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Summary: Enjoyable and entertaining but not much Natual History
Review: You've got to admire a man known as the quintessential evironmentalist who writes so gleefully about trashing nearly everyplace he goes. This book is above all humorous and that alone makes this book enjoyable. Abbey is also a good story-teller.The book chronicles a few seasons Abbey spends as a seasonal ranger in Arches National Monument (now a Park). Abbey describes the environs adequately but in no great depth. What is fascinating is how Abbey relates to the environment and how he interacts with it. Also included are a few other excursions like his float trip down Glen Canyon prior to its flooding by the dam. My favorite parts are the dumb things Abbey does in the environment. Maybe Abbey is saying that is why we need wilderness. We need someplace to lay naked in the sun, burn down, carve initials into trees, or to get away from tourists. My favorite story is when Abbey lights a wildfire in Glen Canyon with his careless bumbling and runs and jumps on his raft just as the flames roar up to the beach. And Abbey seems to enjoy trashing the environment whenever possible doing stunts like rolling old tires into the Grand Canyon (through a mule train) and continually laying naked out in the boondocks somewhere. He also likes carving his initials in various places. His antics with the tourists who seem to bother him in spite of his job being to help them. There is also a humorous account of being a part of a search for a missing (and dead and bloated) tourist. All in all, an amusing read more for the insight into Abbey than into the places he visited.
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Summary: Rugged Individualism Personified
Review: This book is the author's memoir of the time he was a park ranger at Arches National Monument in Utah. Edward Abbey was a true believer in maintaining the pristine, natural beauty of the desert area under his guardianship. Abbey was extraordinarily hostile to what he called "Industrial Tourism": the construction of a system of roads through this desert wonderland which would brings thousands of tourists, their automobiles, and eventual ruination to the environment. He mentions the many pressure groups who threaten to turn Arches National Monument, and other national parks, into picnic grounds. Abbey admits that he would be happy if no tourists ever visited his park. Abbey describes desert scenery of great natural beauty and wonder. He often hiked in the desert area on unmarked trails, carrying with him the barest provisions, often risking his life on the possibility he may never get back. Abbey concerned himself with getting to his destination first, then worry about getting back afterwards. Tourists would never even consider taking such journeys. _Desert Solitaire_ is written in a style nearing poetry--blank verse--and was a total joy to read.
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Summary: An Inspirational Call to Action!
Review: I first read this book while spending a solitary winter in the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho. I cannot imagine a better companion. Abbey had a spiritual connection to landscape that is both intoxicating and addictive, and his plainspoken narrative connects the reader to the depth of his desert experience in an uncommon way. But perhaps the most moving aspect of Desert Solitaire (indeed, all of Abbey's writing) is that the reader, by associating himself with the book, is called to action. This is not a book, nor is this an author, for the passive observer. Someone who wants a nice tale of living in the desert ought to look elsewhere. For anyone who's restless and ready to confront his or her spirit in a purposeful way, inspiration awaits!
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Summary: you can't see anything from a car...so start walking!
Review: Best to read if you are visiting Arches, the Grand Canyon, or Lake Powell, or if you have been there, or even if you just wish you were there...
After reading Abbey's incredible illustration of "his" country, you might as well have been there yourself in spirit, if not in body. Desert Solitaire is part memoir, politics, opinion, beauty, myth, journal, eulogy, ravaging accusation of modern society, and general ramblings on the Southwest. There is very little structure, except that the book opens with Abbey entering Arches in the spring as a ranger, and ends with him leaving in the fall. He touches almost every subject under the desert sun. My favorite chapters were: -"Down the River": on Glen Canyon before the dam
-"Polemic Industrial Tourism and the National Parks": scathing and sarcastic, belittleing the American automobile tourist
-"Rocks": a disturbing legend of the uranium boom in Utah
-"Episodes and Visions": general desert musings and tangents The best way to describe the feel of this book is the blurb on the back: "rough, tough, combative [...] this book may well seem like a ride on a bucking bronco."
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Summary: A voice crying in the wilderness
Review: Edward Abbey was an outspoken wilderness advocate, and his nonfiction writing falls somewhere between Thoreau and Hunter Thompson. "Desert Solitaire" is classic Abbey, written in the latter 1960s, when he was about 30, and it recounts a handful of summers spent ten years earlier in and around Arches National Monument in southeastern Utah. Here he was a park ranger, when the park was still mostly undeveloped. Living in a small trailer, keeping an eye on the campers and tourists, he mostly relishes the quiet, beauty, and indifference of the desert under its hot sun. The book begins with his arrival in April and concludes with his departure at season's end in September. In between are chapters devoted to descriptions of his rambles across the terrain, helping a local cattleman round up cows in the side canyons, trying to capture a one-eyed feral horse, camping on a 13,000-foot local mountain, hiking with a friend into an uncharted wilderness call the Maze, and retrieving the body of a dead tourist. There's also a dark story concerning the unfortunate fate of some uranium prospectors. The longest chapter is a rapturous account of a week spent rafting down the Colorado River, he and a friend among the last to see the canyons about to be inundated by the Glen Canyon Dam and the creation of Lake Powell. Along the way, there are ruminations on the meaning of it all and diatribes against urbanization, intrusive government, the tourist industry, and the destruction of wilderness. The word "solitaire" in the title is an apt choice, as much of the time Abbey is alone, thinking his thoughts and observing this desert world, its plants and wild life, geological formations, and the big sky with its turns of weather. Even when paired up with a companion, he is often off alone, on a walkabout of his own, like as not shedding his clothes. His thoughts, meanwhile, are informed by wide reading in philosophy, history, natural sciences, and literature. As a writer, he's frequently quotable: "Where there is no joy there can be no courage; and without courage all other virtues are useless." "It's a great country: you can say whatever you like so long as it is strictly true -- nobody will ever take you seriously." The vistas he describes so eloquently are not hard to picture in the imagination, but I recommend an accompanying volume of photography, such as Eliot Porter's "The Place No One Knew: Glen Canyon on the Colorado." Unless you're familiar with borage, paintbrush, globemallow, and dozens of other desert species, a picture guidebook to the flora of the region would also be helpful. I thoroughly enjoyed Abbey's book, shared the excitement of his adventures, found his cranky, ornery, sometimes self-indulgent perspective refreshing, and felt saddened by the end-of-season farewell with which it closes. In any list of nonfiction books about the West, it should be near the top.
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Summary: Desert Solitaire
Review: This book is awsome. It is hard to believe that 30 years later some of the same problems exist for the NPS. Abbey definitely was a visionary. This book is the best account of real life in a fabulous place. It takes you back to those National Park visits when life was simple and people didn't mind getting out of their car and walking. Today everyone thinks they can "experience" a park from their car, Abbey understood this was coming and didn't mind giving his idea's on the subject. The descriptions of wildlife, flora and fauna are fantastic. You can almost smell the wild flowers. If you really want to experience the canyonlands of Utah, read this book!
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Summary: Romance in the Red Rocks
Review: This is a collection of romance stories. Romance between a man and the land. Edward Abbey writes lovingly about the stark beauty of Arches National Park -- a hard edged place of immense and awe inspiring beauty. Weaving impressions of a summer spent as a park ranger living in a trailer with minimal comforts, Mr. Abbey exhibits his virtuosity in taking us out where the stars touch the desert. The place has a completely unique personality of its own and Abbery describes it lovingly and raw. After World War II Moab, Utah became a boomtown for uranium mining. The wide disparity between nature's splendor and man's desire to build weapons of destruction set the stage for one unforgettable chapter, "Rocks" that I've read at least a half a dozen times. After reading Desert Solitaire you'll want to go this magnificent part of Utah. If you've been to that part of the country and want to go back, read it. The sweep of the country and Abbey's wry wit is a thoroughly satisfying reading experience.
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Summary: A loving portrait of the redrock canyons of Utah
Review: 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.
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Summary: Environmentalism from a better time
Review: Today, in order to be a true progressive or environmentalist, one has to always be thinking about how whatever one may be doing, it is invariably negatively affecting something else. Abbey takes his season in the desert with less seriousness than most environmentalists can at the grocery store. Abbey's philosophy reflects a time when one did not have to worry about the chemicals or the genetics or the people behind his meal, and reading his book, I cannot help but feel an extreme jealousy. Abbey's philosophy is far from extreme, making this book perfect for a wide range of people. Once in the book he kills a rabbit for the sake of a personal "experiment," he makes a case for people to carry firearms, and he eats meat and a lot of eggs. Today, any of those actions would make a progressive seem contradictory in their philosophy. When did things get so serious? Abbey has written a great book for the cause of conservative environmentalism. Conservative not in the way of the political spectrum, but rather in the way of taking things slower: He says the rise in industrial tourism will destroy the wilderness, that the automobile, while opening up nature to many more people, has cheapened its effect, and that spending a week in one spot in nature is better and spending a week in a thousand different places. The book is beautiful, and regardless of what one believes outside of the realm of environmentalism, readers will enjoy this book with the lack of seriousness that I think Abbey intended time in the wilderness should be spent.
Rating: 
Summary: Not for the faint of heart (or stomach)
Review: I started reading this because it is required reading for a class I am taking. I stopped before I had read the end of the fourth chapter - when the author kills a rabbit! It was hard to read about the snakes in chapter two, but this was it for me. The beginning of the book (which is of course all I've read) has some interesting points, and if I didn't have such a weak stomach, perhaps I would have enjoyed the rest of the book. As for this "required reading"? I'll settle for taking notes in class.
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