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Oct 07, 2007

Cara rated it:

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 ignora More...

16 comments like (15 people liked it)

Nov 19, 2011

Will rated it:

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 More...

5 comments like (5 people liked it)

Sep 14, 2007

Rachael rated it:

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 w More...

0 comments like (8 people liked it)

Jan 15, 2010

Scott rated it:

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 More...

5 comments like (6 people liked it)

Nov 21, 2011

Angie rated it:

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. The More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jan 18, 2008

Jenna rated it:

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 More...

2 comments like (3 people liked it)

Dec 16, 2009

melissa rated it:

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 A More...

1 comment like (3 people liked it)

Jun 02, 2010

Ken-ichi rated it:

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 lovin More...

6 comments like (5 people liked it)

Sep 29, 2011

Abeer rated it:

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 More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Apr 25, 2008

Chaz rated it:

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 contra More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Mar 11, 2008

Jessica rated it:

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 instruction More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Mar 21, 2008

Myridian rated it:

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 througho More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Aug 16, 2008

Lotte rated it:

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...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Mar 18, 2008

Dustin rated it:

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...

1 comment like (3 people liked it)

Feb 16, 2008

Doug rated it:

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 seem More...

3 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 11, 2010

Claire rated it:

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!

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Feb 02, 2008

Jaimee rated it:

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 lo More...

2 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 28, 2009

Kelly rated it:

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

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Feb 04, 2008

Jean rated it:

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 More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Feb 13, 2009

Matt rated it:

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 More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 05, 2009

Rochelle rated it:

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 resour More...

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Dec 22, 2011

Gareth rated it:

Seems to have been almost entirely forgotten, and contains - by a long, long way - the best descriptions of the desert I have ever read. This is what I wrote on my blog about a year ago -

I’m ashamed to say I only recently discovered Edward Abbey’s phenomenal Desert Solitaire. It’s a book which charts the author’s experiences as a park ranger in the Arches National Monument near Moab, southeast Utah. The books I read usually end up littered with blank Post-Its, placeholders to return More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Dec 06, 2011

Ms.pegasus rated it:

Humanist/misanthrope, spiritual atheist, erudite primitive, pessimistic idealist – not that these traits are incompatible. As descriptions of the author, Edward Abbey, they hint at a complicated man struggling to reconcile the contradictions he finds in himself. He embraces an individuality that defies categorization, and that often places himself in an uncomfortably ambivalent relationship with the reader. It is a point worth confronting because DESERT SOLITAIRE is in part a memoir of Abb More...

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Nov 17, 2011

Bob rated it:

Based on advance press, I'd already mentally grouped this with "Desolation Angels" and "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" - a guy who sees himself as a maverick confronts wilderness and eternity in the American West, tells us about it. Abbey is more specific about what he's getting away from and what he's searching for, and his cred as an inspiration for the more radical end of the modern environmentalist movement is worth noting.

He's rather inconsistent th More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Oct 30, 2011

Blyth rated it:

Ned served as the perfect companion to last week's wanderings in the Southern Utah desert lands. Though his insight and humor were enjoyable throughout the book, I was still chafing against his macho persona during the first half. But whether it was because he softened or because I had already melted into the land which inspired his passions, the chapters on Glen Canyon and Havasu, in particular, had me charmed. The elegiacal nature of these chapters may also have had something to do with their More...

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Sep 16, 2011

Riley rated it:

Though the desert has never really spoken to me, I enjoyed this wide ranging book. Two passages of Edward Abbey's really captured my own feelings about nature:

"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 go there. I may never in my life get to Alaska, for exampl More...

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May 11, 2011

Christian rated it:

I first heard about Edward Abbey while reading an article on the now drowned Glen Canyon. I skimmed over a few of the pages in his book, and his writing conjured up such vivid mental images of the desert I decided I had to read it.

Ed is largely known for his distaste for ugly manmade intrusions into the wilderness, and his Monkey-Wrenching of things that blight the landscape. In this book, he pulls down prospecting stakes in Arches, chops down a welcome sign in Moab, and that's it. If More...

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Mar 16, 2011

Damon rated it:

There is a lot in the this book that resonates with someone that has spent enough time in the outdoors in one place with themselves to make grand conclusions about ones own insignificance.

Some of my favorite quotes from the book:
Language makes a mighty loose net with which to go fishing for simple facts, when facts are infinite.

The beauty of Delicate Arch explains nothing, for each thing in its way, when true to its own character, is equally beautiful (p45).

More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 23, 2011

Doug rated it:

First book of Abbey's that I have read. Humor, rich natural description -- by this I mean a wonderful eye for landscape -- and just enough adventure to keep me interested (what we now more hermetically, insularly, without ocean or river or range, call plot and so not fully adventure).

There's also a misanthropic strain that I both laughed with and tried to avoid accepting. His send-up of spoiled, air-conditioned tourists wandering with limited range, tethered to the Machine, is golden. More...

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Dec 05, 2010

Clifford rated it:

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