Get More Details: The Serpents of Paradise: A Reader (Hardcover)
Product Description
Collects a best and many inflammatory papers of a late naturalist, environmentalist, and libertarian, a former National Park ranger and a author of Desert Solitaire, The Journey Home, and other works. 12,500 initial printing.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #1278761 in Books
- Published on: 1995-02
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Hardcover
- 400 pages
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
The late Abbey was not customarily a singularly gifted author some of whose books have acquired cult standing (The Brave Cowboy; The Monkey Wrench Gang; The Fool's Progress), yet also a polemicist of substantial force and an expressive essayist. This anthology, edited by his longtime editor and crony Macrae, creates for a superb outline 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 a rape by ranchers and a industrial powers of his dear Western dried country, a on-going destruction of a peculiarity of complicated life, a dismay growth that would "democratize" forest by creation it simply permitted to all?are on plain view. So, too, are his liabilities: his occasional outbursts of xenophobia and out-of-date sexism, his gleefully arrogant mortal fantasies. Abbey was an radical during heart, an mostly formidable loner who would substantially find life obnoxious in any organized, populous society. But as an researcher and gadfly of so many contemporary absurdities, and as a strenuously musical chronicler of dried solitudes and communion with nonhuman inlet (something like Barry Lopez in a snit), he is in a category by himself. Anyone who doesn't already know his work will find this volume, culled from some-more than a dozen books of novella and nonfiction, an addictive introduction.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
To representation a best of Abbey's work is to smooth a ardour for more. Excerpts from One Life during a Time, Please (LJ 2/1/88), a biography ramblings Desert Solitaire (LJ 1/1/68), a autobiographical The Fool's Progress (LJ 11/1/88), a laughable novel The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975), and other pieces are organised chronologically by occurrence from Abbey's boyhood in Home, Pennsylvania, to his genocide nearby Tucson, Arizona, in 1989 during age 62. Biographical remarks by John Macrae, Abbey's longtime editor and publisher, deliver any of a book's 4 segments. Abbey pronounced that he wrote "to perform my friends and to exasperate my enemies," "to respect life and to regard a hunger beauty of a healthy 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
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Abbey was a loyal independent, a self-declared nonconformist and "desert mystic," and a ruin of a good writer. Irreverent about male and zealous toward nature, Abbey wielded his coop as a arms in a conflict for leisure and forest and opposite audacity and greed. A Pennsylvania native, he fell uncontrolled in adore with a stately dried of a Southwest, a theme of many of his books, after hitchhiking cranky nation during a proposal age of 17. This collection of his works was put together by Abbey's editor and publisher, John Macrae, who has wisely selected to classify these superb essays, transport pieces, and works of novella to together events in Abbey's surprising life. Since all Abbey wrote was autobiographical no matter what literary form it took, a biographical structure is a ideal context for a sampling of his work. His novella is represented by excerpts from several of his novels, including Brave Cowboy (1950), The Fool's Progress (1988), and The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975), while his nonfiction, customarily deliberate his strongest and many successful writing, is culled from many sources, including his many musical book, Desert Solitaire (1985). Donna Seaman
By Edward Abbey
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First tagged "ecology" by Books of Worth
Customer tags: natural history, environmentalism, wilderness, philosophy, naturalist, ecology
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