Why am I passionate about this?
I’ve been passionate about Edward Abbey since I read Desert Solitaire in 1994. By 2010, I decided to write a biography on Abbey, Finding Abbey: The Search for Edward Abbey and His Hidden Desert Grave, which allowed me to research and explore Abbey. I interviewed his great friends, including Jack Loeffler, Doug Peacock, Ken Sleight, and David Petersen. I visited Abbey’s special collections library and read his master’s thesis on anarchism and an unpublished novel. I visited his first home in Pennsylvania and many of his Desert Southwest homes. Along the way, I found the spirit of Abbey and the American Southwest. Finding Abbey won the National Outdoor Book Award.
Sean's book list on reads by or about to Edward Abbey
Why did Sean love this book?
If Desert Solitaire is an American classic, The Monkey Wrench Gang is the blockbuster that everyone knows and loves for its humor, and sex, all wrapped up in an environmental action thriller.
While this book might not be quite as literary as Desert Solitaire, it changed environmentalism in America. This book blended anarchism and environmentalism. It also helped inspire the environmental organization, Earth First. And it created the term “to monkey wrench.”
Read the book because it changed American environmentalism. Love it for its action and thrills in the Desert Southwest. I know I did.
And while I always wanted to be like the brash main character, George Washington Hayduke, in all truth I was and am more like Seldom Seen.
5 authors picked The Monkey Wrench Gang as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
'Revolutionary ... An extravagant, finely written tale of ecological sabotage' The New York Times
Audacious, controversial and hilarious, The Monkey Wrench Gang is Edward Abbey's masterpiece - a big, boisterous and unforgettable novel about freedom and commitment that ignited the flames of environmental activism.
Throughout the vast American West, nature is being vicitimized by a Big Government / Big Business conspiracy of bridges, dams and concrete. But a motley gang of individuals has decided that enough is enough. A burnt-out veteran, a mad doctor and a polygamist join forces in a noble cause: to dismantle the machinery of progress through…