Desert Solitaire

Abbey wraps a live snake around his waist to impress tourists and kills a rabbit with a thrown rock to test a theory, and both scenes turn a good share of readers against him for good. Reviewers call him “a macho hypocritical egomaniac, hiding behind the veil” of wilderness purity, and one flat description sums up the charge sheet: “pompous, both racist and sexist, hypocritical, and a rabbit murderer.” The Polemic chapter against roads and cars in the parks draws its own backlash from readers who can’t walk far, since Abbey’s stand against pavement reads to them as opposition to wheelchair access. One review calls the whole book “part Walden, part Mein Kampf,” and another says it reads as “gonzo environmentalism, and it’s showing its age.” The desert survives the man. Whether the man survives the reader is a separate question.