| Product Summary | | Format: Paperback | | ISBN: 9780345326492 | | Publisher: Ballantine Books | | Publish Date: 7/1/1990 | | Buy.com Sku: 30048799 | | Item#: RN6WKF | | Dimensions (in Inches) 7H x 4L x 1T |
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| | | "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 heart that beat within, is a fascinating, sometimes raucous, always personal account of a place that has already disappeared, but is worth remembering and living through again and again.
Annotation:
DESERT SOLITAIRE, widely considered to be one of Abbey's best books, is the account of two summers he spent in the canyon lands of southeastern Utah. First published in 1968, the book has acquired a huge following over the years, and stands as one of the author's most impassioned pleas for the preservation of the wilderness, and has become a classic of American nature writing.
| PraiseNew York Times Book Review
"[The book] is the outgrowth of a bitter awareness of all that has been lost, all that is being lost, all that is going to be lost in that glory of our American democracy, our system of national parks. Designed to set aside, for all the people, wild areas of special beauty, this system orignated with a two-fold purpose: to serve the public and to preserve the areas. These two goals are not in head-on collision. For 'to serve the public' has come to mean 'to serve the public in automobiles'." - Edwin Way Teale 1/28/68 |
| Author Bio| Edward Abbey | | Abbey was born in the town of Indiana, Pennsylvania. After a brief military career (1945-1947) stationed in Naples, he attended the University of Pennsylvania, then at age 21 set off to see the American West, hitchhiking and riding the rails. He fell in love with the desert, a love that shaped his life and art for the rest of his life. Abbey was fond of Whitman's line: "Resist much, obey little", and wrote his master's thesis at the University of New Mexico on "Anarchism and the Morality of Violence". For 15 years in his 30s and 40s, he worked as a part-time ranger and fire lookout at several different national parks, and published DESERT SOLITAIRE in 1968 based on the experience. In all of his work--novels, essays, letters, and speeches--Abbey consistently voiced the belief that the West was in danger of being developed to death, and that the only solution lay in the preservation of wilderness. His most famous work, THE MONKEY WRENCH GANG (1975) featured a band of radical environmentalists attempting to fight back against the industrialization of nature; it is considered an inspiration for the radical environmental organization Earth First! He was married and divorced four times, and married his final wife in 1982; despite his belief the necessity of population control, he had a total of five children. Abbey died at 62 from complications from surgery, after four days of esophageal hemorrhaging. He requested that he be buried in an old sleeping bag, and left instructions that read: "I want my body to help fertilize the growth of a cactus or cliff rose or sagebrush or tree. If my decomposing carcass helps nourish the roots of a juniper tree or the wings of a vulture--that is immortality enough for me. And as much as anyone deserves." A lifelong environmentalist--called "the Thoreau of the American west" by Larry McMurtry--Abbey was also a famously difficult and uncompromising human being, but was greatly loved and revered by a vast audience. |
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