Everett Ruess: A Vagabond for Beauty

Rating:
Summary: Tree Huggers Unite
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Great Book....
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Tree Huggers Unite
Review: 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].

Rating:
Summary: yippie for the hippie
Review: This book is a great chronical of the last days (?) of everett ruess. It consists entirely of letters written by everett about his life wondering through the wilderness of the southwest. This is the closest that i have come to someone explaining what life is like on the trail. the blockprings included in the book are supurb. A great book for those who detest the city but love the earth.

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Summary: Everett Ruess The Man who inspired my love of the outdoors.
Review: This is a great book for those who love solitude in the mountains. It speakes of a boy who leaves his family in search of himself and to follow his love of the outdoors and painting. It speakes of his trials and feeeling as he is alone on the trail sometimes with only his mule. The best thing about this book is it is not some persons view on what happened to Everett. But it is Everetts letters to his family and friends. As he talked about his life and what is happening. He talkes of love and beauty. As he travles the mountains of Utah, the vallys of Arizona, the roads of New Maxico, and he speakes of the Majestic beauty of the Ocean of California. He Lived a life most of of just dream of. As people now days we tend to live the lifes of others. But by reading this book it inspired me to live my own life and live it to the fullest and take full advantage of the beauty of nature. Before it is gone. This book is put together very well and it holds your attention as you read. You become Everett. I recomend this book to anyone who has any sort of love for the outdoors and soitude. I promise your love for nature will increase. Scott Spencer Anderson

Rating:
Summary: Unsolved mystery
Review: 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."