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—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—and peaceful coexistence be damned!

Customer Reviews:
Fun...and a classic read
Experience a new outlaw justice in this classic Abbey work. Although you may groan at the sometime sophomoric humor, the storytelling outs and the environmental questions are worth considering, even when voiced by terrorists.

trying to understand the position of the Earth First!ers
I put this on my reading list because it's ground zero of the Earth First! environmentalist movement, the vandalism as civil disobedience. And I am not an Earth Firster, tree spiker, SUV dealership destructor, rescuer of bunnies from cosmetic labs, kind of girl. But how who doesn't not love virgin stands of redwoods and the wide, wide, endless sky of the American west and the watersheds of the Colorado? There was no doubt that this author loved the American west, knew the plateaus and cliffs, the wildlife. The descriptions in this book remind you to fall in love with this country all over again, the American Southwest is beautifully, lovingly portrayed in this story. Where's my pack and my sleeping bag because I need to go and rest on the slick rock under the milky way far from the ways for men.

I read this novel to give them 400 pages of my time to explain to me why they do what they do. But progress delayed is not progress defeated. A bulldozer destroyed is not victory. That without our exploding population we wouldn't need to capture the rivers for power, strip the forests for timber and ravage the earth for resources. At one point in the novel, a character actually proposes gathering stones and building houses from them so that we wouldn't need lumber, which would work if the population of the US was a million rather than 100s of millions. The engineers are the bad guys who want to put a chip up the hero's butt and make him calculate exponential factorials, pave the earth, dam the rivers, cloud the sky.

There is a tendency of people who live on the margins to make the assumption that anyone could live on the margins, that anyone could just say no and unplug from the grid. But for the rest of us, it's a lot more complicated than that.

Serious issues, questionable handling
In The Monkey Wrench Gang, Abbey addresses serious issues of our style of living on this planet, addressing a variety of of ways in which we rape the earth, from building large highways to mining, logging, and building dams. There is no question that in the last thirty-five years, since the publication of this book, we have continued the same unsustainable trends. Our practices harm the environment and the other living creatures inhabiting it with us. Our desire for comfort and our greed have led us to ignore the damage we are doing. Currently we cannot escape the knowledge of the devastating of our environment through the blown well from our off shore drilling. We have denied the fact that overpopulation is a major problem. Birth control remains a hot political issue. Unless we curb our population and learn to curb our appetites, we continue to damage the earth we live on. Certainly the book will offend many by the lifestyles of its four major characters and by the methods they use to fight expansion into the West. On the other hand, many of us are politically powerless to stop the large corporations. If you can overlook the scruffiness of the major characters and want to live in harmony with nature, this book is for you.

Best of Class!
The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey is not so much about environmentalism as it is about environmentalists. The story doesn't abound with sprite-like creatures living in a lush world of ferns and flowers; for the most part it takes place in the barren desert. The landscape plays well with the lives of the characters, which are also windswept and bleak, except for Smith, whose life is like the river's edge, here the desert blooms and like Smith's multifamily life, is almost too lush.
The doctor, the nurse, the vet and the river guide are the true endangered species in this story and dealing with the complexities of modern life threatens them all, and all like them, with extinction. Unlike the other helpless creatures being crushed by developmental progress, these are people who can and do fight back.
The war is on! And it's goes from sad to heroic to hilarious. Abbey is probably the best author there is when it comes to illustrating the real villains: ignorance, arrogance, and greed. When these forces collide with determination, intelligence and resourcefulness the result is a comic battle that will leave you choking with laughter.
The characters will live on in your head long after the book is finished, especially George Washington Hayduke. He is at times the most wonderfully stupid genius, but is never insincere or completely in control.
In our modern, electronic world we have authors like Abbey to thank for helping us to discover the boundaries we needed to keep us from destroying the very things from which our humanity springs.

Seeing through Abbey
I read this book in the early 80s when I had just moved to Moab, Utah, where Abbey lived for a while and where he worked for the Park Service. I was appalled by what others have already noted, the glib tacit approval of vandalism.

Abbey was a talented and entertaining writer and could weave magic out of the landscape. I am one of the people who moved to Moab because of Desert Solitaire, a decision I never regretted, altho I left when the town became ruined for anyone but the very rich - See Brave New West by Jim Stiles. But in all Abbey's work, not just Monkey Wrench Gang, a nasty streak surfaces now and then, and at some point I quit reading him.

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