Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #966174 in Books
• Published on: 1988-04-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 255 pages

Customer Reviews

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.

A loving portrait of the redrock canyons of Utah
If you have ever gone to a National Park, and been angered by roads that lead to every attraction, and tourists who don't leave their cars, Edward Abbey agrees with you. He agrees very strongly with you. Here he tells stories from his time in the deserts of Utah and Arizona. His description of Glen Canyon, before it was flooded to create Lake Powell, is the best I have ever read of a place. This is a great, almost poetic description of a place, the desert, that Abbey held a special love for. It is hard to read this book and not bring away your own love of the canyons and mesas, arches and dunes, of the southwestern desert.

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.