Adventures with Ed: A Portrait of Abbey [Illustrated] [Hardcover]

Jack Loeffler (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 30, 2001

No writer has had a greater influence on the American West than Edward Abbey (1927-89), author of twenty-one books of fiction and nonfiction. This long-awaited biographical memoir by one of Abbey's closest friends is a tribute to the gadfly anarchist who popularized environmental activism in his novel The Monkey Wrench Gang and articulated the spirit of the arid West in Desert Solitaire and scores of other essays and articles. In the course of a twenty-year friendship Ed Abbey and Jack Loeffler shared hundreds of campfires, hiked thousands of miles, and talked endlessly about the meaning of life. To read Loeffler's account of his best pal's life and work is to join in their friendship.

Born and raised in Pennsylvania, Abbey came west to attend the University of New Mexico on the G.I. Bill. His natural inclination toward anarchism led him to study philosophy, but after earning an M.A. he rejected academic life and worked off and on for years as a backcountry ranger and fire lookout around the Southwest. His 1956 novel The Brave Cowboy launched his literary career, and by the 1970s he was recognized as an important, uniquely American voice. Abbey used his talents to protest against the mining and development of the American West. By the time of his death he had become an idol to environmentalists, writers, and free spirits all over the West.

"Ed Abbey and Jack Loeffler were like Don Quijote and Sancho Panza. Loeffler delivers his friend, warts and all on a platter full of reverence and irreverence and carefully researched factual information, interspersed with hearty laughter and much serious consideration of all life's Great Questions. Jack's story elucidates and demythifies the Abbey legend, giving us powerful flesh and blood instead."--John Nichols

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Hard on the heels of James Cahalan's Edward Abbey: A Life (LJ 10/15/01) comes this more personal reminiscence by one of author and environmental activist Abbey's closest friends. The book is part biography and part memoir, and it is the latter aspect that makes it of special interest. Loeffler and Abbey (1927-89) spent countless days together, hiking, camping, drinking beer, and talking about the natural beauty of the West and how it was being despoiled by industry and government. It is these long conversations, and the friends' adventures in Mexico and the Western landscape, that energize the second half of the book. Moments of high hilarity alternate with moving scenes from Abbey's life and final days, ending with Loeffler's secret burial of Abbey in the desert they both loved so much. Readers will want to skip the countless sections on anarchism and the diatribes against the industrial-military complex. Though Loeffler's portrait lacks the shades of gray found in Cahalan's biography, this book is highly recommended for Abbey's fans and for larger public library collections. Morris Hounion, N.Y.C. Technical Coll. Lib., CUNY

Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Writer, gadfly, and "wilderness anarchist," Abbey (1927-89) has been the subject of hearsay and controversy but not nearly enough serious consideration. A new biography by James Cahalan [BKL O 1 01] lays the foundation for a deeper appreciation of Abbey and his 21 high-voltage books; and now Loeffler, one of Abbey's closest friends, presents an engrossing biographical memoir. A down-to-earth storyteller who shares Abbey's love of wilderness and freedom as well as his ornery sense of humor, Loeffler expertly chronicles Abbey's early years, drawing judiciously on family archives, but his vivid and anecdotal profile really comes alive when he enters the picture. Loeffler's memories of his conversations and travels with Abbey (they walked thousands of desert miles together) combined with astutely chosen selections from Abbey's journals reveal a shy, often melancholy yet adventurous man, an uncompromising intellectual and revolutionary, and an artist who craved solitude but who lived for friendship and love. Loeffler's intimate, incisive, and loving portrait of Abbey replaces the old, brittle caricature with an indelible body-and-soul vision of a true American original. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 308 pages
• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press; 1st edition (November 30, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0826323871
• ISBN-13: 978-0826323873
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 7.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #412,146 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Companeros., April 12, 2002

By 

G. Merritt (Boulder, CO) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Adventures with Ed: A Portrait of Abbey (Hardcover)

"He hiked through the high desert," Jack Loeffler writes about his friend, Ed Abbey (1927-89), "inhaling the perfume of juniper, feeling the clean hot wind against his face. He watched the circling buzzards and wondered if he should surrender, lie down and die, to provide them with one good meal. Or hike down into the maze and disappear into the ghostly silence. Or relinquish himself to a magnificent rapid in Cataract Canyon. He was frightened by the sound of his own breathing in the vast emptiness where he must keep his own company or lose control" (p. 85). For more than twenty years, Loeffler and Abbey were best friends, and they guzzled beer, shared hundreds of campfires, and hiked thousands of desert miles together (p. 3). "We were companeros," Loeffler says in the Preface to his 285-page biographical memoir. "And as long as I continue to live, we shall be" (p. 10).

Abbey encouraged us to "follow the truth no matter where it leads" (p. 4), and Loeffler does just that in drawing from Abbey's journals, FBI files, personal interviews, correspondence, and conversations he had with Abbey "while hiking, driving, river running, or just staring into campfires" (pp. 287-88), to bring his friend to life in these pages. Along the way, we find Abbey hitchhiking and hopping freight trains across America at age seventeen (pp. 18-20), falling in love repeatedly (he was married five times), attacking billboards at night (p. 38), studying in Scotland on a Fulbright scholarship (p. 39), working as a park ranger in the "bright sunlight of the American Southwest" (p. 79), down on his knees at Glen Canyon Dam, praying for an earthquake (p. 108), dancing naked and "clapping and howling" in the sunshine of Aztec Peak (p. 154), rallying for Earth First!, cussing red ants (p. 9), and trekking 110 miles through the Sonoran Desert "alone with his thoughts" (p. 162). Whereas the first four chapters of Loeffler's book covers much of the same biographical information contained in James Calahan's recent biography, ED ABBEY: A LIFE (2001), in Chapters 5 through 8, Loeffler introduces us to the friend he knew in Ed Abbey. In fact, Loeffler even describes digging Abbey's undisclosed desert grave in the book's final pages. "Every now and then, I visit Ed's grave and pour him a beer," Loeffler tells us (p. 4).

This truly fascinating book will appeal to any Abbey fan. Personal, adventurous, and intimate, Loeffler's "portrait" offers new insights into the "heavy chemistry" of Abbey the loner, the wilderness anarchist, the desert rat, the gifted writer with an evolved mind, the husband, father and friend, and into the "man who would not be dominated by anyone" (p. 61).

G. Merritt

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Intimate Portrait of Abbey, February 25, 2002

By 

mrgrieves08 (tucson) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Adventures with Ed: A Portrait of Abbey (Hardcover)

Adventures with Ed, by his longtime friend and fellow sabot, Jack Loeffler, offers an intimate look into the life of Edward Abbey that gets to the very bedrock of his existence of a writer and as a lover of the natural world. Although I have read and reread almost all of Abbey's work, this book allowed me to integrate and better understand the persona that Abbey constructed through his work and the sensitive, reticent man that he was in everyday life. While Loeffler's biography covers Abbey's entire life, the emphasis is on his life and work after he met Loeffler after the publication of Desert Solitaire until his death in 1988. Thus, this work is not simply a chronicle of Abbey's life as a writer and environmentalist, it is also the story of two friends who shared an unabiding love of nature and especially of the Southwestern desert.

Perhaps, one of the best qualities of this book is the way Loeffler illustrates Abbey's view of the world, which shaped his evolution as a writer, through the retelling of conversations and debates that they had on their many trips into the deserts of the Southwest and Mexico. In this way Loeffler has performed a great service for anyone who desires to better understand the work, as well as the life, of Edward Abbey, by providing many intimate details that reveal the forces that influenced Abbey's perception of the world and his place in it. It is impossible to read Abbey's work and not be moved, sometimes by his sense of humor and satiric wit or by his stunningly beautiful descriptions of what many see only as a desolate wasteland. This book is a must for anyone who wants to travel, albeit vicariously, with Abbey and Loeffler along the dusty roads of their many expeditions and trips into the desert, which allows us all to get a small glimpse into Abbey's life, which allows us to better understand his purpose as a writer.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a wonderful eperience, July 9, 2002

By 

"nmkid" (TX, United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Adventures with Ed: A Portrait of Abbey (Hardcover)

Reading Adventures with Ed by Jack Loeffler was a truly wonderful experience. Mr. Loeffler does well in combining the biographical with his own experiences with Ed. I was sad when I'd finished the book because the author presented such a beatiful friendship, one which transcended anything we can articulate, including mere physicality, and I wanted to read more, keep reading until I understood what they understood through such a tight friendship.

At the same time that Mr. Loeffler presents Ed Abbey in a realistic light, including his faults of which some were publicly criticized, he counters such facts with his own truths, those he gained through nights and nights in the desert with his friend. He highlights several of these trips, and in doing so, gives us wonderful conversations of two intelligent, insightful men trying to figure out the world and the human animal--no easy task.

If you are looking for a biography to futher your enjoyment of Abbey's work, you'll get that with Adventures with Ed, but thanks to Jack Loeffler, you'll get even more than that. You'll get a friendship so strong it extends past life and into death. If an afterlife exists, both Ed and Jack will be there (someday), driving their trucks and sharing beers over a campfire.