Desert Solitaire

Abbey's 1968 memoir of his experience as a park ranger in the badlands of southern Utah mixes nature writing, storytelling, speculation, opinion, ecology, geology, and human history with satire and social commentary—but, at its heart, this book is a thoughtful treatise about life and man and nature. Full of iconoclasm (and light on pretension) this book is as much a philosophical journey of the American West as it is a physical one.