Edward Abbey: A Life

Rating:
Summary: Portrait of an enigma
Review: Any life as filled with controversy, contradiction and conflict as Ed Abbey's cannot be summed up in any one book. That is why Jim Cahalan's book is a valuable addition to any library that assumes to describe this complicated character. No other book about Abbey has as much detail, fact and non-creative non-fiction as Cahalan's. Abbey intended to be an enigma, making the task of uncovering the real person even more daunting. Cahalan has shown the perseverance of a private investigator in uncovering as much reality as anyone knows about Ed Abbey. His organizational skills have given us a wonderful view of Abbey's work, life and philosophy.
This book is highly recommended for anyone who desires to have as complete a picture as possible of the 20th century's most important environmental anarchist, Edward Abbey.

Rating:
Summary: Comprehensive to a Fault
Review: As mentioned in an earlier review this book features a comprehensive Edward Abbey bibliography. The problem is that the author has read all of these books and has decided to include every single detail about Abbey's life, no matter how insignificant. The problem is that Cahalan seems to know a lot about Abbey without actually KNOWING anything about Edward Abbey. The result is copious run-on sentences and thirty page chapters about unimportant periods of Abbey's life. This book quickly becomes laborious to read due to these faults and the excessive amount of gratuitous quotes. It is not for the casual Abbey fan. One could argue that the positive reviews are all probably from hard core Abbey fanatics while the lukewarm ones are from those who do not practice fanatical devotion to the cult of Cactus Ed. It delivers on its promise to destroy the myths about Cactus Ed. The problem is that once you learn about Abbey's character (or profound lack of character) you long for the myth of Cactus Ed.

Rating:
Summary: The Many Sides of Ed Abbey
Review: Edward Abbey (1927-1989) had a big impact on me through his book, DESERT SOLITAIRE. Although our paths never crossed, we shared the same Arizona desert. He taught at the University of Arizona while I was a college student there, and for awhile we even lived in the same Tucson canyon. In James Cahalan's new biography, "cult followers of 'Cactus Ed,' on the one hand, will encounter in these pages another, different, more private Abbey. On the other hand, readers and teachers who have decided from some fleeting snapshot that Abbey disliked other races and women, for example, and do not want to read or teach his books, can read more about the Abbey who edited a bilingual English-Spanish newspaper and spoke at a Navajo rally, and the Abbey who so helpfully reviewed, advised, and befriended several women writers" (p. xii), including Arizona activist Katie Lee, Terry Tempest Williams, Ann Zwinger (p. xii), and Annie Dillard (p. 137).

Cahalan reveals that Abbey's books are autobiographical to an extent, and that his subject went to great lengths to perpetuate the persona of "Cactus Ed." For instance, Abbey was not born in Home, as he claimed, nor did he ever live in Oracle (pp. xi, 3). Based on his careful research and more than 100 interviews with people who knew Abbey, including Abbey's widow, Clarke Cartwright-Abbey, his siblings, and friends such as Dave Foreman, Wendell Berry, Gary Snyder, and Leslie Marmon Silko, Cahalan succeeds in bringing his subject to life in these pages. Abbey's fascinating life reads like fiction. Abbey was "an independent, rebellious, free spirit" even from an early age (p. 20). He was a "loner" in high school, and a "kind of hippie of his day" (p. 21), who hitchhiked West between his junior and senior years in high school (p. 28). "It was wanderlust, pure and simple" (p. 31), Abbey said. He became a Westerner at age 17, obsessed, "sense and mind, by desert thoughts, canyon thoughts" (p. 63) for the rest of his life. After graduating from high school in 1945, he joined the army (p. 33) before later becoming an anti-war activist (p. 99).

"No home, no income, no job" (p. 80) was a familiar theme in Abbey's life. Cahalan follows Abbey, "fueled by separation, lust, and alcohol" (p. 273), through his jobs as bartender, caseworker, laborer, teacher, technical writer, and ranger, from Appalachia, Alaska, Albuquerque, Cabeza Prieta, Taos, Death Valley, Glen Canyon, the Grand Canyon, Half Moon Bay, Moab to Tucson. Along his path from free-spirited loner to "postmodern, anarchist cowboy" (p. 225), Abbey marries five times and fathers five children before his March 14, 1989 death. Cahalan triumphs in revealing that Abbey lived in a "tortured inner world" amidst a "beautiful outerworld" (p. 91).

Abbey would probaby have "no comment" about Cahalan's well-researched, insightful biography. "Death is not tragic," he would remind us. Rather, existing "without fully participating in life--that is the deepest personal tragedy" (p. 208). Although this is not an authorized biography, it is the best biographical resource we have of Ed Abbey to date.

G. Merritt

Rating:
Summary: A biography that reads like a novel
Review: Edward Abbey's life was so interesting that most any decently-written biography of him should be entertaining. Cahalan's biography is certainly that, but he also delves into Abbey's psyche through the presentation of details that are ignored in other biographies of Abbey. Thus, the reader is provided an image of Abbey that has a lot of "texture," and, I believe, is closer to a faithful picture of the real man, faults and virtues combined. Cahalan does a good job of remaining impartial, and tries to present the events just as they are, so that the reader is pretty much left free to make his/her own judgements about Abbey The Man. This doesn't mean that Cahalan's personal opinions about Abbey don't come out in the book (he is sympathetic to Abbey), but he lets the reader know when he is expressing an opinion, and when he is stating what is taken as fact.

Biographies of famous authors, especially revolutionary ones like Abbey, is a genre that I have started to really enjoy. It seems that, for me at least, reading about the events, and the author's reactions to them, that helped to form such an extraordinary individual is often more entertaining than the author's own writings! That's not to say that I haven't enjoyed most of Abbey's books (not all, though). The same goes for Jack Kerouac. Cahalan's biography and Ann Charter's biography of Kerouac are two fine examples of biographies that read like novels, but are in some ways better, because they report actual events!

Rating:
Summary: Ed Abbey Comes to Life Once Again
Review: Edward Abbey; A Life is a fine chronicle of the life of perhaps the greatest American writer of the 20th century. Mr. Cahalan offers a balanced, stick-to-the-well researced facts, account of Abbey's life. He obviously had excellent cooperation from a number of people who knew Abbey well. He also does not fall into the trap of offering his own analysis of Abbey. This leads to a book about Abbey and not what the biographer thinks of Abbey as happened in Bishop's biography. After reading Edward Abbey: A Life, you may not want to blow up a dam, but you will come to wish you got to spent some time with Abbey in a deserted fire tower.

Rating:
Summary: A very thorough, fair, and well-written biography!
Review: I love how this book taught me so many things about Abbey's life that I never knew before, and how he brings in Abbey's voice by quoting him so effectively. It's an important book because it digs beneath the myth of "Cactus Ed" to the real man and the working writer, and it makes me want to go back and reread Abbey's books. Another good feature is how Cahalan makes Abbey part of his broader historical scene by bringing in related historical events, not only in environmental history but also Vietnam and other events that many might not know also interested and influenced Abbey. This was fun to read! Both Abbey fans and readers new to him will like this book.

Rating:
Summary: A very thorough, fair, and well-written biography!
Review: Ill keep this short...Im actually 2/3 of the way thru Cahalan's book on Ed. I purchased the book for the sole purpose of filling in the "blank spots" in Abbey's life, one that I admire. The book has, in fact, done this well. But more than that, fans of Abbey's writing will enjoy the background information about each book or essay...the surprising autobiographical nature of most of his work and even insight into the personal nature of the man...more info than Abbey probably would have liked leaked out to the "masses". A very good reference book for Cactus Ed's fans.

Rating:
Summary: Best book yet on Abbey
Review: This book is the best among the several I've read on Abbey. It contains by far the most details about his life in both its glories and its agonies, and Abbey's voice rings through loud and clear all the way through, partly because Cahalan interweaves plenty of just the right quotations from Abbey's writings, both published and unpublished. It's also the only book I've read that gets the facts right: from where he was born (which WASN'T Home, Pa.), where he lived (many places, but never Oracle); who his many friends, wives, and lovers were; what he actually did and thought; and much, much more. This author has the guts to tell Abbey's whole story, not just paint a picture, at the same time that the cover and inside photographs are great. It separates the real Abbey from the mythical one, but somehow the actual Abbey--warts and all--is even more impressive than the mythical one perpetuated by other authors, including Abbey himself. The big chronological bibliography of all of Abbey's writings is by itself worth the price of this book (even if the book itself weren't also more than worth it); such a bibliography has never before been published. I enjoyed this book from cover to cover, and learned a lot from it.