Reviews
An excellent primer to readers new to [Edward] Abbey and [Wallace] Stegner, and an insightful explanation of their continuing relevance.... Gessner's reporting, whether profiling Stegner and Abbey's acolyte Wendell Berry or observing the consequences of Vernal, Utah's fracking boom, is vivid and personable. In his able hands, Abbey and Stegner's legacy is refreshed for a new generation of readers., To understand the truth of the Desert West, read Stegner. To understand one writer's emotional response to that desert and to our thoughtless destruction of wilderness, read Abbey. To understand the two writers as men of their times--and ours--read Gessner: for his honesty, compassion, humility, scholarship, and sensibility., Two extraordinary men and one remarkable book. To understand how we understand the natural world, you need to read this book., A spirited, ecologically minded travelogue.... [Gessner] writers with a vividness that brings the serious ecological issues and the beauty of the land...to sharp relief...urgent and engrossing., Praise David Gessner for reawakening us, in these climactically challenged times, to the wisdom of our two most venerated literary grandfathers of the American West, to remind us of our wilder longings, to incite in us a fury, that we might act--even now--to defend all the wild that remains., This timely mash-up of environmental journalism, biography, travel writing, and literary criticism has Gessner hitting the road in search of the real story behind 'two of the most effective environmental fighters of the 20th century...What emerges is a joyful adventure in geography and in reading--and in coming to terms with how the domestic and the wild can co-exist over time., [Gessner's] honest voice is full of insight and humor... As he explores Abbey and Stegner's lives, he considers his own, as a nature writer who is also negotiating that line between the artist and the activist, and also still learning how to see. This approach not only allows readers into the lives of two great American writers but invites them to reconsider their own., This book rubs Abbey and Stegner's history in the dust and sand so beloved to them, posing these two late icons among voices, landscapes, and arguments that endure in western wilderness, deftly creating a larger geographic chronicle., A travel book, yes, a literary memoir, yes, and a profound meditation on our myths and shadows. Anyone who loves the American West will be enraptured by this book. It is a wonderful piece of work., Never reduces either man to simplistic categories, but sees in both personalities possible life models, men who loved nature and felt keenly the limits on human liberty.