This book is different from any other Edward Abbey book. It includes essays, travel pieces and fictions to reveal Ed's life directly, in his own words.
The selections gathered here are arranged chronologically by incident, not by date of publication, to offer Edward Abbey's life from the time he was the boy called Ned in Home, Pennsylvania, until his death in Tucson at age 62. A short note introduces each of the four parts of the book and attempts to identify what's happening in the author's life at the time. When relevant, some details of publishing history are provided.
Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
The late Abbey was not only a singularly talented novelist some of whose books have acquired cult status (The Brave Cowboy; The Monkey Wrench Gang; The Fool's Progress), but also a polemicist of considerable force and an eloquent essayist. This anthology, edited by his longtime editor and friend Macrae, makes for a splendid summary of his best work-though it does not slight his faults. Abbey was above all a committed craftsman (``I write to make a difference''); and his passions-about the rape by ranchers and the industrial powers of his beloved Western desert country, the progressive disintegration of the quality of modern life, the dread development that would ``democratize'' wilderness by making it easily accessible to all-are on plain view. So, too, are his liabilities: his occasional outbursts of xenophobia and old-fashioned sexism, his gleefully overweening destructive fantasies. Abbey was an anarchist at heart, an often difficult loner who would probably find life unendurable in any organized, populous society. But as an analyst and gadfly of so many contemporary absurdities, and as a powerfully lyrical chronicler of desert solitudes and communion with nonhuman nature (something like Barry Lopez in a snit), he is in a class by himself. Anyone who doesn't already know his work will find this volume, culled from more than a dozen books of fiction and nonfiction, an addictive introduction. (Mar.)
Library Journal
To sample the best of Abbey's work is to whet the appetite for more. Excerpts from One Life at a Time, Please (LJ 2/1/88), the journal ramblings Desert Solitaire (LJ 1/1/68), the autobiographical The Fool's Progress (LJ 11/1/88), the comical novel The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975), and other pieces are arranged chronologically by incident from Abbey's boyhood in Home, Pennsylvania, to his death near Tucson, Arizona, in 1989 at age 62. Biographical remarks by John Macrae, Abbey's longtime editor and publisher, introduce each of the book's four segments. Abbey said that he wrote "to entertain my friends and to exasperate my enemies," "to honor life and to praise the divine beauty of the natural world," and "to tell my story." He does all remarkably. If your library is Abbey-deficient, this collection is essential.-Cathy Sabol, Northern Virginia Community Coll., Manassas
From the Publisher
The announcement of a new Abbey book, whether essays or fiction, stirs a personal craving no other current American writer can satisfy.” —Los Angeles Book Review“Abbey was a true independent, a self-declared extremist and ‘desert mystic,' and a hell of a good writer. . . . John Macrae has wisely chosen to organize these outstanding essays, travel pieces, and works of fiction to parallel events in Abbey's unusual life.” —Booklist
“A record as important and lovely as Muir's and Thoreau's.” —William McKibben, author of The End of Nature
“A splendid summary of his best work. . . . Anyone who doesn't already know his work will find this volume, culled from more than a dozen books of fiction and nonfiction, an addictive introduction.” —Publishers Weekly
“Abbey was many things as a writer, and his longtime editor, John Macrae, has put together a collection which follows the course of Abbey's life through his own work. It is a clever way to anthologize a talent who is impossible to pigeonhole. . . . A fine introduction to a writer who seems certain to endure and is, undeniably, an American original.” —Geoffrey Norman, American Way
“Abbey's work is a kind of blessed voice in the wilderness any way you take it, and a precious figure in our lethal time.” —W.S. Merwin
“The Serpents of Paradise is without question the best Abbey reader.” —David Petersen, editor of Confessions of a Barbarian: Selections from the Journals of Edward Abbey, 1951-1989
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