One Life at a Time, Please, by Edward Abbey (Holt, 225 pp., $17.95)
Near the beginning of that monumental berg of English literature, Travels in Arabia Deserta, Charles M. Doughty remarks that “for the rest the sun made me an Arab, but never warped me to Orientalism.” Similarly, it might be said of Edward Abbey— novelist, naturalist, essayist, and journalist—that, in his forty years in the deserts of the American Southwest, the sun has never warped him to Occidentalism, he being an enemy of the technological, industrializing, and expansionist spirit of the West, as well as of the bolo-tied, Cadillac-and Cessna-propelled Western agribusinessmen who, along with their counterparts in the real-estate and extractive-mining industries, are currently laying claim to his favorite stalking grounds, from Lame Deer, Montana, to Wolf Hole, Arizona. Who but Ed Abbey would fly from Tucson to the University of Montana at Missoula to deliver an address before five or six hundred cowboys, cowgirls, local ranchers, and “instant rednecks” (i.e., transplanted Easterners) titled “Free Speech: The Cowboy and His Cow” and demanding the immediate removal of all domestic animals (“these ugly, clumsy,
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