterless desert atmosphere. Not just the beautiful desert flowers, but also rattlesnakes, scorpions, black widows, and tarantulas. Not just the colorful desert sunsets, chromatically striated from all the dust in the air, but also the fact that, more often than not, there's no one there to share it with.

But if Desert Solitaire is part love poem, it is also part elegy. Though I was blown away by Arches when we stopped in Moab during the bike trip, Abbey would argue that his Arches was long gone by the time I got there. The desert, as he saw it, was being done in by development, motorized/automotive tourism, and the misdirection of the Park Service. Part of the charm of the desert (built into the very title of the book) is its very inaccessibility and inhospitality. To make Arches easily reachable by thousands of car-enclosed tourists is, to Abbey's mind, to remove part of the soul of the location.

His mourning of the lost parts of the Southwest is not always so abstract. In the chapter "Down the River," he and a friend take a long raft trip down Glen Canyon, soon before a dam down river is built - which, when completed, will submerge the entire canyon. It's a deeply affecting chapter, as they discover hidden nooks and crannies throughout the canyon, all too aware that they may be the last to ever see them. If these are the costs of development, Abbey would argue, then we've made a Faustian bargain. (less)

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Jan 05, 2009 Rochelle rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: nature

All of the often contradictory reactions to this book tell me that it is not an easy book to pigeonhole. Part eulogy to a lost love (see chapter on Tukuhnikivats:Island in the Desert), part eulogy to a doomed wilderness (Glen Canyon dam project) and the potent possibilities of the bygone "frontier" epoch (to which is added in somewhat angry despairing tones his lament for an America mired in the senseless squander of an immoral war and the shortsighted expenditure of its natural resources throug...more All of the often contradictory reactions to this book tell me that it is not an easy book to pigeonhole. Part eulogy to a lost love (see chapter on Tukuhnikivats:Island in the Desert), part eulogy to a doomed wilderness (Glen Canyon dam project) and the potent possibilities of the bygone "frontier" epoch (to which is added in somewhat angry despairing tones his lament for an America mired in the senseless squander of an immoral war and the shortsighted expenditure of its natural resources through unquestioned development and privatization), this book manages to be at the same time richly panegyric. In other words: "There's a lot goin on in here, folks." It could be read as a cultural essay, an environmental text, a map of how "we got to where we are now" as a nation, or heir to Ginsberg "who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed
with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use
of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrat-
ing plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space
through images juxtaposed, and trapped the
archangel of the soul between 2 visual images
and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun
and dash of consciousness together jumping
with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna
Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human
prose and stand before you speechless and intel-
ligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet con-
fessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm
of thought in his naked and endless head,
the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown,
yet putting down here what might be left to say
in time come after death,
and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in
the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the
suffering of America's naked mind for love into
an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone
cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio
with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered
out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand
years." . I am not going to excuse Edward Abbey's sexist remarks, but they are, when examined carefully, a smokescreen. So, I don't entirely buy them either. I think his attempt to come off as a curmudgeon (which he probably practiced assiduously) is, when balanced against, say his soliloquy on the Desert in "Episodes and Visions", a clumsy, obvious device. He truly delights in baiting conventionalism whether it is in religion, viewpoint, or culture. He urges a complacent citizenry to awaken to wonder. The worst thing about this book may quite possibly be his attempt at poetry in the chapter titled "Water." He wishes to incite in the reader a thirst to explore, not just the wilderness without(what there may be left of that) but the deep question within. Who are we? Why are we? Does any of it have meaning ultimately? This struggle with the great zen koan of the desert tugs at him and he does not really tie up the ends of his questioning so neatly that he pretends to answer it for anyone. I have been in some of these places he describes and his love for it and knowledge of it is deep and fiercely felt. Much more was left out than was said. Definitely a book to be savored and revisited. (less)

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Mar 30, 2013 Geoffrey Benn rated it 3 of 5 stars

Another environmental classic – this is the story of Abbey’s season as a park ranger in Arches National Park. The book is a reflection on Man’s mental and spiritual relationship with nature – really concluding that the role of wild places is to exist as anchors of humanity – reminders of our past and roots. One of the most memorable quotes was that he may never go to Alaska, but the very knowledge of its presence was comforting. He also dedicates a lot a time to rail against industrial tourism a...more

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Jan 13, 2013 Matt rated it 5 of 5 stars

This is a beautiful, mad, instructive, provocative, fascinating book. It is subtitled "A Season in the Wilderness". While it does concern itself with said season, as Abbey tells us in the introduction: "This is not primarily a book about the desert." That is wonderfully true, as the book is about so very much more. It is something of a text as to how human life should be lived on this planet where the human species is not necessarily needed. From the desert, the author as anchorite/prophet provi...more

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Nov 20, 2012 Rick Skwiot rated it 4 of 5 stars

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.

Alon...more

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Jul 15, 2012 Mary rated it 5 of 5 stars

There's really no good excuse for my not having read this book until now. I guess I've long known that Abbey's writing had a bit of an edge, and I suppose I thought the book (first published in 1968) would feel dated. It does, to a point--what he feared in the way of "industrial tourism" has long since come to pass--yet that just made the work all the more poignant. I was in fact playing the role of industrial tourist on my way to Arches National Park when I read the book, and after the Colorado...more

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Jun 11, 2012 Anthony rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Anyone interested in the American West

Recommended to Anthony by: neighboor

Fantastic read!!! Anyone who has never gone to the Southwest will want to experience the American pioneering spirit and connect with this hostile environment on an intimate level. As Edward Abbey says quite pointedly, you must get out of your car and walk the land and feel its temperature and live within mother nature's different moods. I really enjoyed the detailed descriptions and romantic/nostalgic feeling I got reading certain sections of this novel. Having been out west before I am able to...more

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Jun 01, 2012 Steve Howes rated it 5 of 5 stars

This is one of those books that should be read more than once in order to get the most out of it. On the surface, it is a description of the author's experiences during a six-month stint with the National Park Service in Arches National Monument in the 1960's. However, the author reveals much more of himself and his thoughts on such topics as industrial growth, the value of wilderness, the federal bureaucracy and its decision making process, organized religion, mistreatment of Native Americans,...more

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About Edward Abbey

Abbey attended college in New Mexico, and then worked as a park ranger and fire lookout for the National Park Service in the Southwest. It was during this time that he developed the relationship with the area's environment that influenced his writing. During his service, he was in close proximity to the ruins of ancient Native American cultures and saw the expansion and destruction of modern civil...more

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The Journey Home: Some Words in Defense of the American West

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Quotes from Desert Solitaire

“Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself.” — 108 people liked it

“A man could be a lover and defender of the wilderness without ever in his lifetime leaving the boundaries of asphalt, powerlines, and right-angled surfaces. We need wilderness whether or not we ever set foot in it. We need a refuge even though we may never need to set foot in it. We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope; without it the life of the cities would drive all men into crime or drugs or psychoanalysis.” — 74 people liked it

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