The Critics: ‘Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast’

Travel Blog  •  Jim Benning  •  11.20.06 | 12:27 PM ET

postcardsfromed

If you love the oudoors, it’s hard not to love Edward Abbey, author of the classic Utah memoir Desert Solitaire. (“Since you cannot get the desert into a book any more than a fisherman can haul up the sea with his nets,” Abbey memorably wrote in “Solitaire,” “I have tried to create a world of words in which the desert figures more as a medium than as material.”) Abbey died in 1989, and now, a publisher has collected 236 letters he wrote over his lifetime, in a collection entitled Postcards from Ed. It was reviewed in Sunday’s New York Times. Writes Jonathan Miles: “If few surprises are embedded in this trim selection of letters, edited by Abbey’s pal David Petersen, it’s because Abbey, on the page, was always Abbey: free ranging, cymbal crashing, an anarchist in mind as well as politics, encased throughout his life in an ever-shaken snow globe of contradictions, provocations, bathroom-wall jokes and fortissimo declarations.” That may be so, but die-hard Abbey fans are sure to add it to their collections.

Tags: What Would Edward Abbey Think, News and Briefs


1 Comment for The Critics: ‘Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast’

TambourineMan 11.21.06 | 10:31 PM ET

Thanks for the heads-up, Jim. I’ll check this out.

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