Edward Abbey Libri

"Desert solitaire" è diventato un libro di culto sin dalla sua pubblicazione, nel 1968. Un racconto provocatorio e mistico, arrabbiato e appassionato, in cui Edward Abbey ci restituisce la sua esperienza di ranger nell'Arches National Monument, nel Sudest dello Utah, catturandone l'essenza e trasmettendoci il desiderio di vivere nella natura e conoscerla nella sua forma più pura: silenzio, lotta, bellezza abbagliante. Ma "Desert solitaire" è anche il grido angosciato di un uomo pronto a sfidare il crescente sfruttamento operato dall'industria petrolifera, mineraria e del turismo. Sono trascorsi quasi cinquant'anni, e le osservazioni di Abbey, le sue battaglie, non hanno perso nulla della loro rilevanza. Anzi, oggi più che mai, "Desert solitaire" ci chiama a combattere, mettendoci di fronte a un'ultima domanda fondamentale: riusciremo a salvare ciò che resta dei nostri tesori naturali prima che i bulldozer manovrati dal profitto colpiscano ancora?

Down the River is a collection of essays both timeless and timely. It is an exploration of the abiding beauty of some of the last great stretches of American wilderness on voyages down rivers where the body and mind float free, and the grandeur of nature gives rise to meditations on everything from the life of Henry David Thoreau to the militarization of the open range. At the same time, it is an impassioned condemnation of what is being done to our natural heritage in the name of progress, profit, and security. Filled with fiery dawns, wild and shining rivers, and radiant sandstone canyons, it is charged as well with heartfelt, rampageous rage at human greed, blindness, and folly. It is, in short, Edward Abbey at his best, where and when we need him most.

The Journey Home ranges from the surreal cityscapes of Hoboken and Manhattan to the solitary splendor of the deserts and mountains of the Southwest. It is alive with ranchers, dam builders, kissing bugs, and mountain lions. In a voice edged with chagrin, Edward Abbey offers a portrait of the American West that we’ll not soon forget, offering us the observations of a man who left the urban world behind to think about the natural world and the myths buried therein. Abbey, our foremost “ecological philosopher,” has a voice like no other. He can be wildly funny, ferociously acerbic, and unexpectedly moving as he ardently champions our natural wilderness and castigates those who would ravish it for the perverse pleasure of profit.

Henry Lightcap, a man facing a terminal illness, sets out on a trip across America accompanied only by his dog, Solstice, and discovers the beauty and majesty of the Southwest.

Text and photographs discuss the various mountain ranges of North America including the Rockies, Hawaii, Cascades, Appalachins, Olympics, Sierra Nevada and the mountain ranges of Alaska

You are about to visit some of the most exciting places on earth. Not the sort of excitement that makes morning headlines or the nightly news. Instead it is the excitement that comes from experiencing the natural world as it always has been and should be, and seeing human beings living in tune with its subtlest rhythms. In Australian cattle country and in the primitive outback. On a desert island off Mexico and in the Sierra Madres. On the Rio Grande and in the great Southwest. On Lake Powell in Utah and in the living American desert. It is adventure. It is enlightenment. It is vintage Abbey.

Ed Abbey called The Monkey Wrench Gang, his 1975 novel, a "comic extravaganza." Some readers have remarked that the book is more a comic book than a real novel, and it's true that reading this incendiary call to protect the American wilderness requires more than a little of the old willing suspension of disbelief.The story centers on Vietnam veteran George Washington Hayduke III, who returns to the desert to find his beloved canyons and rivers threatened by industrial development. On a rafting trip down the Colorado River, Hayduke joins forces with feminist saboteur Bonnie Abbzug, wilderness guide Seldom Seen Smith, and billboard torcher Doc Sarvis, M.D., and together they wander off to wage war on the big yellow machines, on dam builders and road builders and strip miners. As they do, his characters voice Abbey's concerns about wilderness preservation ("Hell of a place to lose a cow," Smith thinks to himself while roaming through the canyonlands of southern Utah. "Hell of a place to lose your heart. Hell of a place... to lose. Period").Moving from one improbable situation to the next, packing more adventure into the space of a few weeks than most real people do in a lifetime, the motley gang puts fear into the hearts of their enemies, laughing all the while. It's comic, yes, and required reading for anyone who has come to love the desert.

From stories about cattlemen, fellow critics, his beloved desert, cities, and technocrats to thoughts on sin and redemption, this is one of our most treasured writers at the height of his powers.

Edward Abbey's first love was to write fiction, and as so many of his friends pointed out, Black Sun was his own personal favorite book. It contains some of his most lyrical writing, and it is unusually gentle and introspective for him.

The Brave Cowboy Jack Burnes is a loner at odds with modern civilization. A man out of time, he rides a feisty chestnut mare across the New West -- a once beautiful land smothered beneanth airstrips and superhighways. And he lives by a personal code of ethics that sets him on a collision course with the keepers of law and order. Now he has stepped over the line by breaking one too many of society's rulus. The hounds of justice are hot in his trail. But Burnes would rather die than spend even a single night behind bars. And they have to catch him first.