Slumgullion Stew

He's been dubbed 'The Desert Anarchist', but Edward Abbey (1927-1989) cut a much wider swath than just the western deserts of the U.S. -- he managed to offend government lizards and do-gooder do-nothing elitist-naturalists all over the planet! He really did have the shrewdest answer for the preservation of our American deserts: "Stay home -- don't go there!" Abbey worked as a fire-spotter in the National Parks and Forests and managed to hustle some of the lady rangers in the old fire tower while he worked. He also liked to commune with the indigenes of small western town taverns, where he was typically a fish out of water but still managed to not get killed. They broke the mold after they made Edward Abbey. This work is a compendium of Abbey's writings (he would probably say 'scrawlings'), ergo the title, "Slumgullion Stew" which, at my house anyway, is a little of this and a little of that, all put into one pot. I rarely read compendiums but I just wanted to broaden my horizons a bit on Abbey, having heard an audiotape of mostly his 'desert stuff', which was really fun but thought-provoking too. The man was no apologist for anyone and, frankly (based on my own expertise as a life-long outdoorsman and conservation officer), he's right on darn near everything concerning people and their relationship, good and bad, with the planetary environment. These tales, some long, some short, are all lifted from Abbey's previously published works. This assemblage is primarily non-fiction. The book covers people, politics, and nature from California to North Carolina to Europe, and from New York to southern Mexico to Australia, all anecdotally. Abbey's prose is a sort of rambling, Tom Bodette style and the reader quickly inserts himself or herself into his mesmerizing paradigms. The man clearly had no ego whatever, (he obliquely publicly confesses to mastubation, a huge Freudian hurdle for any macho guy! "I comitted adultry with my fist."), and he was never afraid to nail factions like the Sierra Club when they were bulging with nasty methane gas. And when it came to the government and their appurtenent scoundrels, he really took off the gloves. So, in here, you'll read about 'Old Mooneye', a renegade horse gone wild; Death Valley; poverty and squalor in Mexico; the real value of water (sometimes much higher than gold or diamonds!); nuclear noxiousness; cattle round-ups in Australia; Nazi love competitors; a demented Appalachian baseball team; and much more. It's all really a lot of tongue-in-cheek fun, but there's a lot of subtle but great philosophy in here too: "Truth is the enemy of power." One tip to reading "Slumgullion Stew": skip the very first story, read the rest of the book, and THEN come back and read the two-page "Jonathan Troy" excerpt. It's just like Abbey to put his most complex, coherently difficult prose right up front to make people think that they got screwed on the price of a book -- typical Abbey self-gratifying humor, really. This