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A review by catapocalypse
Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey
adventurous
reflective
slow-paced
2.5
This was a reread for me; my first read was back in high school for a university extension course, about 15 years ago. Honestly, I didn't remember much about it beyond the first few chapters, and perhaps that's all we read...
There's no denying that Abbey has some beautiful prose, and the beginning of the book starts off very strong. Unfortunately, it goes downhill hard, as his terrible views and factual inaccuracies become more pronounced.
The book is a memoir of his time as a park ranger for Arches National Monument in southern Utah. What it does well is describe the beauty of the region across the half of the year spanning from April to September. It also includes his philosophy and opinions on a number of things relating to the people of the region, tourists to it, and everyone's relationship with its wilderness. This is where his misanthropy, bigotry, ignorance, hypocrisy, etc. sours things.
A frequent idea Abbey brings up is essentially that increasing access to national parks and natural monuments somehow cheapens them. This insufferable idea that something is ruined if *other* people can experience it is not a recent phenomenon. Railing against increased accessibility is also rather ableist, and he does say explicitly ableist things in the process. And while his concerns about the careless variety of tourists trashing sites are valid, he's hardly better when he brains a rabbit with a stone just to prove he could, or accidentally sets the brush in a side canyon off Glen Canyon on fire and bails.
Then there's the deeply racist treatment of the impoverished Navajo reservation in the chapter, "Cowboys and Indians Part II." While some of it may be a little tongue-in-cheek, as he clearly disdains industrialization and "industrialized tourism" too, he still uses a lot of common racist terminology and descriptions about natives, and even spouts the straight up genocidal idea that they were having too many children and could be "helped" by compulsory birth control.
Beyond the ignorance behind these sentiments is a broader ignorance of facts. There were inaccuracies that honestly had me questioning whether he even had an editor on this. He claimed the native people had vacated the area seven hundred years ago, yet there were pictographs including horses, so clearly they were present within the last four hundred years. He mistakenly stated the poet Everett Ruess disappeared at 26, when Ruess had been only 20. And he had a peculiar tendency to refer to the "new moon" when he was clearly talking about the full moon.
There are also a few stories like the "legend" of Albert Husk, which he almost certainly made up entirely himself. Paired with the lack of fact-checking, the book is not trustworthy as a source of historical information.
So what purpose can be found in it, if it's inaccurate as nonfiction and insufferable as opinion or philosophy? If you wish to preserve a positive opinion of the book and Abbey, read the first few chapters for the beautiful descriptions of the desert and don't bother with the rest. But there are probably better treatments on the region out there.
There's no denying that Abbey has some beautiful prose, and the beginning of the book starts off very strong. Unfortunately, it goes downhill hard, as his terrible views and factual inaccuracies become more pronounced.
The book is a memoir of his time as a park ranger for Arches National Monument in southern Utah. What it does well is describe the beauty of the region across the half of the year spanning from April to September. It also includes his philosophy and opinions on a number of things relating to the people of the region, tourists to it, and everyone's relationship with its wilderness. This is where his misanthropy, bigotry, ignorance, hypocrisy, etc. sours things.
A frequent idea Abbey brings up is essentially that increasing access to national parks and natural monuments somehow cheapens them. This insufferable idea that something is ruined if *other* people can experience it is not a recent phenomenon. Railing against increased accessibility is also rather ableist, and he does say explicitly ableist things in the process. And while his concerns about the careless variety of tourists trashing sites are valid, he's hardly better when he brains a rabbit with a stone just to prove he could, or accidentally sets the brush in a side canyon off Glen Canyon on fire and bails.
Then there's the deeply racist treatment of the impoverished Navajo reservation in the chapter, "Cowboys and Indians Part II." While some of it may be a little tongue-in-cheek, as he clearly disdains industrialization and "industrialized tourism" too, he still uses a lot of common racist terminology and descriptions about natives, and even spouts the straight up genocidal idea that they were having too many children and could be "helped" by compulsory birth control.
Beyond the ignorance behind these sentiments is a broader ignorance of facts. There were inaccuracies that honestly had me questioning whether he even had an editor on this. He claimed the native people had vacated the area seven hundred years ago, yet there were pictographs including horses, so clearly they were present within the last four hundred years. He mistakenly stated the poet Everett Ruess disappeared at 26, when Ruess had been only 20. And he had a peculiar tendency to refer to the "new moon" when he was clearly talking about the full moon.
There are also a few stories like the "legend" of Albert Husk, which he almost certainly made up entirely himself. Paired with the lack of fact-checking, the book is not trustworthy as a source of historical information.
So what purpose can be found in it, if it's inaccurate as nonfiction and insufferable as opinion or philosophy? If you wish to preserve a positive opinion of the book and Abbey, read the first few chapters for the beautiful descriptions of the desert and don't bother with the rest. But there are probably better treatments on the region out there.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Ableism, Animal cruelty, Animal death, Child death, Death, Genocide, Racism, Death of parent, and Murder
Moderate: Gun violence
Minor: Homophobia, Infidelity, Misogyny, Racial slurs, Transphobia, Antisemitism, Islamophobia, and Religious bigotry