Reading Adventures with Ed by Jack Loeffler was a truly wonderful experience. Mr. Loeffler does well in combining the biographical with his own experiences with Ed. I was sad when I'd finished the book because the author presented such a beatiful friendship, one which transcended anything we can articulate, including mere physicality, and I wanted to read more, keep reading until I understood what they understood through such a tight friendship.

At the same time that Mr. Loeffler presents Ed Abbey in a realistic light, including his faults of which some were publicly criticized, he counters such facts with his own truths, those he gained through nights and nights in the desert with his friend. He highlights several of these trips, and in doing so, gives us wonderful conversations of two intelligent, insightful men trying to figure out the world and the human animal--no easy task.

If you are looking for a biography to futher your enjoyment of Abbey's work, you'll get that with Adventures with Ed, but thanks to Jack Loeffler, you'll get even more than that. You'll get a friendship so strong it extends past life and into death. If an afterlife exists, both Ed and Jack will be there (someday), driving their trucks and sharing beers over a campfire.

"He hiked through the high desert," Jack Loeffler writes about his friend, Ed Abbey (1927-89), "inhaling the perfume of juniper, feeling the clean hot wind against his face. He watched the circling buzzards and wondered if he should surrender, lie down and die, to provide them with one good meal. Or hike down into the maze and disappear into the ghostly silence. Or relinquish himself to a magnificent rapid in Cataract Canyon. He was frightened by the sound of his own breathing in the vast emptiness where he must keep his own company or lose control" (p. 85). For more than twenty years, Loeffler and Abbey were best friends, and they guzzled beer, shared hundreds of campfires, and hiked thousands of desert miles together (p. 3). "We were companeros," Loeffler says in the Preface to his 285-page biographical memoir. "And as long as I continue to live, we shall be" (p. 10).

Abbey encouraged us to "follow the truth no matter where it leads" (p. 4), and Loeffler does just that in drawing from Abbey's journals, FBI files, personal interviews, correspondence, and conversations he had with Abbey "while hiking, driving, river running, or just staring into campfires" (pp. 287-88), to bring his friend to life in these pages. Along the way, we find Abbey hitchhiking and hopping freight trains across America at age seventeen (pp. 18-20), falling in love repeatedly (he was married five times), attacking billboards at night (p. 38), studying in Scotland on a Fulbright scholarship (p. 39), working as a park ranger in the "bright sunlight of the American Southwest" (p. 79), down on his knees at Glen Canyon Dam, praying for an earthquake (p. 108), dancing naked and "clapping and howling" in the sunshine of Aztec Peak (p. 154), rallying for Earth First!, cussing red ants (p. 9), and trekking 110 miles through the Sonoran Desert "alone with his thoughts" (p. 162). Whereas the first four chapters of Loeffler's book covers much of the same biographical information contained in James Calahan's recent biography, ED ABBEY: A LIFE (2001), in Chapters 5 through 8, Loeffler introduces us to the friend he knew in Ed Abbey. In fact, Loeffler even describes digging Abbey's undisclosed desert grave in the book's final pages. "Every now and then, I visit Ed's grave and pour him a beer," Loeffler tells us (p. 4).

This truly fascinating book will appeal to any Abbey fan. Personal, adventurous, and intimate, Loeffler's "portrait" offers new insights into the "heavy chemistry" of Abbey the loner, the wilderness anarchist, the desert rat, the gifted writer with an evolved mind, the husband, father and friend, and into the "man who would not be dominated by anyone" (p. 61).

G. Merritt

Adventures with Ed, by his longtime friend and fellow sabot, Jack Loeffler, offers an intimate look into the life of Edward Abbey that gets to the very bedrock of his existence of a writer and as a lover of the natural world. Although I have read and reread almost all of Abbey's work, this book allowed me to integrate and better understand the persona that Abbey constructed through his work and the sensitive, reticent man that he was in everyday life. While Loeffler's biography covers Abbey's entire life, the emphasis is on his life and work after he met Loeffler after the publication of Desert Solitaire until his death in 1988. Thus, this work is not simply a chronicle of Abbey's life as a writer and environmentalist, it is also the story of two friends who shared an unabiding love of nature and especially of the Southwestern desert.

Perhaps, one of the best qualities of this book is the way Loeffler illustrates Abbey's view of the world, which shaped his evolution as a writer, through the retelling of conversations and debates that they had on their many trips into the deserts of the Southwest and Mexico. In this way Loeffler has performed a great service for anyone who desires to better understand the work, as well as the life, of Edward Abbey, by providing many intimate details that reveal the forces that influenced Abbey's perception of the world and his place in it. It is impossible to read Abbey's work and not be moved, sometimes by his sense of humor and satiric wit or by his stunningly beautiful descriptions of what many see only as a desolate wasteland. This book is a must for anyone who wants to travel, albeit vicariously, with Abbey and Loeffler along the dusty roads of their many expeditions and trips into the desert, which allows us all to get a small glimpse into Abbey's life, which allows us to better understand his purpose as a writer.

Thanks to Outside magazine, which has been systematically cultivating a stable of fine writers for years now, we have a collection of what I'll call the "nouveau adventure" genre. Yes, there are traditional, edge-of-your-seat adventure stories by familiar names like Jon Krakauer, Sebastian Junger and Dave Roberts, but to me the real pleasure of reading this book is derived from pieces like Ian Frazier's "Keeping America's Trees Safe from Small-Curd Bubble Wrap," and Randy Wayne White's "Why Do We Fish?" Their topics are just a bit off the wall, poke gentle fun at the human condition, and still manage to offer some real insight into subjects that most of us would never have thought of.

I have also savored the several pieces in the anthology that touch a deeper chord. "The High Cost of Being David Bower," a sensitive portrait of a man literally driven by the urgency of his dream, and "The Blackfoot Years," dealing with the importance of a river to the lives of a family that has had to cope with tragedy, are two favorites.

Here you will find adventure of all kinds, insightful social commentary, high risk moments, and just enough oddball humor to keep you entertained for hours. Like other readers, I find myself returning to this collection just for the fun and pleasure of rereading my favorites. Many thanks to Outside for having the vision and sense to give these authors a home in print.

I must have re-read this book for the twentieth time by now. And I already have this whole stack of Outside magazines on the shelf! Every time I read this book I would discover something interesting and new between the lines and in the stories -- whether it's emotional, descriptive or implied. I feel terrified when I read Krakauer's take on the Everest accident; inspired by the story on David Brower and his environmental stand; and I laughed myself silly with The King of the Ferret Leggers. In short, this book take me through the whole gamut of emotions. It's a great compilation and an even greater buy.

Years and years ago an office-mate brought in a copy Outside magazine with an article on "Ferret-legging," and read to all of us. By the end of it we were dying with laughter. I made a xerox, which I saved for years, until I finally made the mistake of loaning to a friend (ex, now, obviously) WHO DID NOT RETURN IT.
Now this compendium of Outside's comes out, and blessed Mary mother of God, it includes the ferret-legging piece.
You must buy this, flip to "King of the ferret-leggers," and read the piece. You'll thank me, honest you will.
And I'm told there're some other stories in here as well. Think of them as gravy.

Listening to Ed Abbey read selections from Desert Solitaire, The Journey Home, Abbey's Road, and Down the River puts his writings in a whole new perspective. I found myself going back and rereading these selections after listening to the tapes. It is as though I never really read them in the first place. Highly recommended if you can find a copy. Don't understand why they are so hard to find. From the back cover, "Vintage Abbey. If I could have only one Abbey work on a desert island, I might choose this."

A MUST Abbey "listen." Hear Cactus Ed himself. If you love wilderness and need a little jolt of Abbeyism, this is it. I use it as a class assignment, not only for its literary quality but for its passion for wild places. American Wilderness: Love it or leave it alone.

a remarkable collection, and worth every penny (...) i paid for them new. ed's voice never gets tiresome, especially reading some of his own best works.

This book is a collection of essays on hunting by some excellent outdoor writers, including former President Jimmy Carter. The writers talk about why they hunt. This book examines that question and finds that there are many reasons different people give to that same question. You may agree with some or disagree, but you'll definitely think long and hard about the answers given.

This book's thought provoking essays also force all of us to think about our own carnivorous instincts. Since almost all of us eat meat from the supermarket the book takes cows as an example and asks non hunters if the castration of bulls, the branding, the feeding of them in outdoor, closed in, excrement filled pens and the eventual slaughter of them is really somehow better than the hunter who shoots and kills a deer in the wild? It seems we all live with blood on our hands. But not to let you think this book is simply cut and pasted from the pages of American Hunter. The book also questions trophy hunting and whether hunting should even be considered a sport.

Since many hunters spend a good deal of time defending what they love to do, I would recommend that they pick up a copy of this book in order to be able to answer the question "why do I hunt?"

I could not think of a title for my review. I don't write many and find Amazon's 5 star system constraining. This book is extraordinarily good. The title will, unfortunately, be off-putting to some. If one could choose another title, I would suggest: A compendium of almost four-dozen essays written by men and women about their love and passion for wildlife and conservation. It is so much more than a book about hunting, that one cannot describe it simply. Further, what is equally astounding is the fact that the "collector," David Petersen, was able to obtain such a wonderful robust collection.

If one expects this to be a book merely about hunting, that expectation is wrong. If one expects this to be essays written only by undereducated, good old boys-"slob hunters"-who relish ambushing Bambi from a truck that is wrong. If your expectation is that all the essays will be unambiguously pro-hunting or gun sport, you are "off the mark." Fairly, Nelson, in his introduction says," In the United States, hunters are probably the largest, most diverse, and most important potential advocates for preservation of natural habitats and protection of wild animal populations." That remark comes close.

I believe that many city folk have so lost touch with wild life that they now believe that hunting is something akin to a video game using live ammunition. That a hunter would relish spending an entire day tracking game, and not succeed seems antithetical to their purpose for some. After reading these essays, one understands why the writers deem the day a success, something very special; e.g., "I began to realize that what I like best about hunting was the companionship of a few good old trusted buddies in the out-of-doors."

If hunters can feel so deeply-even those who later abandon it-one hopes for a return to earlier days when more Americans shared the pastime. Pete Dunne writes about "the Great Moment: How the universe held its breath, waiting-waiting for the sound of an echo that never came; the echo of a shot that was never fired" while sighting a deer-and not shooting-after his many years of hunting. You can feel the heart of this "ex"-hunter who still declares that "anti-hunters who believe that hunting is synonymous with killing and that anyone who hunts is unfeeling and cruel" ... "aren't dishonest. They are merely wrong."

I could go further, providing so many wonderful examples of the humanity of these writers. I suggest, however, that you make the time to read this book. Perhaps the greatest compliment I can pay to these writers is that they are knowledgeable, articulate, caring people. If their hunting experience has helped them become that way, hunting is very important to our culture and our society.

One of the things a hunter struggles with is how to describe to others what the importance of hunting is. This book is a compilation of insights written by those who ask themselves the question, "Why do you hunt?".

Having rafted the Colorado myself 2 years ago, this was a perfect souvenir-reminder of my trip. The photos in particular are exquisite - some I have no idea how he managed to capture without ending up in the river himself. I lost my Pentax to the very first rapid! This book definitely gives a sense of what the Canyon, the river, and the rapids are like. Makes me want to go back!

I have traveled through the Grand Canyon many times, both on the river and on the trails. John Blaustein has not only been able to capture the beauty of the canyon but also the soul of the river it contains. Abbey's journal is a fine compliment to the pulchritude of the pictures.

Any fan of unique photography and wonderful words should buy this reissue. Mr. Blaustein is a gifted photographer and abbey is equally adept in capturing the magic of this river trip. The book is a reminder of what could be lost, if we fail to preserve the glorious heritage of our national parks.

If you are a fan of R. Crumb and Cactus Ed this is a great Calendar. I wish I could bring myself to cut it apart and frame it because it does belong on the wall. R. Crumb definitely knew the characters and did a great job in revealing their stories through their expressions in these pictures.

Exciting, important topic. Who owns the movie rights? Why hasn't this book ever been made into a movie?

I am writing this on March 14th, 1998 - the ninth anniversary of the passing of Cactus Ed. This novel is the most satisfying of Ed,s books. It fills in so much about his life that his non-fiction essays only hinted at. Plus, it's a damn good story. I have all of Ed,s books, all first-editions and most autographed by Ed. I cherish my autographed first edition copy of Fools Progress more than any of my many books. Ah me, today I am sad thinking about Ed. I want to thank him again for all his writings, but especially for his " Fat Masterpiece", The Fools Progress. I would love to read the unedited manuscript for this book; the final product is only half as long as the entire story he wanted to tell.

Edward Abbey died in March of 1989. In the latter part of 1988, he saw his last and perhaps most accomplished work brought to bed at his publishers in New York. The author of many highly controversial works of fiction and non-fiction, best known for his seemingly solitary stand against the ecological destruction of the western American deserts, Abbey's last book effectively completed a cycle. At the same time it was a very close foretelling of his own probable doom.

Abbey was an environmentalist from the beginning. In the East of his youth, he saw strip mines close in on his father's mountain acres. Out West, he witnessed the early preparations being made to dam the Colorado and its tributaries. He rafted down Glen Canyon and saw the hidden valleys filled with a beauty that was soon after to be engulfed. He smelt out the tricky political deals being woven by senators and landowners in the forgotten tracts of the butte country and did his best to expose them. Against all of the attempts to tame this corner of the American wilderness, Abbey railed.

In books ranging from "Desert Solitaire" (1967), a journal of a season in the desert, to "The Monkey Wrench Gang" (1975), an explosive novel of saboteurs versus dambuilders, Abbey argues his points in favour of preserving the canyon country. Having been there "before" and "after," his voice has a compelling authority. To read his account of Glen Canyon before the dam is to be filled with regret at the later spoliation.

In "The Fool's Progress," Abbey gives us something of a summing up of his own life. The book is like a reverse history of Kerouac's "On the Road." Instead of youth rushing out through the length of America to meet its new and cosmic identity on the West Coast, here is a life which is wearing down, attacked from within, going back from the desert to the Appalachian hills of birth and ancestry. In the chronicle of the winding down, as the truck begins to fail and a mortal pain begins to rise, boyhood is measured against the actual experience of the now hard-bitten adult.

"The Fool's Progress" is the work of a now accomplished writer in his prime. We might have expected much more from Edward Abbey and his early death is a great loss. Nevertheless, his completed works stand on their own and I can recommend them to anyone who is intrigued by the workings of an original mind as it tackles the problems of our age.

No one I have ever read has had as much justifiable contempt for the unnatural "society" humankind has fashioned for its self as does Edward Abbey. Abbey at the same time exhibits a passion for human existence as it relates to a true appreciation for the natural world and its implacable laws. The Fools Progress will, with every turn of the page, cause you to examine and question your own pursuit of material ends. Abbey's corresponding use of first person and narrative writing techniques lend an even greater sense of passion and conviction to his already bold writing style. This is a book that posesses the potential to change your life. Buy it, read it, enjoy it and appreciate it for the rest of your life!

Its been over ten years since I read Desert Solitaire and I've combed through a couple of his works looking for another collection of stories that hit me with the same "between-the-eyes" impact as Desert Solitaire. Well, I found it with Journey Home. To me Edward Abbey represents the second coming of John Westly Powell. He, like Major Powell, foresaw the westward expansion of the U.S. and in the case of the desert southwest instinctively knew that water would be the limiting factor. It's important to remember that Abbey saw the huge growth up tick coming some 25 years ago. And places like Phoenix, and Vegas have exploded in size ever since. Abbey puts it all in focus with "The BLOB Comes to Arizona." "Telluride Blues - A Hatchet Job" is another case in point. But for pure fun, nothing tops Abbey's "premarital honeymoon" adventure in "Disorder and Early Sorrow." If you're a fan of Abbey and you buy the book for that story alone, you won't be disappointed.

That claim may seem a little rash in the face of Abbey's great prose work, Desert Solitaire, but this book in my view offers a more intimate and personal look at Abbey himself and provides some great insights into his formation as writing placed withi the context of the American west. One of the strengths of this work, as opposed to Desert Solitaire, is the broadness of subject matter covered. Abbey begins by recounting his life changing hitch-hiking, train jumping tour across america to the west in the summer of 1944. His style, however, is like Kerouac, but without the without the self consciousness and pretension. Through Abbey's it is nature that is the subject, his personal exploits are merely secondary/accidental; Abbey is just along for the ride. He tells of his first glimpse of the mesa's of Hopi country on the fringes of the Painted Desert as viewed from the side door of the Pullman as he drifted down the tracks towards New Mexico. Throughout, he describes his love of the desert and the creatures that live there with a vitality and gentleness uncommon in today's environmental discourse. This sensitivity is even more pronounced when compared with his verbal protests against what he sees as the destroyers of his desert paradise, such as, the miners, developers, dammers, trappers and, yes, even the tourists. "The Journey Home" closes with a surrealistic celebration of the desert as seen through the detached lens of an anonymous camera, which I consider some of his most beautiful and original writing. For all those who have read Desert Solitaire, read this to get a more intimate look of the man behind the ideas. Abbey's contradictions are what makes him so great as an American writer. He is at once an anarchist, environmentalist, desert rat, river-runner, essayist and novelist, but above all a man from pennsylvania who became entraptured by the mysteries of the desert and dedicated his life to celebrating its beauty.

Reading Abbey reminds me of lines from the Scottish poet, Hugh MacDiarmid:

I'll have no half-way house, but aye be where/ Extremes meet; it's the only way I ken/ To dodge the cursed conceit of bein' rich/ That damns the vast majority of men.

That's Abbey for you, and he has a helluva great time out there where extremes meet. Is there any other way to live?

This is a fine collect of 10 early hikes and float trips Abbey made mostly in the high deserts of the American Southwest. The last takes place in Alaska. In "A Walk in the Desert Hills" Abbey tells of a solo hike across more than 100 miles with only his backpack and the hope that water will be found in natural tanks. What, the reader may ask, compels a man to undertake such a trek with only a belief that salvation lies ahead in a bowl shaped stone (tanks) filled with rain water, and then further on, perhaps another, and hopefully another still? Throughout the book he answers this question by showing us the hidden beauty of slot canyons, how the Colorado looked beneath the flooded Glen Canyon before the dam and shares with us his discovery of petroglyphs and pictographs whose meanings still remains unknown. This is Abbey when his desert world was still new, before the roads and bridges and dams he hated changed it all. This is the world beyond the wall, his world. "Beyond the wall of the unreal city, beyond the security fences topped with barbed wire and razor wire, beyond the asphalt belting of superhighways, beyond the cemented banksides of our temporarily stopped and mutilated rivers, beyond the rage of lies that poison the air, there is another world waiting for you. It is the old true world of the deserts, the mountains, the forests, the islands, the shores, the open plains, Go there ...into the ancient blood-thrilling primeval freedom of those vast and democratic vistas. You will never understand the secret essence of the word freedom until you do."

Abbey was as about as free as a man can get.

The first two pieces in this collection provide the best introduction to Abbey I can think of. "A Walk in the Desert Hills" describes a 115-mile walk across the Sonoran Desert, in search of adventure, wisdom, and water. "How It Was" describes his first incursions into the Four Corners and Glen Canyon area, before the pavement came. "How It Was" will make you understand what got Abbey intoxicated with the desert. "A Walk ..." tells why it was still more magical than bourbon even thirty years later. For these two pieces alone this is my favorite of Abbey's books. The remainder of the pieces in the book, which describe forays around the Colorado River region, the Sea of Cortez, and a rafting trip in northern Alaska, are pure, delightful gravy.

Although Desert Solitaire is Abbey's most popular work of non-fiction and is an undeniable American masterpiece, Beyond the Wall in many ways surpasses it in its praise of the beauty and granduer of nature and as a meditation on humanity's place in it. As a work primarily concerned with Abbey's experiences on several hiking/camping trips alone in the Desert, from Southern Colorado, and West Texas, through theNew Mexico and Arizona wilds to the Sea of Cortez, the reader is allowed an glimpse into his psyche that is unsurpassed in these quiet revelations, documented in many a lonely, but not lonesome walk. In Beyond the Wall, Abbey is closest to his comparison with Thoreau, in the way that the simple description of Nature itself is the focus of this work. In many ways this book is both a eulogy and a celebration of Glen Canyon and raw unspoiled Nature.
Whether narrating "a Walk Through Desert Hills" or a "float trip down the doomed Glen Canyon, Abbey's awareness of the subtle force of nature is everpresent, and is expressed in the metaphoric image of Freedom and Wilderness versus industrial insanity and slavery. In many ways, what is beyond the wall is the possibility of our unmeditated communion with nature. And although this wall seems forminable, it can be overcome simply by venturing off the beaten path into a wilderness unknown to many. His solution lies in the simple concept of reestablishing an intimate relationship with Nature, which is deprived of so many today. Thus, in becoming acquainted with our environments and surroundings we will be much more involved in saving what is there. The case of Glen Canyon is a sad illustration of this, for despite its stunning beauty and granduer, which Abbey claimed surpassed even that of the Grand Canyon, it was destroyed simply because not enough people had experienced it and too few cared enough to save it.
In reading the essays in Beyond the wall, Ed introduces us to one way that we can all get beyond the walls that alienate us from nature and ultimately ourselves. And since this book can only guide us so far, it is we that must take the next step and decide on what side of the wall we want to live our lives.

This is Abbey's most unabashedly anarchist novel (yes, even more so than The Monkey Wrench Gang) with anti-militarist undertones as well as his usual love for the rural Southwest.

This is Abbey's one attempt at writing sci-fi, with the novel set in a future time when the governments and big corporations in the cities have collapsed under the weight of their own unsustainability, and the people have largely returned to the small-scale agrarian economy of the Old West, albeit with no government. The ideal, in Abbey's worldview. Only problem is, there is a would-be military dictator trying to establish a power base in Phoenix and re-establish the state and the primacy of the city.

Not as good a novel as The Monkey Wrench Gang, but still rates 5 stars.

For some intellectual fun, compare and contrast this book to Ayn Rand's Anthem. It is interesting how both Abbey and Rand portray the cities as hives of statism and authoritarianism, and rural areas as the places where freedom and escape from authoritarian government can be found. And yet, Abbey and Rand held such diametrically opposed views on the environment and wilderness preservation. Which one is right? Or more to the point, is preserving wilderness and rural areas from development our last best hope as an escape hatch from authoritarian government? On this point, I'll put my bet on Abbey any day!

This is not only one of Abbey's best novels but a great novel in its own right. As both a city and a country dweller I can not only relate but confirm much of his notion that cities are not nearly as healthy for a man's soul as the country is. In addition this is a great story about social decay and what it takes to over come the challanges that arise from such a situation. We have grown soft and forgetful of what our forefathers went through to create a country like ours and this book gives a realistic and easy to swallow insight into their frames of mind and their state of heart. This is the wild west and the futurama all mixed together with an iron fisted military group to boot. I still can't believe this was never made into a movie.

Abbey's best work will always be his essays, but this novel is one of those "forgotten" dystopian classics that deserves much more attention. Forget Orwell's "1984." It's too European. Forget Levin's "This Perfect Day." It's too fantastic. Abbey has written the best post-apocalypse American novel to date. And his politics, as always, ring true. Up the rebels! An anarcho-classic