Write a short Summary of Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness.
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Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness is a masterpiece of non-fiction by American writer Edward Abbey, originally published in 1968. Abbey uses this book as a platform not only to make observations about the geography, fauna and flora of Utah but as a place to vent his spleen at the destruction of the natural world and the dehumanizing nature of our society. The book is also filled with humour, pathos, and great sensitivity. His prose is elastic, conversational at some points, poetic and profound at others.
A Season in the Wilderness by Edward Abbey has a much-deserved reputation of being one of the finest book written about the American West. Abbey spent time as a park ranger in Arches National Park in the late 60s, and in the process, travelled all around southern Utah and northern Arizona. This book is the outcome of that stay, yet it is so much more.
Desert Solitaire is a masterpiece of non-fiction. Abbey moves from topic to topic with ease. Each piece stands alone, but they are interconnected. In a relatively short amount of space, he writes strongly and convincingly about a host of topics. For this skill, we can forgive him for his obvious misanthropy. He hates everyone.
By opening sentence of the text proper: “This is the most beautiful place on earth.” he means the canyon-lands near Moab, Utah, where he worked as a seasonal park ranger for a couple of years in the late 1950s. Similar to most of the naturalists whose writing we meet in this series, Abbey celebrates the flora and fauna he encounters in the desert, but he is probably the most openly political in his message, lashing out in a chapter he calls a “polemic” against the dangers of Industrial Tourism and the “earnest engineers” who support construction and development as “intrinsic goods,” even in national parks. “No more new roads in national parks,” Abbey bluntly asserts. He comments on the uranium boom, on “cowboys and Indians,” and in the chapter entitled “Water” he reminds us of Wallace Stegner’s frequently quote remark that “Aridity, more than anything else, gives the western landscape its character.” The city, Abbey warns, “can be made to function as a concentration camp. At times angry and at times passionate, Abbey dashes back and forth between diatribe and poetry. Wilderness, he insists, “is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread” (169). In the longest chapter Abbey joins a friend in an excursion down the Colorado River, a place he senses is “doomed.” Accused by one visitor of being opposed to civilization and humanity, Abbey writes, “Naturally I was flattered.” Renowned naturalist Edwin Way Teale, in a review for the New York Times, admired the philosophy and humour of the book, which he described as “passionately felt” and “deeply poetic.”
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