Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness

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Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire, the noted author's most enduring nonfiction work, is an account of Abbey's seasons as a ranger at Arches National Park outside Moab, Utah. Abbey reflects on the nature of the Colorado Plateau desert, on the condition of our remaining wilderness, and on the future of a civilization that cannot reconcile itself to living in the natural world. He also recounts adventures with scorpions and snakes, obstinate tourists and entrenched bureaucrats, and, most powerful of all, with his own mortality. Abbey's account of getting stranded in a rock pool down a side branch of the Grand Canyon is at once hilarious and terrifying.


Review
The New York Times Book Review Like a ride on a bucking bronco...rough, tough, combative. The author is a rebel and an eloquent loner. His is a passionately felt, deeply poetic book...set down in a lean, racing prose, in a close-knit style of power and beauty.


Book Description
When Desert Solitaire was first published in 1968, it became the focus of a nationwide cult. Rude and sensitive. Thought-provoking and mystical. Angry and loving. Both Abbey and this book are all of these and more. Here, the legendary author of The Monkey Wrench Gang, Abbey's Road and many other critically acclaimed books vividly captures the essence of his life during three seasons as a park ranger in southeastern Utah. This is a rare view of a quest to experience nature in its purest form -- the silence, the struggle, the overwhelming beauty. But this is also the gripping, anguished cry of a man of character who challenges the growing exploitation of the wilderness by oil and mining interests, as well as by the tourist industry. Abbey's observations and challenges remain as relevant now as the day he wrote them. Today, Desert Solitaire asks if any of our incalculable natural treasures can be saved before the bulldozers strike again.


From the Publisher
The year before I began working at Random House, I took a roadtrip with a friend from college. One night we spent sleeping under the stars on the side of the road, about one-hundred feet from the edge of the Grand Canyon. That night has stayed present for me. And so when I saw the deep desert reds and the striking blue sky of the cover of DESERT SOLITAIRE sitting in the office, I had no choice but to pick it up. Riding through the insides of Manhattan, tunneling through to work, I have been carrying this book with me. I keep closing my eyes and hearing the wolf call, the swish of the wind through the brush and seeing the great vast distances, feeling the heat of the day on my skin and the dry cool descent of desert night. In reading this book I am coming to a whole new understanding of the ecology of the desert west. Edward Abbey went alone to the desert as a seeker of a greater knowledge of himself, but also to dwell in a nature unfiltered, unpersonified, on its own terms. The desert is bigger than any of us, filled with intimate moments. This book will take you there.

Jason Zuzga
Ballantine Editorial


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Abbey's observations and challenges remain as relevant now as the day he wrote them. Today, Desert Solitaire asks if any of our incalculable natural treasures can be saved before the bulldozers strike again.


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