The Journey Home (Plume) [Paperback]

Edward Abbey (Author)

Book Description

Series: Plume | Publication Date: January 30, 1991

Long considered an underground classic, The Journey Home stands beside Desert Solitaire as one of Abbey's most important works. In a voice edged eith chagrin, Abbey offers a portrait of the American West that readers will not soon forget, presenting the reflections and observations of a man who left the urban world behind in pursuit of the natural one and the myths buried therein.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"I am not a naturalist. I never was and never will be a naturalist." So Ed Abbey opens The Journey Home, a collection of essays that turns every page or two to some aspect of the natural history of the desert West. Abbey had recently been compared to Henry Thoreau as a writer who had made a home both literary and real in the wild, and he was having none of it: he wanted to be thought of as a novelist and environmental activist, not as the author of gentle essays on self-sufficiency and the turn of the seasons. The Journey Home is thus full of politically charged, often enraged essays on such matters as urban growth ("The Blob Comes to Arizona"), the gentrification of the small-town West ("Telluride Blues--A Hatchet Job"), and wilderness preservation ("Let Us Now Praise Mountain Lions"). He raised a few hackles with this book, but he also found many devoted readers, fans who wanted and got an update of and rejoinder to Abbey's Desert Solitaire. Agree with him or not, you can't fault Abbey for his honest self-assessment: "I am--really am--an extremist," he wrote, "one who lives and loves by choice far out on the very verge of things, on the edge of the abyss, where this world falls into the depths of the other. That's the way I like it." --Gregory McNamee

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Plume (January 30, 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0452265622
• ISBN-13: 978-0452265622
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #204,179 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Edward Abbey was born in Home, Pennsylvania, in 1927. He was educated at the University of New Mexico and the University of Edinburgh. He died at his home in Oracle, Arizona, in 1989.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Abbey for President - Ed come back we need you now!, February 5, 2002

By 

Philip Carl "EcoAngler" (Half Moon Bay, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Journey Home (Plume) (Paperback)

Its been over ten years since I read Desert Solitaire and I've combed through a couple of his works looking for another collection of stories that hit me with the same "between-the-eyes" impact as Desert Solitaire. Well, I found it with Journey Home. To me Edward Abbey represents the second coming of John Westly Powell. He, like Major Powell, foresaw the westward expansion of the U.S. and in the case of the desert southwest instinctively knew that water would be the limiting factor. It's important to remember that Abbey saw the huge growth up tick coming some 25 years ago. And places like Phoenix, and Vegas have exploded in size ever since. Abbey puts it all in focus with "The BLOB Comes to Arizona." "Telluride Blues - A Hatchet Job" is another case in point. But for pure fun, nothing tops Abbey's "premarital honeymoon" adventure in "Disorder and Early Sorrow." If you're a fan of Abbey and you buy the book for that story alone, you won't be disappointed.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Arguably Abbey's best, October 26, 2000

By 

mrgrieves08 (tucson) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Journey Home (Plume) (Paperback)

That claim may seem a little rash in the face of Abbey's great prose work, Desert Solitaire, but this book in my view offers a more intimate and personal look at Abbey himself and provides some great insights into his formation as writing placed within the context of the American west. One of the strengths of this work, as opposed to Desert Solitaire, is the broadness of subject matter covered. Abbey begins by recounting his life changing hitch-hiking, train jumping tour across America to the west in the summer of 1944. His style, however, is like Kerouac, but without the self consciousness and pretension. Through Abbey's eye's it is nature that is the subject, his personal exploits are merely secondary/accidental; Abbey is just along for the ride. He tells of his first glimpse of the mesa's of Hopi country on the fringes of the Painted Desert as viewed from the side door of the Pullman as he drifted down the tracks towards New Mexico. Throughout, he describes his love of the desert and the creatures that live there with a vitality and gentleness uncommon in contemporary environmental discourse. This sensitivity is even more pronounced when compared with his verbal protests against what he sees as the destroyers of his desert home, such as, the miners, developers, dammers, trappers and, yes, even the tourists. "The Journey Home" closes with a surrealistic celebration of the desert as seen through the detached lens of an anonymous camera, which I consider some of his most beautiful and original writing. For all those who have read Desert Solitaire, read this to get a more intimate look of the man behind the ideas. Abbey's contradictions are what makes him so great as an American writer. He is at once an anarchist, environmentalist, desert rat, river-runner, essayist, and novelist, but above all, he was just a man from Pennsylvania who became enraptured by the mysteries of the desert and dedicated his life to celebrating its beauty.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars If You're New to Abbey, a Good Place to Start, July 6, 2000

By 

Gary Reger - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Journey Home (Plume) (Paperback)

Edward Abbey says he's not a naturalist, not an ecologist, not a writer in the tradition of Thoreau. That's true and not, like so many things about this American original who passed from among us in 1989. Most of all, Abbey loved the American West, especially the desert, and he hated anything -- mass tourism, forces of modernization, greed -- that threatened to destroy it. His prose invites the reader to come west even as he inventories all the noxious creatures waiting to sting, spray, cut, or poison her. *The Journey Home* can be read as a set of separate essays, self-contained, each short enough to savor in a sitting; but the whole coheres around Abbey's passions, and will leave you, unless your heart has been wholly congealed in the embaling fluids of city life, yearning for the wilderness and enflamed with the mission to preserve it.