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Grandfather John Vogelin's land is his life -- a barren stretch of New Mexican wilderness, mercifully bypassed by civilization. Then the government moves in. And suddenly the elderly, mule-stubborn rancher is confronting the combined land-grabbing greed of the County Sheriff, the Department of the Interior, the Atomic Energy Commission and the U.S. Air Force. But a tough old man is like a mountain lion: if you back hom into a conner, he'll come out fighting.
Edward Abbey spent most of his life in the American Southwest. The author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction, including the much celebrated Desert Solitaire, which decried the waste of America's wilderness, Abbey was one of the country's foremost defenders of the natural environment. He died in 1989.
--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Philosophic Precursor to the Monkeywrench Gang,
By mrgrieves08 (tucson) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Fire on the Mountain (Paperback)
For all those who have read Abbey's famous work Desert Solitaire and other non fiction Fire on the Mountain is a great introduction to his fiction. First published in 1962 it marks Abbey's early attempts to confront some of the environmental and social problems resulting from humanity's alienation from nature and the land. Abbey based his plot around actual events in which a New Mexico rancher named John Prather fought government attempts to confiscate his land to make it part of the White Sands Missle Range. Considering the time when this book was written, following the era of McCarthyism and the onset of the Cold War, Abbey was especially bold in putting forth the philosophical preposition that an individual has a moral and ethical responsibilty to protect the land against its despoilers, whether corporate entities or even the US government. In detailing one person's struggle against the seemingly invincible forces of power that the government represents, Abbey was attempting to illustrate that, indeed, one person's strugglecan make a difference. Given Abbey's extention of this line of thought and further development in The Monkeywrech Gang the intimate relationship between the two novels seems apparent. The ideas presented in Fire on the Mountain, thus, are central to understanding Abbey's subsequent works, both his fiction and non fiction, which are all bound by his belief that the essential tenent for human society must be respect for the environment and a duty to protect the natural diversity of life. As Abbey often said the land is owned by all and no one.
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The desert between covers,
By
This review is from: Fire on the Mountain (Paperback)
This was the very first book of Edward Abbey's I ever read, back when I was a seventeen year old college freshman.
And it wasn't the last. It was my last year of college though, and I have to blame, at least in part, this book's author. Edward Abbey loved the desert. He loved the West, with a jealous, protective, sincere love, a love that spills from every page of his books, and that seeps into his readers. Read one Abbey novel, and the odds are, you'll read more. Read more, and the odds are, you'll start to listen to what he has to say about the desert, and about the outdoors. Somehow I went from going to classes, to reading books like this, to living out of a canoe in southern Utah. It's that kind of a read. Abbey's writing is just good enough to motivate a person to get out into he desert himself--but it can't replace the experience of the desrt itself (like Cormac McCarthy sometimes almost does)--and maybe he was never going for that anyway. In this book, Abbey's terse, playful, anarchistic style and philosophy is still emerging, not yet crystalized into the clearer sentiments of "Desert Solitaire," but--on the positive side--not yet twisted into the cranky diatribes and caricatures of "Hayduke Lives." The book is the story of a boy visiting his grandfather in New Mexico, at the same time that his grandfather is about to be evicted from his property so that the government can turn the family ranch into additional acreage for White Sands Missile Range. The characters are convincing, the natural descriptions are minimal yet evocative, and the gentle desert tone--with the exception of a few rough spots where Abbey's strident rants overwhelm the voice of the story's supposedly innocent, supposedly naive, child narrator--is spot on. This is a book I would be proud to have written. It's a chance to see Edward Abbey's voice and style in its earliest stages, and a lovely portrayal of west Texas and southern New Mexico. At times, it's also very funny. Read this. Take it with you camping. If you like the desert and distrust the government, you'll probably like this book. If you only read one Abbey novel in your life, read...something else. But if you love Abbey's writing, or would like to, then really, pick up this one. Give it a shot.
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fiction based in reality,
By
This review is from: Fire on the Mountain (Paperback)
This is another of Abbey's great works which mixes fiction with reality. Although I don't know if the main character and his fight to save the land he lives on is based in fact I do know that it represents the same struggle that many have gone through when the government comes to tell you they need your land. It is a very endearing story about a man who has lived and worked on his land (which is in a relatively hostile geographic area which most people would not live in) only to find that towards the end of his life someone is going to try to take it from him. It is a great story and does not duplicate any of his other writings as far as I could tell.
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