Rating: 
Summary: Excellent
Review: If you love the desert, you should already have read this book if not bought a copy or two. Abbey's descriptions of Arches National Park are wonderful, especially for those of us who can't visit there as often as we would like.
Rating:
Summary: Pulp Moab
Review: If you have been to Moab, Utah and the surrounding red rock country of Southern Utah then this book is an absolute must read.
If you have never been to Moab or Arches National Park, read this book and let Ed Abbey take you there. This is one of my favorite books and I come back to it often. Abbey's tranquil descriptions
of the beautiful yet harsh red rock environment of what was then Arches National Monument is the quintessential narrative of this lovely desert landscape. In this volume the history, geology and
mood of the red rock country comes alive with Abbey's economic prose. Abbey served as a park ranger during Arches' infancy and his love for the desert and disdain for convention and oppression
served him well during his brief tenure as Arches' caretaker. My favorite chapter: "The Deadman at Grandview Point". Gallows humor
at its finest. Read this book and love it the way Abbey loved Arches.
Rating:
Summary: Simply the best
Review: This book is the one that got me started going out West over a quarter century ago. I've never regretted it and read the book about every other year along with "Slickrock", (another Abbey masterpiece), for old times' sake.
Ed Abbey always maintained he wrote to eat. He would have scoffed at allegations that his first book was a brilliant, evocative, militant, sentimental, enormously literate, invitation to help preserve what was left, (even though it is). Lake Foul, behind Glen Canyon Damn, broke his heart, but he remained a vibrant influence for free thinking until his death. This book, though it was his first, is still his best memorial. If you don't read it, it is your loss.There may be people who won't like it because it presents a viewpoint too easily eschewed in today's Enron-ethic climate. They are the ones who should read it most.
Rating:
Summary: Raw, Prickly, Poetic--Thoreau Western Style
Review: Nearly 45 years ago, before Arches was a National Park, before Moab had become a well-known slickrock mountain biking destination, before the "high brow" rush to the wide open spaces of the West, Arches National Monument was a hot, dry and dusty little piece of real estate in the American outback...and Edward Abbey was there as seasonal park ranger. Abbey was cranky loner and prickly rebel, but also passionate poet who wrote a beautiful eligy to the vanishing desert wilderness. "The wind will not stop. Gusts of sand swirl before me, stinging my face. But there is still too much to see and marvel at, the world very much alive in the bright light and wind, exultant with the fever of spring, the delight of morning. Strolling on, it seems to me that the strangeness and wonder of existence are emphasized here, in the desert, by the comparative sparsity of the flora and fauna: life not crowded upon life as in other places, but scattered abroad in spareness and simplicity, with a generous gift of space for each herb and bush and tree, each stem of grass, so that the living organism stands out bold and brave and vivid against the lifeless sand and barren rock. The extreme clarity of the desert light is equaled by the extreme individuation of desert life-forms. Love flowers best in openness and freedom." For both those who remember and lament the West as it once was and those who yet love it as it is, this is a must read.
Rating:
Summary: Difficult man; great writer
Review: Well-beloved and much-reviled prophet of the wilderness and of the wild places, Abbey, like his œuvre, covers a lot of ground. Desert Solitaire is probably his best work -- a statement Cactus Ed would spiritedly deny (right before busting my head with a rock). Conceived mainly while Abbey worked as a ranger in Arches National Monument (now National Park), the book is, in turns, a poetic evocation of the desert, a clownish middle finger upthrust into the face of the cosmos, a tirade against middle-America, and, above all else, an uncompromising voice bawling itself hoarse on behalf of nature. Do not misunderstand me; Abbey was no environmental activist, nor was he above decorating the Eisenhower Highways with his empty beer cans. Abbey howled for freedom; freedom from the tyranny of roads and universal access, freedom from development, freedom from the encroachment of the city and its ungainly cousin the suburb, freedom from any form of regulation or oversight... up to and including laws against littering. None of this has ever prevented the old iconoclast from becoming a patron saint of the environmental movement. Nor should it have done. Perhaps he littered the roads, but I love the cranky old bastard all the same. But for Abbey, how would I -- or any other member of my generation -- know what was lost when they flooded Lake Powell? Resist much, obey little. Check this one out, then drink a toast to Cactus Ed. Out of a can.
Rating:
Summary: A must-read for any outdoor enthusiast
Review: Though more than 30 years old, this book is a classic that still holds its own today. Edward Abbey's months of living alone in the vast, uninhabited lands of southern Utah, which most of us will never do, provides a unique perspective on the beauty of the Canyonlands and the outdoors in general. His rafting trip down the Colorado River before it was damned gives an excellent taste of an adventure that is, unfortunately, no longer possible. And his descriptions of the Maze and its remoteness seemed almost like a fantasy - to amazing to be true. Though reading about the beauty and uniqueness of this area of the country is nothing compared to visiting it, his comments on tourism and the sprawl of American society are particularly relevant today. Coming from a man who is integral in defining the modern conservation movement, this book is a must-read for any outdoor enthusiast.
Rating: 
Summary: Returning To Desert Solitaire
Review: I just ordered Desert Solitaire for my dear friend Joel Stone after having a great conversation with him about his trip to Utah to visit his wife's family. It has been over twenty years since I read the book, back when I was living in Utah, teaching at East High School in Salt Lake City and going to the desert every chance I had. Abbey brings the desert to life like no other author I have read. In fact, he is the one writer who portrayed the desert as a real living scene. When I go back and read passages from Solitaire, it is like I am back in the desert trudging through the sand between some fins or gazing across the vistas watching the waves of heat undulate. Abbey's accomplishment in this book is his focus on the minute details of the desert and how it feels to be there. His description of how the whole world comes to a stop in the middle of the day when the heat hits hard is right on target. My wife and I and our oldest daughter Margo were camped in the Arches in July and had to seek refuge from the heat by climbing up between two fins and simply sit there on the slightly damp sand and spend the afternoon reading and playing games. There was a cool, damp breeze coming down between the fins less than a foot thick off the ground. This is the kind of experience that Abbey can bring to you with his writing and which gets you to the point where you want to go out and strap on the roof rack and head for the desert just to feel the heat and watch the eagles and vultures circle overheat. His treatment of the local human culture of Moab in his early desert days is outstanding. The characters are bigger than life, although essentially none of them were famous people. You can smell their sweat and hear their curses and feel the bumps as you ride around with them in their old pickups and jeeps. And you can hear the curses from Abbey himself as he eloquently and graphically described that which was happening to the desert, its ecology and its way of life decades ago. He seems quiet and sensitive but lashes out with anger or hatred at the endangerment he sees. This guy is not nice, accepting and philosophical. He is not like an environmentalist, but more like a mean old rattlesnake lying under a bush waiting for somebody to mess with his desert. Abbey's vision of that which might happen to the desert has, to a great extent, come to pass. Yet, he might be happy if he could know that vast tracts of land have been set aside and are less threatened, spoiled and polluted than back when he was there and mining and ranching were in their heyday. Whenever you read this book, it will still help you form a relationship with the desert in your time and your place and give you an awareness of its fragility and beauty and what must be done from here on. The scene has changed a lot, the decades have gone by, the Westerner Grill has closed, but the desert and Abbey's insightful perceptions of it remain the constant in whole equation. Reading this book takes you to a new, exciting, billion-year-old place. Even decades later.
Rating:
Summary: Cactus Ed was a desert prophet.
Review: I was raised between a rock and a cactus in southern Arizona I then lived in the desert Southwest for more than forty years before leaving the "cancerous madness" of Phoenix (p. 127) for Boulder. Although our paths never crossed, for awhile I even shared the same Tucson canyon Ed Abbey called his home. I have desert dust in my blood. I have read many books about the Southwest, and Abbey's DESERT SOLITAIRE is the best. In fact, it even changed my life. Written in the 1960s while Abbey lived as a park ranger--"the sole inhabitant, usufructuary, observer and custodian"--in the 33,000 acres of Arches National Park, DESERT SOLITAIRE takes us into "into the center of the world, God's navel, Abbey's country, the red wasteland" (pp. 4-5). But in his prophetic Introduction to this 1968 classic, Abbey says, "what I write about in this book is already gone or going under fast. This is not a travel guide but an elegy. A memorial. You're holding a tombstone in your hands. A bloody rock. Don't drop it on your foot--throw it at something big and glassy" (p. xiv). "I am not an athiest but an earthiest," Abbey said. He loved his earthly life, "the grasp of a child's hand in your own, the flavor of an apple, the embrace of a friend or lover, the silk of a girl's thigh, the sunlight on rocks and leaves, the feel of music, the bark of a tree, the abrasion of granite and sand, the plunge of clear water into a pool, the face of the wind" (p. xiii) And he loved wilderness, especially the desert. "Noontime here is like a drug. The light is psychedelic, the dry electric air narcotic. The desert is stimulating, exciting, exacting" (p. 135). Alone in the desert, Abbey loved finding sublime meaning in its contrasts and its critters, "scorpions and tarantulas and flies, rattlesnakes and Gila monsters, sandstorms, volcanoes and earthquakes, bacteria and bear, cactus, yucca, bladderweed, ocotillo and mesquite, flash floods and quicksand" (p. 167). "The desert reveals itself nakedly and cruelly, with no meaning but its own existence" (p. 135). DESERT SOLITAIRE is Abbey's desert love story. And it is a love story with a simple message: "Be true to the earth" (p. 184). Abbey recognized that wilderness is a necessary part of civilization (p. 47). Long before our parks became congested with traffic and our campgrounds overcrowded with too many loud tourists, he advocated keeping cars and roads out of national parks, and putting park rangers to work by removing them from their patrol cars to lead "the dudes over hill and dale, safely into and back out of the wilderness" (pp. 52-55). Cactus Ed was a true desert prophet, and DESERT SOLITAIRE remains as relevant as ever. G. Merritt
Rating:
Summary: "I would rather kill a man than a snake."
Review: "I would rather kill a man than a snake," wrote Edward Abbey, and I suspect he even meant it. That sentence summed up, for me, this book: it is filled with Abbey's love of the wild desert and its inhabitants and his contempt for modernity and its inhabitants. I think Abbey was one of the early voices in modern environmentalism, and this is a classic book in that field. I appreciate his desert and his writing; even if you are not an environmentalist nor a lover of the desert, you may see why people are if you read this. At any rate, his deep naturalist reflections deserve consideration in our fast-food, internet, climate-controlled, sanitized and artificial age.
Rating:
Summary: This book gets better everytime
Review: I just finished my 6th reading of this book (having purchased it several times since people never return it). This book gets better with age and is amazingly relevant for being 30+ years old. In an age of overcrowded campgrounds, loud tourists and dissappearing wilderness, this book will give you the vacation you can never have. Ed paints a picture that will give you a full understanding of a Southern Utah that once was.
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