Desert Cabal
A New Season in the Wilderness
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4.0 • 4 Ratings
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
"A grief–stricken, heart–hopeful, soul song to the American Desert."
—PAM HOUSTON, author of Deep Creek
As Ed Abbey’s Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness turns fifty, its iconic author, who has inspired generations of rebel–rousing advocacy on behalf of the American West, is due for a tribute as well as a talking to. In Desert Cabal: A New Season in the Wilderness, Amy Irvine admires the man who influenced her life and work while challenging all that is dated—offensive, even—between the covers of Abbey's environmental classic. Irvine names and questions the "lone male" narrative—white and privileged as it is—that still has its boots planted firmly at the center of today's wilderness movement, even as she celebrates the lens through which Abbey taught so many to love the wild remains of the nation. From Abbey’s quiet notion of solitude to Irvine’s roaring cabal, the desert just got hotter, and its defenders more nuanced and numerous.
AMY IRVINE is a sixth–generation Utahn and longtime public lands activist. Her work has been published in Orion, Pacific Standard, High Desert Journal, Climbing, Triquarterly, and other publications. Her memoir, Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land, received the Orion Book Award, the Ellen Meloy Desert Writers Award, and Colorado Book Award. Her essay "Spectral Light," which appeared in Orion and The Best American Science and Nature Writing, was a finalist for the Pen Award in Journalism, and her recent essay, “Conflagrations: Motherhood, Madness and a Planet on Fire” appeared among the 2017 Best American Essays' list of Notables. Irvine teaches in the Mountainview Low–Residency MFA Program of Southern New Hampshire University—in the White Mountains of New England. She lives and writes off the grid in southwest Colorado, just spitting distance from her Utah homeland.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Public lands activist Irvine (Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land) takes on the late naturalist Edward Abbey in a book well worth reading despite some idiosyncratic prose. Addressing Abbey on the 50th anniversary of his classic Desert Solitaire, Irvine challenges him on male privilege, white privilege, xenophobia, and his praise of solitude, which Irvine argues is more a "literary device" than reality. What Irvine emphasizes most is the need for community over isolation. She notes that despite Abbey's claims, he was often with people, that his writing on solitude, ironically, brought crowds to state parks in the West, and that women, especially, rely on community to stay safe in the wilds. Unfortunately, Irvine's dizzying opening passages are potentially off-putting: "This yolk of sun has broken on a horizon sawed in two by saguaros" in a "desert that has, thank the horned gods, not succumbed to the Mad Max lunacy in Moab." Fortunately, the end of this short book is well worth sticking past the rocky beginning. Irvine gradually builds to a ringing conclusion, stating simply and clearly that wilderness lovers "need intimacy with people every bit as much as with place" and that "going it alone is a failure of contribution and compassion."
