Customer Rating: 
Summary: my favorite book ever
Comment: This is all over the map. It's a hermit's reflections on a world that moves too slowly for the rest of us to see. It's a naturalist's insight into the behavior of animals and people. It's a political extremist's commentary on unchecked development and resource depletion. Best of all, it's a delicious anthem of love that sings from the pages, affirming the connection some humans have with the natural world of sun, snow, snakes, and stone. You can't read this and remain untouched by its sincerity, even if (or perhaps because of) Abbey's attitude: a cactus bloom, all fiery beauty encased by sharp needles. Like a masterpiece painting, it really doesn't matter what it's "about" (some dude who becomes a park ranger for a year); it's really just a vehicle for communicating the deepest realizations of an honest questing soul.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Road Trip Companion
Comment: I loved this book and stayed up nights under the desert stars reading Abbey's writting that brought the desert to life. His appreciation for the wilderness fueled by the reflection of civilization gives the narrative depth. His rants of gapers and the great industry of being civilized are often humerous but sometimes turn mean. This book made me laught, cry, think, and act. A great book to take along for a road trip if you plan to get lost and leave the car at the end of the road to see where your feet take you.
Customer Rating: Summary: Pretty good
Comment: In 1968 Edward Abbey wrote a memoir, Desert Solitaire, A Season In The Wilderness, that would instantly be hailed as a nature classic, as well as his bestselling work. While familiar with EA's name the only work of his I'd read up to this point was a woeful collection of the man's `poetry'. Believe me, when I say there's a definite reason for the quotes around the word poetry. Apparently the work is considered somewhat of a nature hymn, along the lines of Henry David Thoreau's Walden. This is a perfect example of poor criticism propagating myths down through the years. This is not to say that there is not some fine writing in DS, but neither its consistency nor tone are akin to Walden's....Although these events happened over 3 seasons, the book condenses them down into 1, for dramatic effect. It's a technique that can see such startling contradictions in the same book as this reluctant admission-
`As I type these words, several years after the little episode of the gray jeep and the thirsty engineers, all that was foretold has come to pass. Arches National Monument has been developed. The Master Plan has been fulfilled. Where once a few adventurous people came on weekends to camp for a night or two and enjoy a taste of the primitive and remote, you will now find serpentine streams of baroque automobiles pouring in and out, all through the spring and summer, in numbers that would have seemed fantastic when I worked there: from 3,000 to 30,000 to 300,000 per year, the `visitation,' as they call it, mounts ever upward....Down at the beginning of the new road, at park headquarters, is the new entrance station and visitor center, where admission fees are collected and where the rangers are going quietly nuts answering the same three basic questions five hundred times a day: (1) Where's the john? (2) How long's it take to see this place? (3) Where's the Coke machine?'
-& this contrapuntal admission that he basically understands why the previous lament was written:
`Standing there, gaping at this monstrous and inhuman spectacle of rock and cloud and sky and space, I feel a ridiculous greed and possessiveness come over me. I want to know it all, possess it all, embrace the entire scene intimately, deeply, totally, as a man desires a beautiful woman. An insane wish? Perhaps not--at least there's nothing else, no one human, to dispute possession with me.'
While the book is not going to make the reader drop the book & take a breath, like the best of Loren Eiseley, Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire is a book worth reading, not nearly so much because it is a paean to nature, although it occasionally is, but because it is an excellent portrayal of a man's state of being- a man who could be hypocritical, childish, write poorly, then surmount these flaws. If the same were true of most of EA's readers this last sentence would not be as cogent.
Customer Rating: Summary: Not just desert love
Comment: Sure, this book may speak strongly for the respect and preservation of the desert southwest, and for that, it deserves proper credit.
But for me, it has had a much deeper impact. This is a lot more than just an argument that we should protect our wilderness, although it is easily that. Rather, I found it to be a profound guide on how to think and act in general, about pretty much everything, everywhere.
This is one of the greatest books of the American twentieth century, a true classic, and everyone pondering how to think about and evaluate everything these days could surely benefit by reading it carefully.
Customer Rating: Summary: I now understand why this is considered a "Nature Classic".
Comment: I purchased this book because David Quammen referenced it in one of his books, and I really enjoy Quammen's books. It is listed on various websites and in some magazines as a "Nature Classic".
I have visited and hiked the deserts and canyon in Utah and northern Arizona. That allowed me to feel a lot of what Abbey writes about. It is a special place. I wish I could go back and see Arches National Park when Abbey was there. (It was Arches National Monument at the time of his stay there.)
While there are some controversial things in this book, and while I don't agree with everything Abbey writes, I have to say that I really hated to come to the end of this book. Besides the stories about nature, Abbey also writes about some of the human activities in this area.
I think I understand why people call this a landmark book. The environmental movement was just starting in the sixties. (Does anyone else remember the green Ecology symbol?)
