PDF The Monkey Wrench Gang PS Harper Perennial Modern Classics Edward Abbey 9780061129766 Books
Download As PDF : The Monkey Wrench Gang PS Harper Perennial Modern Classics Edward Abbey 9780061129766 Books
Ex-Green Beret George Hayduke has returned from war to find his beloved southwestern desert threatened by industrial development. Joining with Bronx exile and feminist saboteur Bonnie Abzug, wilderness guide and outcast Mormon Seldom Seen Smith, and libertarian billboard torcher Doc Sarvis, M.D., Hayduke is ready to fight the power#8212;taking on the strip miners, clear-cutters, and the highway, dam, and bridge builders who are threatening the natural habitat. The Monkey Wrench Gang is on the move#8212;and peaceful coexistence be damned!
PDF The Monkey Wrench Gang PS Harper Perennial Modern Classics Edward Abbey 9780061129766 Books
"The Monkey Wrench Gang holds up well; is still entertaining and thought provoking. All of the characters are flawed, but that may be the point. Those of us who fit well into society are seldom eager to risk our comfortable lives in the service of a greater good. Those of us who are marginalized, however, have less to lose and may be more likely to make political statements and take political actions.
The adventures of George Hayduke, Doc Savis, Bonnie Abzug and Seldom Seen Smith as they attempt to fight back against development and the destruction of the West by destroying bulldozers, dams and the egos of their pursuers are cartoonishly entertaining. Today, the idea of an environmentalist throwing a beer can out of a car window seems more than a little odd. In 1975, however, Abby seemed to be combining the mythic image of the Marlborough man with some new age sensitivity to the environment to create characters who both entertain and enlighten and have held up well for 40 years.
If you are looking for a light read to entertain you on a flight or at the beach, and have missed it in the past, The Monkey Wrench Gang is a great choice. It is also worth reading to get some historical knowledge and understand where Earth First got some of their ideas. So enjoy the humor, the descriptions of the West and your trip back in time with one of the books that inspired the environmental movement."
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Tags : The Monkey Wrench Gang (P.S.) (Harper Perennial Modern Classics) [Edward Abbey] on . Ex-Green Beret George Hayduke has returned from war to find his beloved southwestern desert threatened by industrial development. Joining with Bronx exile and feminist saboteur Bonnie Abzug,Edward Abbey,The Monkey Wrench Gang (P.S.) (Harper Perennial Modern Classics),Harper Perennial,0061129763,Humorous - General,Political,Environmental protection,Environmental protection;Fiction.,Environmentalists,Environmentalists;Fiction.,Humorous fiction,Southwestern States,Southwestern States;Fiction.,Literature Fiction / Literature,ABBEY, EDWARD - PROSE CRITICISM,FICTION / Classics,FICTION / General,FICTION / Humorous / General,FICTION / Literary,FICTION / Political,Fiction,Fiction - General,Fiction-Humorous,GENERAL,General Adult,Modern contemporary fiction (post c 1945),REFERENCE / General,United States
The Monkey Wrench Gang PS Harper Perennial Modern Classics Edward Abbey 9780061129766 Books Reviews :
The Monkey Wrench Gang PS Harper Perennial Modern Classics Edward Abbey 9780061129766 Books Reviews
- I've read this book a few times now, Edward Abbey truly is an amazing author. This book takes you on a journey through environmental stewards or eco terrorists as some might say. The activism in the name of the environment is riveting and exciting. This is one of those books you stay up through the night reading
- I bought this several years ago right around the time the stuff at the Bundy ranch was boiling over. It seemed a good time to have a look at some sort of western libertarian anarchism. What binds Abbey's characters and the Bundy gang was a sense of ownership of the collective but a weird sense. The Bundy people defended grazing on collective land - private benefit of public land without compensation of the public. The gang in the book have a weird sense of protecting the land through destruction, but they aren't steward of the land. One thing that struck me was how willfully they all littered. And on top of all of that, neither the Monkey Wrench Gang or the Bundy Gang were the first ones on the land they claimed to protect through their ownership. The Amerindians are pretty absent from both narratives. As a book, Abby is a good writer, even though I had trouble differentiating between Hayduke and Seldom Seen Smith (not enough difference in the characters, if you ask me). It was good enough that though I kept putting it aside, I kept picking it back up.
- The Monkey Wrench Gang holds up well; is still entertaining and thought provoking. All of the characters are flawed, but that may be the point. Those of us who fit well into society are seldom eager to risk our comfortable lives in the service of a greater good. Those of us who are marginalized, however, have less to lose and may be more likely to make political statements and take political actions.
The adventures of George Hayduke, Doc Savis, Bonnie Abzug and Seldom Seen Smith as they attempt to fight back against development and the destruction of the West by destroying bulldozers, dams and the egos of their pursuers are cartoonishly entertaining. Today, the idea of an environmentalist throwing a beer can out of a car window seems more than a little odd. In 1975, however, Abby seemed to be combining the mythic image of the Marlborough man with some new age sensitivity to the environment to create characters who both entertain and enlighten and have held up well for 40 years.
If you are looking for a light read to entertain you on a flight or at the beach, and have missed it in the past, The Monkey Wrench Gang is a great choice. It is also worth reading to get some historical knowledge and understand where Earth First got some of their ideas. So enjoy the humor, the descriptions of the West and your trip back in time with one of the books that inspired the environmental movement. - I decided to read Monkey Wrench Gang because one book of Edward Abbey's or another was always sitting at my late father's bedside table. My Dad tended to read existential, philosophical novels and was a big fan of Hemingway and Camus. Clearly I had the wrong idea of what Abbey was about. The Monkey Wrench Gang does occasionally wax philosophically, but only in the midst of one character whining or thinking about the bourgeois influence of sanitized American adulthood on the natural environment. Most of Abbey's energy in Monkey Wrench Gang is spent having a good time - following a troupe of 4 troublemakers each shaking off their own shackles of middle-aged boredom to help fight for environmental freedom. But what I found I liked most about Abbey was that, if that was his plot, it's devoid of any sentimentality, any politeness, and even just the occasional whiff of sympathy, even for the characters we care about. At its center, George Hayduke, the beer-guzzling sorta-traumatised vet who never met a can of cheap beer he didn't like, is so fun to watch not because of his drive, but because his drive to clean up the environment seems to come from nothing more than his hatred of anything besides open land, and even then, he'd never be able to put that into words. For a 400+ page book, Abbey's narrative never slags - there's always a race, a crime, or a good yelling match keeping the book moving. And then there's that philosophical sense, which shows up in asides throughout the book, making Abbey's writing a lot like a Vonnegut or Tom Robbins - prone to smart observations that make you like the writer even more than you thought you already did. Take this observation, on women going to bed before men while camping "The ladies first. Not because they were the weaker sex - they were not - but simply because they had more sense. Men on an outing feel obliged to stay up drinking to the vile and bilious end, jabbering, mumbling, and maundering through the blear, to end up finally on hands and knees, puking on innocent sand and befouling God's sweet earth. The manly tradition." Observations like that show how punchy Abbey can be in making a point, even is his point is that civilized westerners, to the environment and beyond, have been pretty annoying.
- This is supposed to be one of those 'don't miss' classics. Personally I found it all a bit silly. I have no problem with it's message of protecting the wilderness from the predations of developers, but the characters were caricatures and the plot seemed concocted by the imagination of an idealistic teenager. Perhaps it seemed radical in its day but in our 'age of terror' it just doesn't ring true.
