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Desert Solitaire

by Edward Abbey

A memoir shaped by the desert

Regular price $18.95 USD
Regular price $31.59 USD Sale price $18.95 USD
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Paperback New English

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Awards & Recognition

  • Critical praise

    Praised by The New York Times as “a passionately felt, deeply poetic book”

    The book is described as “a passionately felt, deeply poetic book.”

AlbakiReads Editorial

A memoir shaped by the desert

Edward Abbey’s autobiographical essays draw on his work as a park ranger in the American Southwest, bringing together encounters with wilderness and conflicts over development and tourism. The collection also turns to the desert as a subject of reflection: Abbey presents it as both liberating and beautiful, yet isolating and harsh. That tension gives the book’s accounts of outdoor life a broader philosophical frame, linking conservation and particular experiences in the landscape with questions about how people live and what they seek in nature.

Good fit for readers who enjoy

  • Readers interested in essays and autobiographical writing about the American Southwest.
  • Those exploring wilderness, conservation, and the effects of development or tourism on land.
  • Readers who enjoy philosophical reflections rooted in encounters with nature.

Themes

Desert wildernessConservation and developmentIsolation and liberationNature and human life

Based on publisher information and book metadata.

Book overview

Hailed by The New York Times as "a passionately felt, deeply poetic book," the moving autobiographical work of Edward Abbey, considered the Thoreau of the American West, and his passion for the southwestern wilderness.

Desert Solitaire is a collection of vignettes about life in the wilderness and the nature of the desert itself by park ranger and conservationist, Edward Abbey. The book details the unique adventures and conflicts the author faces, from dealing with the damage caused by development of the land or excessive tourism, to discovering a dead body. However Desert Solitaire is not just a collection of one man's stories, the book is also a philosophical memoir, full of Abbey's reflections on the desert as a paradox, at once beautiful and liberating, but also isolating and cruel. Often compared to Thoreau's Walden, Desert Solitaire is a powerful discussion of life's mysteries set against the stirring backdrop of the American southwestern wilderness.
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