Another fellow managed to cover all the eloquent intellectualities, but the simple truth is that this here book is a good look at a great man. Abbey is legendary, indeed, and that's a good thing, for the stuff he defended deserves a hero and the folks he poked mercilessly with his sharp stick wit (just about about all of us, but especially money-grubbing land-rapers and the lackadaisical dogs who can't bother to oppose them) deserved the poking. Buy this book, then let it collect dust until you've read through Abbey's words to discover him for yourself.

Wonderful collection of essays on the general theme of who Edward Abbey was. Some of the writers include Wendell Berry, Ed's friend Jack Loeffler, Gary "Jafey Rider" Snyder, Dave Petersen and Terry Tempest Williams. From this partial list of contributors, it's obvious that this is a book full of personal observances about one of the west's most hated and best loved figures. Since his death in 1989, the legend of Ed Abbey has perhaps grown beyond manageability. The essays collected here simultaneously feed that legend, while speaking of the actual person behind the lore. This juxtaposition creates an interesting tension throughout the book, as those who knew the man grapple with the public vs. the private Abbey. Abbey himself is also called to task to reveal a bit of himself through a couple of interviews. In hopes that the issue may never be solved and that the world will continue to discuss Abbey, here is what Ed had to say about himself, taken from the Poetry Center Interview: "The real Edward Abbey -- whoever the hell that is -- is a real shy, timid fellow, but the character I create in my journalism is perhaps a person I would like to be: bold, brash, daring...I guess some people mistake the creation for the author, but that's their problem." Resist Much, Obey Little is essential reading for those who knew Ed, as well as for those who are just discovering him.

Eliot Porter's beautiful photographs of wildflowers, trees, and mountain streams are an interesting juxtaposition to the often caustic prose of Edward Abbey, who writes the main body of the text, and Harry Caudill, who writes the epilogue. This book is Abbey at his best, showing that he can write well about a landscape other than the American southwest. He describes the landscape of the Southern Appalachians in their stark reality: the billboards and phony saloons of industrial tourism, the abandoned stores and churches, the paved roads catering to the rich and sedentary, the forsaken Cherokees. His story is a truthful and compassionate account of the tragedies of the region, as well as a powerful argument that capitalism has failed. This is not the place to start with Abbey--"Desert Solitaire" or "Abbey's Road" would be a better choice--but for those who are already familiar with him, this book will not be a disappointment.

Here lies proof of the theory that the soul of a writer propogates beyond into the heart of the reader. It's rare that I give a book 5 stars, but this anthology, a picture taken some years after Edward Abbey's death, show his ideas and methods are still very much alive. Some of the authors herein have chosen the path of analysis, and Coyote slips by. He's hard to find, but not for lack of trying. Others have chosen to 'become' rather than to 'seek', and here's where the real fun begins.

I'll not give all the secrets away. It's much more enjoyable to find them for yourself. But I will say one thing: I had a revelation while reading this book, and despite Abbey's Nietzshean roots, I hold him closer now and with greater respect, after reading this book.

We camped for a week in the Davis Mountains in west Texas in a section of the Chihuahuan desert last summer. This was not our first desert experience - we have hiked and camped across much of the Southwest over the last twenty years or so. This was an unplanned trip as we were headed toward southern Colorado, but we became fascinated by the Chihuahuan desert and somehow we never drove any further.

We were similarly quite lucky to find a copy of the first edition of Peggy Larson's Sierra Guidebook in a bookstore in Alpine, Texas. She presents the deserts of the American southwest (and northern Mexico) in a literate and educated fashion. She manages to discuss individual plants and animals in some detail while painting a large scale, beautiful portrait of the four major deserts of North America. Detailed ink drawings - landscape, geology, plants, and animals - are scattered throughout the narrative and add considerable value. She knows her subject and shares her knowledge in an intriguing fashion. She effectively uses scientific names of desert plants and animals interchangeably with common (but less unique) names without intimidating the reader. This is not a novel and it is quite possible to skip to selected chapters of personal interest, but I highly recommend exploring all chapters, all topics. Peggy Larson's style is really quite good.

If you are already familiar with the American deserts, you will find "The Deserts of the Southwest" a rewarding visit with an old friend. If you are somewhat new to the deserts and possibly have only sampled the deserts from a highway perspective, I suspect that after reading Peggy Larson's book you will likely change your travel plans to include a personal visit to an American desert.

Valuable asset for adherents to late David Brower's promise to restore Glen Canyon as wild river. Read Scott Slovic's 21 page afterword...& understand that Glen canyon Dam may soon be by-passed,standing, as a concrete artfiact to man's defamation of nature. (See Cadillac Desert, late author-Reisner)

Edward Abbey was an outspoken wilderness advocate, and his nonfiction writing falls somewhere between Thoreau and Hunter Thompson. "Desert Solitaire" is classic Abbey, written in the latter 1960s, when he was about 30, and it recounts a handful of summers spent ten years earlier in and around Arches National Monument in southeastern Utah. Here he was a park ranger, when the park was still mostly undeveloped. Living in a small trailer, keeping an eye on the campers and tourists, he mostly relishes the quiet, beauty, and indifference of the desert under its hot sun.

The book begins with his arrival in April and concludes with his departure at season's end in September. In between are chapters devoted to descriptions of his rambles across the terrain, helping a local cattleman round up cows in the side canyons, trying to capture a one-eyed feral horse, camping on a 13,000-foot local mountain, hiking with a friend into an uncharted wilderness call the Maze, and retrieving the body of a dead tourist. There's also a dark story concerning the unfortunate fate of some uranium prospectors. The longest chapter is a rapturous account of a week spent rafting down the Colorado River, he and a friend among the last to see the canyons about to be inundated by the Glen Canyon Dam and the creation of Lake Powell.

Along the way, there are ruminations on the meaning of it all and diatribes against urbanization, intrusive government, the tourist industry, and the destruction of wilderness. The word "solitaire" in the title is an apt choice, as much of the time Abbey is alone, thinking his thoughts and observing this desert world, its plants and wild life, geological formations, and the big sky with its turns of weather. Even when paired up with a companion, he is often off alone, on a walkabout of his own, like as not shedding his clothes.

His thoughts, meanwhile, are informed by wide reading in philosophy, history, natural sciences, and literature. As a writer, he's frequently quotable: "Where there is no joy there can be no courage; and without courage all other virtues are useless." "It's a great country: you can say whatever you like so long as it is strictly true -- nobody will ever take you seriously."

The vistas he describes so eloquently are not hard to picture in the imagination, but I recommend an accompanying volume of photography, such as Eliot Porter's "The Place No One Knew: Glen Canyon on the Colorado." Unless you're familiar with borage, paintbrush, globemallow, and dozens of other desert species, a picture guidebook to the flora of the region would also be helpful. I thoroughly enjoyed Abbey's book, shared the excitement of his adventures, found his cranky, ornery, sometimes self-indulgent perspective refreshing, and felt saddened by the end-of-season farewell with which it closes. In any list of nonfiction books about the West, it should be near the top.

If you have been to Moab, Utah and the surrounding red rock country of Southern Utah then this book is an absolute must read.
If you have never been to Moab or Arches National Park, read this book and let Ed Abbey take you there. This is one of my favorite books and I come back to it often. Abbey's tranquil descriptions
of the beautiful yet harsh red rock environment of what was then Arches National Monument is the quintessential narrative of this lovely desert landscape. In this volume the history, geology and
mood of the red rock country comes alive with Abbey's economic prose. Abbey served as a park ranger during Arches' infancy and his love for the desert and disdain for convention and oppression
served him well during his brief tenure as Arches' caretaker. My favorite chapter: "The Deadman at Grandview Point". Gallows humor
at its finest. Read this book and love it the way Abbey loved Arches.

Edward Abbey didn't like to be known as a nature writer (he was far too proud of his fiction), but after reading this book I would have to say he is among the best. Before I read this book, I had never even considered traveling to the Southwest, this book changed that, and the way I look at nature forever. Abbey has rightfully been called the Thoreau of the American West, this book more than any other shows us why. In Desert Solitaire Abbey is at his best, doing for the Southwest what Thoreau did for Concord and Walden.

One of the great strenghts of this book is the way Abbey weaves together such a wide array of subject matter, which illustrates the seemingly endless variety of experience, in what is thought by many to be an inhospitable wasteland. In a collection of breif chapters Abbey touches on everthing from the incredible beauty of forgotton canyons, the Southwest's past inhabitants, a feral horse, the Colorado river, the perils of industrial tourism, and the story of a man who may have came to die at the edge of a cliff.

In this book you get a great sampling of everything Abbey has to offer, from his stinging wit and dark humor, rage and sadness concerning the destruction of nature, and finally to hope. Edward Abbey has accomplished on the printed page, what Ansel Adams' photography has done for the Southwest. And yes, both immortalize a time and a place that are being destroyed forever, little by little, day by day, but leaving for us a sad and yet wonderful record of what used to be, and why what is left is worth saving. Desert Solitaire is both a celebration and a lamentation for the disappearing landscapes, and hidden canyons that Abbey chose as his own paradise, and if you read this book it may become yours too. Like Abbey's says get out of your cars and crawl in the sand, and EXPERIENCE what nature has to offer, you might just be surprised at what you find.

In a word - boring. In two? Boring and dull. Not particularily interesting, not particularily insightful. Blah, blah, blah - it never seems to end. My friend's mother must have been high on crack to recommend this to me. Several hours of my life I'll never get back. I'm a bright guy, PhD, well read, enjoy camping and the outdoors - not as shallow as this review might suggest - but honestly, this book [stink].

This is a hard book to sum up in a few words. Fascinating and compelling, yes; heartbreaking, often; hair-raising sometimes; exasperating, occasionally. Mostly, it is a vivid reminder of what it is to be still very young, naive, and adventuresome. It's also a book that's very hard to put down.

The reader, of course, knows from the start that Everett Ruess disappears at the age of 21 while on a walkabout somewhere near the Colorado River, in the remote 1930s wilderness of southern Utah. Gifted, bright, and almost painfully sensitive, he writes letters home that are sweetly poignant, thoughtful, opinionated, and rapturously descriptive of the natural environment he loves. Starting at the age of 16, while still a high school student in Hollywood, California, he journeys to Carmel, Arizona, and the Sierras. Leaving UCLA after one unhappy semester, he returns to the Four Corners region of Arizona and drifts northward into Utah where he follows the Escalante down to the Colorado and then vanishes.

A lover of classical music, a reader of books, poet, writer, water colorist, and block print maker, he considers himself very much a misfit in a world of conformity, where people live lives of quiet desperation, pursuing material goals that make them unhappy and unfulfilled. Torn between his desire for companionship and his love of wilderness solitude, he appreciates warm and welcoming company wherever he happens upon it, and seeks it out when he can, sometimes introducing himself to established artists, such as photographers Edward Weston and Ansel Adams. During visits to the home of painter Maynard Dixon, in San Francisco, he is befriended and photographed by Dixon's wife, Dorothea Lange. One of these photographs eventually appears in a missing persons report in a publication of the Los Angeles Police Department.

It's easy to go on and on about this book. The letters provide such a rich psychological portrait of this young man, full of interesting contradictions and curious prophecies of his eventual fate. Meanwhile, there is the mystery of his disappearance and the various theories and speculation about what may have happened to him, which are also included by the book's author.

I am happy to recommend this book to anyone interested in the West, stories about coming of age and self-reliance, rhapsodic descriptions of nature, personal adventures, the desert, Native Americans, and unsolved mysteries. As companion volumes, I'd also suggest Edward Abbey's "Desert Solitaire" and Eliot Porter's excellent collection of photographs, "The Place No One Knew: Glen Canyon on the Colorado."

I throughly enjoyed this book.

Being from No. Az. I was able to comprehend, location wise, Everett's travels and understand his artistic descriptions. Well written in chronological fashion, Rusho challenges readers to speculate on Everett's demise w/o overburdening with his own opinions.

Buy this book and be ready; Everett's a fellow that I think we would all truly like to meet and would appreciate.

I happen to live very near where this book is set and I enjoyed going out to these places and envisioning Hayduke, Doc, Abbzug, and Seldom Seen traipsing through the boulders and the scrub brush, tearing up bulldozers. Abbey brings the reader into the story well and keeps you there with rowdy chases and funny anecdotes from the slightly insane Hayduke.

More than that, he begins to make you care for his cause. Having seen the devastation in the desert by the Highway dept. and others, I can understand where the motive for the book comes from. Abbey speaks out the only way he knows how, through irreverence, humor, and a whole lot of craziness.

The writing style, while distinctly Abbey, put me off a bit. He starts off with a bang but it takes 100 pages before you really get into it again. His writing style is a little difficult to get through at times but the result is well worth it.

The book is a joy to read and fun. I recommend it to anyone who can step outside of their common sense for a while and just enjoy a good story with a worthwhile moral.

In this book, which is considered to be Edward Abbey's crowning achievement, people actually begin to fight back against the terrors of environmental depredation. Strip mines, logging operations, dams that destroy ecosystems, new highways, bridges spanning canyons, even billboards--all of these things ruin and deface the natural environment, and all are targets of the self-styled Monkey Wrench Gang. They are a unique breed of eco-terrorists (so to speak) who wage a war against machinery and THE machine in an attempt to keep the wilderness as fertile and unmolested as possible. Theirs is a losing battle, and they know it, but they fight it simply because their consciences won't allow them not to.

Though Abbey treated this novel as a joke (most of the time), he no doubt intended it to have some impact, which it did. Many new environmental groups took this as their Bible, and count it as a sort of rallying cry. Many people don't get involved in the issues of environmentalism (such as myself), but you can't help admiring the small band of eco-crusaders in this book. They don't expect to win. They just hope they can slow things down enough to make a difference.

The novel goes from one exploit of the gang to the next, as they vandalize bulldozers, burn helicopters, sabotage mining operations, etc. They are driven by a compulsion to help the environment (the hero, Hayduke, cannot pass a piece of machinery without stopping to vandalize it). The characters are likable, the writing superb, and the story just downright engaging. Sometimes suspenseful, sometimes funny, often irreverent, the Monkey Wrench Gang is a great novel that, if it doesn't inspire you to action, will at least make you stop and think about what is happening to the natural land around us (or what's left of it).

No one opens minds quite like Abbey. Litter roads? Why not? Most roads are huge deposits of trash anyway according to George Washington Hayduke, a character as colorful as any other I've encountered in life or fiction.
The Monkey Wrench Gang is a fictional tale about four protestors of industrial progress and defenders of the American Southwest. It reads as a hair-raising yet amusing story with many close calls. Yet as entertaining as this story is, it is also a truly tragic depiction of the increasing shrinkage of the lower 48's largest wilderness area. This book should prove to be vastly important in American history. It spurred the births of various environmental groups which will have a collectively substantial impact in stopping superfluous ecological ruin.
It's my wish for everyone to read this book. Abbey lives on!

For those of you who feel this is not a "normal" Abbey book, you are right in one sence but not totally. You must take into account that this book was written shortly after his wife passed away. So there were thoughts and feelings and emotions that he was going through that dictated the lay of this book. The woman who disappears, never seen again, all boils back to the heartbreak Abbey was going through after loosing his young wife. This is a great book to pick up if you want to read one of Abbey's different styles of writing.

The person who wrote this review must be completely immune to subtext. Abbey is such a raw, emotional expositor on nature. This book he considered his masterwork, I think because he saw it as his best, most personal expression of how he felt, both about the red rock region and his late wife. In this book he reconciles the loss of the later and diminishment of the former, yet doesn't succumb to any easy answers about what happens to either. Vicious in its simplicity. I recommend it if you've read some Abbey and want to get into his head a bit.

Edward Abbey (Cactus Ed) describes the American southwest like no other American writter. This book, "Black Sun" is one of Abbey's earlier works. It is a rough, profane and moving look at a man's love affair with the Red Rock Desert. It's not for the tame or the easily offended. I believe Abbey said once, "And if there is anyone left in the room I have not offened, I apologize". His views on conservation and preservation of our National Parks are extreme, but he puts these views in the format of a novel. It is a book I have read and reread many times, and the many people I have shared it with have all loved it and have not been able to put it down. It is a tragic book, just as the loss and destruction of the desert southwest is tragic. If you love the desert and love good writting, this book is a good read. Abbey said, "Oh my desert, yours is the one death I cannot endure". That passion for the wild places of America comes through on every page of this wonderful book.

This collection from Edward Abbey's journals pulls no punches. David Peterson should be praised for resisting the urge to censor Abbey's alternately brilliant, paranoid, suicidal, cynical, angry, loving, and often quotable journals. The man presented here is the real Abbey--defender of the American West, enemy of what he called the "techno-industrial state"--not an idealized version. It's a fascinating book if you've read some of his other works, to see another stage in the development of his novels and essays. This is a writer for whom the words flow freely, even effortlessly, onto the page. This book accomplishes, I think, what Abbey said was the reason he decided to write: "to entertain my friends and family, and to exasperate my enemies." Certainly Abbey had plenty of enemies, and plenty of admirers as well. I recommend these journals for anyone who loves Edward Abbey, but for the uninitiated, I would recommend "Desert Solitaire" (a classic in modern American literature) or "The Monkey Wrench Gang" (probably his best-known book).

This book hooked me into Edward Abbey. It is uncensored and honest. It is also amazingly wise and funny. I read it all the time.

This book is a must-read for all fans of Edward Abbey. Throughout his life, Abbey strove to write that one "great" book. He may have died believing that he had not accomplished that task. However, as it turns out, his life story is, in fact, his greatest "book".