This book has helped a lot of people to realize the follies in the U.S. environmental landscape and created a generation of environmentalists when it first came out. It's adventurous, crude, and doesn't beat around the bush on the characters issues and our governments in our environmental stewardship. Reading it in today's landscape there is still a lot to learn from the explicitness and expressiveness of the characters despite the Deus ex machina.

mixed feelings as i read this book but the end was so good that it left me feeling really good about what i read. abbey tells a damn good story, overlooking his 1960s white manness. made me miss the desert.