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.

I liked a lot of things about this book (interesting prose with some fantastic lines, a thrilling and inspiring plot) but the sexism and anti indigenous racism overshadowed everything. Also if I had to hear that audiobook narrator say “pinyon pine” one more time I was going to jump off the Glen Canyon Dam.