Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #700618 in Books
• Published on: 1988-04-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 255 pages

Customer Reviews

Under a blood red sky
The land of dust..of sagebrush and mesas...of prickly pear and diamondbacks found its most eloquent champion in Edward Abbey. A man of words and deep intellect who drove beat up pick up trucks and worked as a state goon living in an isolated silver trailer surrounded by snakes and tumbleweeds,
The enigma that is Edward Abbey is writ large in this minor epic set in the South Western deserts and slickrock canyons.
Death blood and sand spattered with love and tears, Abbey paints a vivid canvas which when seen from a brooding European perspective,ignites in the reader an empathic passion for this strange alien land of soaring eagles and a blinding sun. A land where Cactus Ed walked tall and free.

A great book.

A season in the wilderness it is
Curiously enough, I found the trail that led me to this exceptional book in a book by French author Yves Berger on the landscape of the American Southwest. Desert Solitaire is something special, though possibly a book with a limited audience made of people who have travelled the Southwest and taken it to their souls. It is a sort of diary of the period Abbey spent as a park ranger in the Arches National Park in Utah. If you're looking for an engrossing plot, well, you won't find it. But if you've been to that area of the world and loved the closeness and vastness of sky and cloud, the colors of the stone, the smell of dust and brush, you will love and treasure this book. And it's all there in the title: the desert and the man.

Deserts are not dull
To many the desert is a dull, lifeless place. Not to Abbey. In equal measures poetic and polemic, Abbey's passion for his subject shines through, bringing the desert to life. Not only does he describe what it looks like, but more importantly, what it *feels* like. Desert Solitaire is little short of a masterpiece.