The Monkey Wrench Gang

356 pages

English language

Published Sept. 24, 1985 by Dream Garden Press.

ISBN:
978-0-942688-18-4
Copied ISBN!
OCLC Number:
41447429

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5 stars (3 reviews)

The Monkey Wrench Gang is a novel written by American author Edward Abbey (1927–1989), published in 1975. Abbey's most famous work of fiction, the novel concerns the use of sabotage to protest environmentally damaging activities in the Southwestern United States, and was so influential that the term "monkeywrench" has come to mean, besides sabotage and damage to machines, any sabotage, activism, law-making, or law-breaking to preserve wilderness, wild spaces and ecosystems. In 1985, Dream Garden Press released a special 10th Anniversary edition of the book featuring illustrations by R. Crumb, plus a chapter titled "Seldom Seen at Home" that had been deleted from the original edition. Crumb's illustrations were used for a limited-edition calendar based on the book. The most recent edition was released in 2006 by Harper Perennial Modern Classics.

16 editions

Entertaining with gorgeous descriptions

4 stars

The real strength of The Monkey Wrench Gang for me was in Edward Abbey's gorgeous descriptions of the natural environments throughout South West America, particularly Utah. He had a sharp eye for detail and I particularly loved the passages evoking the plant life or vast rocky panoramas. That said, Abbey's whole novel is an entertaining tale, perhaps a little dated now in places, but I still enjoyed following the intrepid quartet along their roads to destruction.

Subjects

  • Environmentalists -- Southwestern States -- Fiction