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Summary: The story of a hillbilly philospher.
Review: This book is about the journey and adventure of an Appalachian man's life. He goes through many woeful experiences with love, employment, and other failures in life. But this free spirited Hillbilly from the mountains of West Virginia manages to find strength in his Appalachian family, tradition, and habits to over come the physical and emotional ills that plague his lonely life.
"The Fool's Progress" provides detailed depictions of different environments and personalities with a crude comical twist. It is entertaining to read at times and boring at others. Overall, the book is a heart warming novel that does not really stick with the traditional story telling of having a plot, climax, antagonist, protagonist, and etc. The book also tended to stretch a bit (over 500 pages with no real plot or story line to follow). Rating: 6.5/10
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Summary: "Ed Abbey Lives!"
Review: "Nobody said you had to stay, you damn fool. And nobody ever said you had to leave neither." Cactus Ed's "fat masterpiece" is truly one of the most penetrating looks at the human condition to date. Both gut wrenching and absurdly humorous, Abbey's pseudo-biography traces the trials and tribulations of Henry Lightcap -beer drinking, womanizing minstrel of the American West and Appalachia. Abbey writes, as always with the panache of Sam Clemens and the descriptiveness of Thoreau. Pardon me for the bland expression, but this is a "Must Read."
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Summary: Uncommon Beauty
Review: After his third wife leaves him, Henry hops in his truck, his dying dog following faithfully behind, and travels east, (from his small home in Arizona), to the place of his childhood. As he travels, he reminisces upon his past life and past loves. A man unwilling to submit to society, Henry and his beautiful character give a valuable lesson to the reader. Learn from it.As the book progresses, you learn more and more about Henry, (Henry may be a fool, but Henry is far wiser than the worker in the cubicle). Flirtatious, he is quick to fall deeply in love; extremist, does anything to protect the wilderness; and extravagant, he's a philosopher with no job. He values freedom more than anything else ... and NOT the kind must Americans think of. He takes the freedom to sleep miles from the city, under the stars, for most of the year and to pee in sinks. He takes the freedom to carry around a knife and gut his own goat. He takes the freedom to never have a full time job. (Americans usually take the "freedom" to own a house, SUV, a wife, two happy kids, a stable job and have no ambition other than to retire). He has a love for the West, for the deserts of Arizona and New Mexico, the geological formations and the multi-cultural people of Albuquerque. Edward Abbey himself is so present in this novel ... you could call it autobiographical. This book can tell you so much ... please learn from it. But it's beauty is unusual. I admired Abbey's writing before I read this, but he sweeps up all the common archetypes of literature and life, and puts them all in one classic novel. Highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: Uncommon Beauty
Review: After his third wife leaves him, Henry hops in his truck, his dying dog following faithfully behind, and travels east, (from his small home in Arizona), to the place of his childhood. As he travels, he reminisces upon his past life and past loves. A man unwilling to submit to society, Henry and his beautiful character give a valuable lesson to the reader. Learn from it. As the book progresses, you learn more and more about Henry, (Henry may be a fool, but Henry is far wiser than the worker in the cubicle). Flirtatious, he is quick to fall deeply in love; extremist, does anything to protect the wilderness; and extravagant, he's a philosopher with no job. He values freedom more than anything else ... and NOT the kind must Americans think of. He takes the freedom to sleep miles from the city, under the stars, for most of the year and to pee in sinks. He takes the freedom to carry around a knife and gut his own goat. He takes the freedom to never have a full time job. (Americans usually take the "freedom" to own a house, SUV, a wife, two happy kids, a stable job and have no ambition other than to retire). He has a love for the West, for the deserts of Arizona and New Mexico, the geological formations and the multi-cultural people of Albuquerque. Edward Abbey himself is so present in this novel ... you could call it autobiographical. This book can tell you so much ... please learn from it. But it's beauty is unusual. I admired Abbey's writing before I read this, but he sweeps up all the common archetypes of literature and life, and puts them all in one classic novel. Highly recommended.
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Summary: WOW!!
Review: All I can say after reading this book is WOW!! At first I was a little suprised at how up front and honest this book is, but after a few chapters I began to appereciate it, because most books are written to please the reader, not to honestly speak out. Very good job..
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Summary: Best book I've ever read.
Review: Being an avid reader, I've read all of the "great works" -- from Socrates and Plato to Steinbeck and Hemingway -- and this is the best fiction/philosophy that I've ever read. Abbey's discriptions of his travels and laments are first class -- funny, honest, and down-right on the mark. When I met Henry Lightcap in chapter one, I wanted to know who he is and how he became to be. At the end, I cried for a man that I came to know and love. Although I love and respect many of the great works of the west, this is the most incredible novel I have ever read. I re-read this book at least once a year -- it's a wonderful journey, never a chore. If I could recommend one book out of the multitudes I've read, this would be the one. And the only.
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Summary: You can never go back...but you can always come back!
Review: Came across these reviews while searching for a new read. It makes me want to go back and read it again. The last few days I've been staring at my photo of "Picture Gorge" on the John Day river in Oregon. It hangs over my computer (ugh) at work. I am a web developer (for some reason - oh yeah...money) and lately I've been feeling disconnected from well, everything. Also got some health problems. But, now I have some perspective. Think I'll go sit in the woods a while.Thanks again Ed - you've brought me back to reality just by the reviews your readers write. A simple test: raise your hand if you are human...now all who have their hands raised - READ THIS BOOK!
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Summary: Astonishing last autobiographical novel
Review: Edward Abbey died in March of 1989. In the latter part of 1988, he saw his last and perhaps most accomplished work brought to bed at his publishers in New York. The author of many highly controversial works of fiction and non-fiction, best known for his seemingly solitary stand against the ecological destruction of the western American deserts, Abbey's last book effectively completed a cycle. At the same time it was a very close foretelling of his own probable doom. Abbey was an environmentalist from the beginning. In the East of his youth, he saw strip mines close in on his father's mountain acres. Out West, he witnessed the early preparations being made to dam the Colorado and its tributaries. He rafted down Glen Canyon and saw the hidden valleys filled with a beauty that was soon after to be engulfed. He smelt out the tricky political deals being woven by senators and landowners in the forgotten tracts of the butte country and did his best to expose them. Against all of the attempts to tame this corner of the American wilderness, Abbey railed. In books ranging from "Desert Solitaire" (1967), a journal of a season in the desert, to "The Monkey Wrench Gang" (1975), an explosive novel of saboteurs versus dambuilders, Abbey argues his points in favour of preserving the canyon country. Having been there "before" and "after," his voice has a compelling authority. To read his account of Glen Canyon before the dam is to be filled with regret at the later spoliation. In "The Fool's Progress," Abbey gives us something of a summing up of his own life. The book is like a reverse history of Kerouac's "On the Road." Instead of youth rushing out through the length of America to meet its new and cosmic identity on the West Coast, here is a life which is wearing down, attacked from within, going back from the desert to the Appalachian hills of birth and ancestry. In the chronicle of the winding down, as the truck begins to fail and a mortal pain begins to rise, boyhood is measured against the actual experience of the now hard-bitten adult. "The Fool's Progress" is the work of a now accomplished writer in his prime. We might have expected much more from Edward Abbey and his early death is a great loss. Nevertheless, his completed works stand on their own and I can recommend them to anyone who is intrigued by the workings of an original mind as it tackles the problems of our age.
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Summary: Good ol' Ed Abbey
Review: Edward Abbey has written a book about the life of Henry Holyoke the sounds suspiciously like Ed Abbey. This has got all of the usual Abbey obsessions as well as a few new ones, all written in a very funny and honest way. It is also very romantic and moving. Abbey put his soul into this book as he does in many of his books and in spite of the bombast and posturing, it is a compelling and genuinely american soul.
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Summary: Powerful and thought-provoking
Review: Edward Abbey's A FOOL'S PROGRESS made me laugh, think, and want to go outside---and all those are reactions he probrably intended. This story about a loner's journey across the Southwest--and his memories of what happened there--is breathtaking and heartbreaking. I love his terse but beautiful observations about nature and the desert landscape, the place of man in it, and his misanthropic, grouchy snarlings about human behavior. If this book doesn't make you get up from your sorry ass, shoot your computer,and go outdoors in search of love and adventure, nothing will!
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