BEYOND THE WALL

by Edward Abbey ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 13, 1984

This collection of ten previously published essays will be his last ""desert digressions. . . my last 'writ in the sand',"" claims the Voice in the Wilderness. In one of two essays from the Eighties, ""A Walk in the Desert Hills,"" Abbey allows his middle-aged self--with feet, neck, and slightly arthritic hip singing out in pain from time to time--plenty of sun-stewed rage at his favorite targets: concrete ""damnations,"" power-serving scientists, and all Destroyers (like the ""hideous howls"" of the Air Force). Why press on from water hole to water hole? Possibly because of the need for ""some authentic experience."" Or possibly to ""meet my God."" Watch out, Abbey warns himself: he's sounding like ""the worst of T. E. Lawrence; the best of Annie Dillard."" In earlier, closer cropped, less cheerfully self-indulgent essays, Abbey remembers: the lost Glen Canyon, a rumbling flood, a ""sweet and subtle"" river song, and a doughty little ferry; the ""liver-hued bentonite hills"" of Utah's Pariah Valley--where one pot hole sported a fantastic fairy shrimp. There's a trip down the Colorado, or what's left of it: a Mexican desert and one Sonoran region that was ""the bleakest, flattest, ugliest. . . most senseless desert of them all."" In the other recent essay, Abbey details a trip on Alaska's Kongakut River: for mega-buck-bent Americans, Abbey notes, Alaska is ""the last pork chop."" Here he reverts again to curmudgeonism, a superior synthesis of McPhee's purse-lipped exactitude and Hunter Thompson's extravagance of ire. For latecomers and longtime Abbey followers: a firm, tartly-framed selection.

Pub Date: April 13, 1984

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Holt, Rinehart & Winston

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1984

Categories: NONFICTION