Written in the middle of the 1960s, yet composed largely from journals kept a decade earlier during the author’s summers as a backcountry ranger at the Arches National Monument (“among,” as he puts it, “the hoodoo rocks and voodoo silence of the Utah wilderness”), Desert Solitaire evokes the paradoxical loveliness of the harsh, hostile landscape with awestruck exactitude and visceral intensity. Edward Abbey’s attention to the desert flora and fauna, to the ancient rock formations and the ever-present weather, to the pleasures of both solitude and company, brings a bracing alertness to the episodes he describes in the linked essays that organize his narrative. Despite its canonization as something of a backpacker’s bible, Desert Solitaire is too quirky, cranky, and idiosyncratic to be stereotyped as a nature lover’s handbook. While the spare majesty of its setting provides a stunning inspiration for Abbey’s work, his meditations have as much to say about society, civilization, and culture as they do about nature.