Book Review

Rack, Rope and Red Hot Pincers

by Geoffrey Abbott

     What an amazing thing human ingenuity is. Well, maybe not. For every amazing accomplishment our species makes, there seems to be something awful that happens in its shadow. We’ve built skyscrapers, computers, airplanes, and cured diseases. But we’ve also created the nuclear bomb and the American government. And our penal codes have a long-standing tradition of using torture as a means of punishment or for the use of extracting confessions from suspects. Rack, Rope and Red Hot Pincers by Geoffrey Abbott is a cute little book that catalogs and details the devices and methods of torture, most of which were employed in the Middle Ages, yet the narrative does extend into the twentieth century at times. You may want to ask yourself why you would want to read this when there are so many other books to choose from.

Geoffrey Abbott writes popular history books, most of which are related to medieval England and the Tower of London. As a historian, he appears to be a hobbyist more than an academic. He lays out the scheme of the book according to categories like use of straps, weights, racks, water torture, amputations and mutilations, and there is even an entire chapter, my personal favorite, dedicated to whips and flogging. The final chapter is about the ultimate punishment, the death penalty, and the variety of sadistic ways that it has been carried out. If you haven’t read this, you can imagine what kinds of details are used to fill in each chapter. It’s all written with minimal commentary, presenting the bare facts alone, with occasional puns and jokes, none of which are funny.

While the myriad ways in which pain is inflicted can be somewhat interesting for the morbidly minded, it is the context of the torture that interested me the most. Everything in this book is something done by law enforcement either to punish criminals or force them to admit to crimes. Often the crimes they confessed to were not committed by them and sometimes they were forced to implicate innocent people while under conditions of extreme distress. It doesn’t take a psychologist to figure out that a person being pierced with needles, crushed by stones, skinned with hot pincers, or having their limbs dislocated while being stretched on a rack will say anything the interrogator wants to hear in order to get the pain to stop. And yet these things are still going on in our supposedly more enlightened times; the Bush administration allowed for “enhanced interrogation techniques” to be used in the War on Terror including sleep deprivation, physically exhausting postures, solitary confinement, exposure to dangerous animals, and water boarding, the latter being a torture technique that was invented and frequently used in the dungeons of medieval Europe. So despite what they say on Fox News, it really is a form of torture. Of course, this book was written before the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, but the author would certainly have said something about that if he had written this at a later time or revised this edition. He does mention the use of torture in American prisons like Leavenworth, where the idiomatic phrase “being put on the spot” comes from, as well as methods of administering corporal punishment in America.

Another issue of note regarding the context of torture is how many people were imprisoned and tortured for the crime of heresy. About half of the methods described in this short book were inflicted for the purpose of disagreeing with church doctrine, practicing witchcraft, or simply being suspected of saying or doing something that ran counter to the religious principles of the day. The prosecution of religious heresies were largely in the hands of law enforcement. You have to wonder what is wrong with a society that allows the police to amputate a man’s tongue, cut off his nose, and gouge out his eye because he prefers to pray silently rather than aloud. In modern times, this would be considered a thought crime and it looks as though the worst criminals were employed by the police to punish such harmless transgressions and victimless crimes with the most sadistic cruelty imaginable. When the church could not control people’s minds, they turned them over to the government to control their bodies through extreme acts of cruelty.

Most of the other crimes that could get you tortured in the past were petty crimes like theft or public drunkenness. You could also be publicly disemboweled for insulting a member of the nobility. Of course, torture was a special punishment reserved for use against the lower classes, although admittedly there were some cases in which monarchs were beheaded due to political power struggles. Friedrich Nietzsche, in On the Genealogy of Morals, explained that the powerful classes need to express their power through acts of cruelty and violence, sometimes as a public spectacle, so the weaker members of society will receive a visual reminder of who has the most control. The practice of governing is inherently violent to its subjects and such cruelty needs to be displayed so we know what side of the fence we are on. Punishment is the right and the domain of the ruling class and those who take violence into their own hands are punished for crossing that line, not because of the pain and suffering they caused to others.

But Abbott didn’t intend this book to be a commentary on political theory, criminal justice, class conflict, or the irrationality of the human race. It is simply a book that describes torture in all its glorious forms. As such, for scholars, it works as a good source book, giving details of things that are often glossed over by historians covering more conventional themes in historical tomes. There might be times when reading medieval history where you wonder what is meant by thumbscrews or the strappado and the author doesn’t bother to explain because they are more concerned with the narrative at a macro level. I myself had never know what it means to be drawn and quartered until I read this book, despite having come across the term in dozens of other history books I have read.

As for why I read this book, I’ll simply have to say it was a matter of morbid curiosity. Aside from a handful of kinks that turn me on in the boudoir, and possibly the geeky delight I get from teaching syntax classes, I’m not especially inclined to inflicting pain on my fellow human beings, even when their stupidity disgusts me. But I remember going to a carnival funhouse when I was a kid. They had one room labeled the torture chamber with racks, whips, chains on the wall, and a swinging pendulum, made out of cardboard no less, right out of Edgar Allan Poe. A strobe light was flickering while they played a vinyl sound effects record of people moaning while iron chains clinked, wind blew, doors creaked, and cats screeched. The record was stuck and the carnies weren’t paying any attention so I laughed it all off and moved on. And here I am, decades later reading Rack, Rope and Red Hot Pincers.

 

Book Review

Serpico:

The Cop Who Defied the System

by Peter Maas

     

     Most Americans want to like the police. It’s just that so many of us have had bad experiences with them and that makes it difficult. If you grow up in a city, especially one with a moderate or high crime rate, you will learn not to trust the cops from a young age. For most of us, it starts in our teenage years. It’s even worse if you aren’t white or dress somewhat unconventionally. Yes we’ve all heard it said that not all police are bad and it’s unfair that a few bad ones tarnish the reputation of the whole institution. We all know that’s true. That line of reasoning doesn’t go so far when you get harassed, surveilled, and bullied on a weekly basis by the jerks in blue when you aren’t doing anything worse than walking to the corner grocery store or going to school. All that is just surface level annoyance though. There are deep problems with corruption in polic forces all across the country; NYPD is especially notorious for playing dirty, taking graft for allowing gambling, prostitution, drug dealing, and all kinds of crime. This isn’t something the media made up; any New Yorker will tell you it’s real and many of them know from experience.

Then a man like Frank Serpico comes along and tries to blow the whole rotten pustule open for all to see, but in his case, the little that got seen did nothing to stop the rot which was feeding on all levels of the law enforcement system. Peter Maas’s Serpico: The Cop Who Defied the System gives the full run down on this singularly courageous man who tried to fix what had gone wrong. Written like a novel, it is a compelling biography that succeeds because he makes the protagonist a character that is easy to relate to.

Frank Serpico, like so many other great Americans, was the son of immigrants. His family were hard-working Neapolitans who came over from Italy. As a boy he developed a precocious interest in guns and a fascination for police which was partly influenced by their heroic portrayals in the movies and television. He also loved reading and developed an intellectual side that is rare among people who seek employment as police officers, most of which tend to be blue collar with low levels of education.

When Serpico realized his dream of becoming a cop, he exceeded in his duty, courageously making arrests that other policemen were too lazy or scared to get involved with. He immediately became an outsider on the force, not only because of his desire to be the best, but also because he started to see all the corruption; his partners routinely accepted bribes and many of them found places to sleep when they should have been out patrolling the streets. Even worse, Serpico grew a beard and long hair and began looking a little too bohemian for the other cops who thought he was gay or else some kind of hippie radical.

After being transferred to different departments, the corruption got even worse. He realized that the NYPD were actively working with criminals and encouraging crime for the sake of taking bribes. Many of these cops even chose their jobs for that reason alone. This was nothing new; the number of men seeking employment as cops during the Prohibition era spiked for the exact same reason, for example. When Serpico tried to fight the corruption by taking his case to the highest levels of the police department, he was met with nothing but cold shoulders. He eventually took his story to the media and testified in court on the issue of police corruption, but very little was done to stop the problem. Then during a drug bust gone wrong, he got shot in the face. Although he survived, there were sympathy cards he received in the mail from members of the police force who said they wished he had died.

This is a very accessible and visually stimulating book. What really works though is the way the author makes you feel Serpico’s frustrations and disappointment. You know from the start that Serpico will lose but the writing style really brings you close to his emotions and states of mind. The downside of this descriptive writing is that at times Peter Maas veers into purple prose with excessive use of adjectives that becomes slightly annoying. And while the anecdotes about Serpico’s early years as a cop are true, Maas writes about him as if he is a superhero, larger than life and a little cartoonish as he fights for truth, justice, and the American way. It comes off as too good to be true, even though those stories are true. Fortunately, these weaker parts of the writing are at the beginning of the story and don’t continue all the way through.

Serpico is a great book. In fact it was so great that it got made into a classic movie starring Al Pacino around the peak of his career in the 1970s, which is one hell of a credential. The book is somewhat better because Peter Maas makes Serpico so easy to relate to. If you have ever had big dreams of doing something great and then getting disillusioned after you got there, this biography will strike a cord with you. You don’t have to be an honest police officer to relate to Frank Serpico. I myself have been a teacher for twenty years and my experiences with the educational system have been similar to what he went through. I reached a point where I no longer want to have anything to do with such a dirty business. Frank Serpico’s dream was to work for a police force in which the bad cops feared the good cops and what he found was something the opposite way around. He failed in his mission but that fact that he tried is enough to restore a dash of faith in humanity. At least there are some people out there who want things to be right. Frank Serpico was heroic and that is why his story deserves to be remembered. 

 

Book Review

The Spanish Inquisition

by Jean Plaidy

     Religious people often like to make the claim that without religion there would be no morality. Such a claim does not address the problem of why, if it is true, that there can be so many religious people who are immoral. Take the Spanish Inquisition, for example. As a bureaucratic arm of the Catholic Church, surviving a span of time from the Middle Ages to the Napoleonic Wars, they engaged in such crimes and human rights violations as torture, mass murder, extortion, blackmail, ethnic cleansing, and sexual abuse. If they had truly been the moral arbiters of the Spanish Kingdom, they would not have so freely indulged in such atrocities that make your average organized crime family look like a gang of saints. In fact you wouldn’t be wrong to compare the Inquisition to the Nazis for a long list of reasons, rabid anti-Semitism being one of them. Jean Plaidy’s The Spanish Inquisition does a sufficient job of showing just how immoral that political organization really was while analyzing the mechanisms of their practices and motivations, further condemning them as yet another corrupt and vicious criminal element of human history.

This nicely bound impression is actually a facsimile edition of three different books written by Jean Plaidy, a woman who more famously found success as an author of historical romance novels under the pen name Victoria Holt. The first part examines the precursors, origins, and rise of the Spanish Inquisition. She begins with a spasm of righteous anger directed towards the sadists who ran this institution. From her own Christian point of view, she accuses them of ignoring their own religious doctrines for the sake of maintaining their own power and control over Spanish society. Plaidy further examines the first medieval Papal Inquisitions that took place across Europe. From there she details the practices and methods of the Inquisitors, how they used torture as a method of extracting false confessions from so-called heretics, then later to publicly humiliate them and burn them at the stake in public spectacles called autos de fe. They Inquisition dominated Spanish society, ruling them by fear, and enforcing strict conformity of thought, speech, and action. In its details and narrative, this fist section is the best and most informative part of this book.

The second section is of mixed value. On one hand, it gives a strong explanation of how King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella used the Inquisition to help them consolidate and solidify the Spanish Kingdom. Led by the bigoted and sadistic Primate Torquemada, they persecuted minority populations to ensure the uniformity of the Spanish populace. They first went after the most marginalized citizens, Jewish converts to Christianity, and punished them for allegedly practicing Judaism clandestinely after being baptized into the Catholic faith. Soon after, the Inquisition went after Jews who did not convert and the Islamic Moors who also insisted on maintaining their own traditions. Sadly, both groups of people were either forced to convert, chased out of the country, or executed en masse. Unfortunately for the Spanish Kingdom, these wars and ethnic cleansings resulted in an economic crash because all the farmers and merchants were quickly eliminated from society without being replaced. Conservatives of our day who support an anti-pluralistic agenda might want to look at a past example like this to see a possible consequence of such a political program. Cultural diversity often leads to more stable societies rather than the other way around.

On the other hand, this second section of the book goes into a lot of detail about the political intrigues and affairs of Ferdinand and Isabella and their sidekick Ximenes, the man who replaced Torquemada when he died. These passages are not poorly written or even uninteresting, but Plaidy strays too far away from the subject of the Spanish Inquisition to make them relevant to the overall subject matter of the book.

The third part is the weakest. There is a lot about the Spanish monarchy and the succession of kings and queens that came after Ferdinand and Isabella. Again, a lot of this is not directly relevant to the Inquisition. There are, however, a lot of anecdotal stories about the corruption and the wrongdoings of that most hated institution. There are some stories about the Inquisition’s weak attempts at spreading abroad and into the Spanish colonies too. But after a while, these passages read more like lists of terrible things the Inquisition did and less like an interesting engagement with history.

Jean Plaidy’s The Spanish Inquisition gets off to a very strong start but dwindles into chore-like writing by the end. Still, it is a strong and solid analytical work of history that serves as a good overview of this shameful but fascinating sector of Europe, bridging the medieval with the early modern world. By extension, it is easy to see how this piece fits into the puzzle of 20^th century atrocities, totalitarian regimes, the World Wars, nationalist movements, and the modernist revolt in favor of the individual’s liberation. And as for the religious question, you may be left wondering how religion could be the foundation of morality when it seems, rather, that it has so often been the cause of immorality, cruelty, and corruption more than anything else. The Spanish Inquisition is just one of a multitude of examples supporting the latter side of that ethical equation. If anything, the Spanish Inquisition demonstrates why the separation of church and state became such an important idea for the Founding Fathers of America and why history is needed to remind us of this. 

 

Book Review

DB Cooper and the FBI:

A Case Study of America's Only Unsolved Skyjacking

by Bruce A. Smith

By now, a lot of people know about the DB Cooper case. As far as unsolved crimes go, this one is a fascinating story because so little, in fact almost nothing, is known about the perpetrator and, by some estimates, he appears to have gotten away with the skyjacking. With so many unanswered questions, it inevitably attracts a large number of hobbyists, amateur sleuths, conspiracy theorists, and cranks. Of the latter category, it is tempting to include Bruce A. Smith, author of DB Cooper and the FBI: A Case Study of America’s Only Unsolved Skyjacking.

This book starts off with a standard account of the DB Cooper adventure. The day before Thanksgiving in 1971, a solitary man checked onto an airplane in Portland, Oregon. After the flight took off, he told a stewardess he had a bomb in his suitcase. He demanded the plane be grounded and also requested four parachutes and $200,000 in cash. The FBI handed over the money and parachutes, then the plane took off again in the direction of Mexico City. But en route to the Land of Manana, DB Cooper jumped out of the plane, disappearing into the freezing cold night. He and his money were never to be seen again, except for a small stash of bills that were found at a beach on the Columbia River seven years later. Ever since then, the skyjacker has been an endless source of fascination for certain kinds of people. The beginning of Smith’s book does an adequate job of telling the story, but this is no great literary feat. The same story has been told dozens of times in other books so no new ground is broken here.

From there, the author tracks down other people who might have knowledge of the case including FBI officers and other authors who have covered the DB Cooper case. Things start to get a little creepy while he stalks Tina Mucklow, the stewardess who spent the most time with Cooper during the flight. At this point, the author’s sanity comes into question. He not only stalks this woman, who clearly wants to be left alone, but he also states his pet theory that she and everyone else in the Cooper case were part of a brainwashing program conducted by the CIA.

From there a big chunk of the book is dedicated to people who have either admitted to being DB Cooper or have been identified by family members as the unknown skyjacker. Yes, believe it or not, there have been hundreds of people who were suspected of this crime by their own families. Some of the evidence is as flimsy as can possibly be; typically some dysfunctional family in rural Washington or Oregon wonders why Uncle Joe unexpectedly didn’t show up for Thanksgiving and then they later found out he had gone on a gambling spree in Las Vegas or something like that. People who admitted to being Cooper are no more promising. The most interesting one was a transgendered pilot who supposedly carried out the skyjacking for therapeutic reasons; after having the surgery, he needed to do something macho to feel like the transition to manhood was complete. The evidence linking this lady who became a dude is flimsy. The author takes himself pretty seriously when stating that this pilot and Cooper could have been the same because both of them wore loafers and smoked cigarettes. I could never imagine this kind of evidence being considered admissible in court.

Then we get to the really kooky stuff. Smith presents his conspiracy theory that DB Cooper was a participant in the CIA’s MKUltra mind control experiments. I guess they wanted to brainwash people into skyjacking commercial American airliners for some incomprehensible purpose and DB Cooper happened to be their most successful experiment. He entertains the thought that this was done to force the privately owned airline companies into taking safety a little more seriously. There is also something about Cooper’s clip-on tie, which he left behind before parachuting into the wilderness. Smith believes that everyone who has come into physical contact with the tie has developed amnesia regarding details of the case via post-hypnotic suggestion. There is also a lot about clandestine military operations in the Vietnam War and an FBI plot to avoid solving the case to cover up the activities of the CIA. To Smith’s credit, at least he is man enough to admit that he has no evidence to support any of this bunk.

But then it gets even weirder. Bruce Smith, admitting to being a member of the Ramtha the Enlightened One cult in Washington, has some meditation and hypnotherapy sessions in which he claims to meet DB Cooper somewhere in the afterlife. This doesn’t yield any useful information, except that it vaguely justifies the author’s conspiracy theories. I suppose DB Cooper was some kind of supernatural being from another dimension and the author has pursued him so vigorously because he thinks of him as some kind of long-lost (imaginary) friend.

At least the author was smart enough to save his most loony ideas for the end. He is probably sane enough to know that he would lose any of his more skeptical readers if he had mentioned that stuff in the beginning. Then again, maybe he just thought he was saving the best parts for last, thereby making a horrible miscalculation. To be fair, the majority of the book is about relaying information he found during his own research. He presents his ideas clearly and in an orderly fashion which is great if you’re writing something for a freshman composition class. But for the world outside of community college writing classes, the ideas presented need to carry a little more weight to be plausible unless you are a conspiracy theories or a religious nut. The conspiracy theories and mysticism might appeal to other cranks, but for people who actually want a realistic theory of what happened with DB Cooper, this information just ruins the whole book which was nothing exceptional to begin with.

DB Cooper and the FBI is not the best book to read if you want to learn about this skyjacking. There are plenty of other books on the subject and most of them are shorter too because they aren’t bulked up with nonsense. Actually, all the facts that are known are readily available on the DB Cooper Wikipedia page. In the end, this book is more like a chronicle of a Ramtha cult member who spends too much time going down internet rabbit holes and associating with too many other online kooks.

If you really want to know who DB Cooper was and what happened to him after he jumped out of the plane with the money, you aren’t going to find the answers here. You aren’t going to find them anywhere because there isn’t enough evidence to solve the case and it happened so long ago that the surfacing of new evidence is extremely unlikely. But this is the appeal of it all. Just reading the story will make you try to fit the pieces together and fill in the blanks while the uncomfortable lack of closure will leave you wondering about it for long stretches of time. In the end, my gut feeling is that DB Cooper survived the jump and escaped with most of the money, but then again, I am the kind of person who places little value on gut feelings. Maybe DB Cooper lost all his money in a poker game with Bigfoot. My personal theory is that DB Cooper and Thomas Pynchon are the same man. 

Book Review

The Monkey Wrench Gang

by Edward Abbey

     Who hasn’t felt like blowing things up from time to time? I know I have, not that I would actually do something like that. I don’t want to end up in jail and it probably wouldn’t do much to make the world a better place in the long run anyways. Besides, my weapon-making skills are non-existent, I’m clumsy, have shaky hands, and can’t tell the difference between saltpetre and cialis so you wouldn’t want to be near me while I’m carrying a box of high-powered explosives. But really, if you haven’t fantasized about blowing something up at some point in your life, you’re probably not paying much attention to what’s happening in the world. Edward Abbey was certainly paying attention to the destruction of nature and he felt like blowing things up. Instead of doing that, he wrote a counter-cultural novel called The Monkey Wrench Gang and it is all about people who blow things up. It is hard not to cheer them on along the way even though it is obvious from the beginning they are on a quixotic mission.

During a white water rafting trip in Utah, four trickster-type individuals start drinking by their campfire and talk about how great it would be to sabotage all the industrial development taking place across the American Southwest. One is the rafting guide, Seldom Seen Smith, a Mormon with questionable morals and marginal commitments to the Church of LSD, oops I mean LDS. He is basically a clever redneck who wants to preserve nature as it is without the intrusive exploitation of the capitalist system. Doc Sarvis is a surgeon who is fed up with having to treat patients suffering from diseases and injuries caused by the chemicals and pollutants of the modern world. His much younger lover, Bonnie Abzug, no relation to Bella Abzug, is a Jewish hippy feminist from New York who just wants to burn down civilization and start everything over from scratch. Then there is Hayduke, a crude and primitive-minded wildman who just returned from Vietnam. He wants revenge for the nightmare of living through the war and sees a parallel between the way the US military invaded Southeast Asia and the way big corporations are invading the American wilderness. He wants to free himself from society and live like an animal in the desert. His name is derived from “hajduk” which, in Slavic and other Eastern European languages means “outlaw”. Each one represents a different facet of the environmental movement as it was in the 1970s and one of this novel’s strengths is that these are the most memorable characters ever created by this author. While their conversations and personalities alternate between clashing and harmonizing with a lot of punning and humor along the way, they fit together like pieces of a multi-dimensional puzzle.

Another of the novel’s strengths is the descriptive language. Abbey was famous for his ability to describe the deserts of Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona, and he never fails to deliver in that regard in this book. He engages all your senses to make it feel as if you are there, experiencing what the characters experience, feeling the wind they feel, walking where they walk, hiding behind the trees and rocks they use for cover, feeling the vastness of the starry desert sky and being absorbed into that stillness and quietude that one can only feel in the depths of that part of North America. And he describes industrial machinery and the development it brings with just as much detail. Obviously he took great care to use language for the construction of ugly, intrusive human inventions for the sake of taking grim delight in their destruction at the hands of the four heroes.

The plot is minimal and basic. The gang make plans to sabotage whatever machinery they can find, albeit without killing anybody, and proceed to do so. They get pursued throughout the desert by a posse of law enforcement villains and vigilantes who are more concerned with exploiting the land for money than they actually are with justice. All the while, the quartet of eco-warriors know they don’t have a chance of succeeding in tearing down civilization, but they feel compelled to keep monkey wrenching until they get caught.

There are some downsides to the writing. The main characters are brutally racist towards Native American people and politically correct readers of today will definitely whine about the sexist portrayal of Bonnie Abzug. This is a very macho, hyper-masculine novel, although in some ways that is part of its appeal. There was a time when American Leftists actually did have the balls to go toe to toe with the system, unlike today’s useless army of woke wimps who think that “online activism” is actually going to do some good in the world. Yeah, if you actually care about the world you should get off your social media asses and figure out ways to cancel global warming instead of bickering with inconsequential MAGA maggots on Twitter. But then again, there are times when the Monkey Wrench Gang come across as naive and a bit stupid too; for four people who care about preserving nature, they should be smart enough to know that burning construction equipment in the high esert, pushing earth movers into a lake, and blowing up bridges will do a hell of a lot of damage to the environment they want to protect.

But The Monkey Wrench Gang is a big wish-fulfillment fantasy. I don’t think it is meant to be taken in any other way, except maybe as a call to (responsible) action. This is, after all, the book that inspired the Earth First activist group. It really is an action-adventure story that reads like an updated, 1970s version of the traditional Western genre, complete with rough and tumble, whisky drinking, cigar chomping, poker playing outlaws who learn how to stick it to the lawman. They bomb construction sites rather than robbing banks and the whole thing reads like Abbey hoped someday this would be made into a movie. Not a chance of that happening today since the colossally big corporations that run the world now would never stand for any kind of entertainment that might inspire people to fight the system. Is it any surprise that Hollywood seems to be making nothing but junk food for the 21^st century mind these days? Anything that dazzles the senses and prevents people from thinking benefits the big shots at the top of the human society shit pile. There is plenty of room for destructive fantasies in our culture, especially when they critique our way of living or provide a means of catharsis. You can cheer this gang on as they sabotage machinery the same way you cheer on Tyler Durden when he blows uo the bank at the end of Fight Club.

Maybe it’s time for somebody to write a good science-fiction novel about blowing up the internet. There are millions of times I’ve fantasized about doing that.  

 

Michael Shermer

On the Future of Books

with Literary Critic & Publishing Insider Bethanne Patrick

 

Book Review

Fire On the Mountain

by Edward Abbey

     How far should one man go to preserve the land he holds sacred? John Vogelin, the protagonist of Edward Abbey’s second novel Fire On the Mountain, insists on fighting to the death to hold onto his ranch where he was born, where he spent all his life, and where he planned to die. If this sounds like a commentary on freedom and macho American individualism, you are right. If this sounds like the premise for a gripping story, don’t get your hopes up too high though.

Vogelin is an 87 year old man who owns a ranch and some land in southern New Mexico. The government’s plan is to expand the White Sands Missile Range and Vogelin’s property is the only obstacle holding them back. They insist on seizing the land under the law of eminent domain, but old man Vogelin won’t budge. The ranch is all he knows and removing him from it would make the end of his long life a miserable one.

The supporting characters are his grandson, Billy, who is also the narrator. The young boy is visiting his grandfather for the summer, taking a vacation from his home in Pennsylvania. Billy prefers life on the ranch to that in his school and he plans to take over the property when Vogelin dies. The other supporting character is Lee Mackie, Vogelin’s best friend. Lee is a businessman, a native to the region, and the one who tries to be a negotiator and voice of reason for Vogelin as he fights with the government. Vogelin is the most complete character of the three; he has a simple outlook on life but we learn his motivations, his feelings, and the reasoning behind his stubbornness. From the other two, we learn not so much. Grandfather Vogelin is Billy’s hero and the boy vows to fight by his side to the end, but you might wonder at times why he is even in the story to begin with. He is a shadow to the main character and little more. Even the narration, which reads as if Billy is recalling the story from the vantage point of adulthood, does not actually need the first person subjective style that Abbey employs. It would be fine if written in any other voice. Lee Mackie serves a more definite purpose, acting as the conscience and counterpoint to Vogelin’s struggles, but we never really learn who he is as a person. We never learn how he met Vogelin or why he is so attached to the old man, even though he thinks the old man should sell his property to the government and move on. Thankfully, Edward Abbey learned from the mistakes he made in his earlier writings and went on to write better developed characters in his later works.

So what is a reader to gain from reading this short story with a generic plot and weakly-drawn characters? The best part of it all is the beginning when Vogelin, Billy, and Lee Mackie ride on horseback out into the mountains in search of a pony that wandered away from the ranch. The author does here what he always does best: describe the desert with its scenery, its stillness, its vast landscapes, big sky, and unique ecosystems. Abbey never fails to capture the essence of the New Mexico desert and this book is no exception. If you have been to places he describes you will know exactly what I mean.

This long passage also introduces two themes, one of which is important to the plot and the other is something that never gets developed to completion. The latter of the two is Billy’s confrontation with the desert. When on top of a mountain, he comes face to face with a mountain lion. Paralyzed with fear, the two stare at each other and this event transforms Billy’s life. The problem here is that we never really learn how Billy changed after that. Abbey doesn’t describe the meaning of this encounter and he never develops this theme subsequently to its occurrence, although it does get mentioned from time to time. We also learn that Lee Mackie had a similar type of experience when he was younger, but no details are given as to what the event was and how it effected him.

The other theme that gets taken up during their trek into the wilderness is the trio’s encounter with the military. In one scene, they get confronted by some belligerent soldiers from the air force who almost start a gun fight with them. In another part they find their lost horse, only to see it had been tortured, murdered, and mutilated by the same soldiers when they were drunk and had nothing better to do. Abbey’s portrayal of the US military is in no way favorable. And why should it be? This book was written in the 1960s and the anarchist author needed some antagonists for the plot’s conflict anyways.

SPOILER ALERT HERE. The rest of the story is anti-climactic. Grandpa Vogelin gets into a gunfight with government officials, though no one gets killed. The burning of his body at the end seems both significant as closure to the novel and symbolic as well of temporal man’s relationship to the eternity of nature. The fact that starting a massive fire in the desert to cremate Vogelin is a colossal act of stupidity ruined the ending a little bit. Forest fires spread rapidly and in the dry heat of New Mexico, this is not something to be messed around with. It is surprising that an environmentalist like Edward Abbey couldn’t see the ignorance of making a funeral pyre in such a poorly situated located.

Fire On the Mountain is almost a Western. It reads like an interpretation of the Western genre as seen through the lens of the Cold War and post-World War II America with a touch of 1960s counter-cultural defiance of authority thrown in. By today’s standards it would be considered a right-wing anti-government screed, but in Abbey’s day, fighting the government was purely a left-wing undertaking. Keep that in mind when reading anything by this author. It isn’t quite a Western because there isn’t enough action in it to make it much more than a desert drama with a half-assed gunfight near the end. If Edward Abbey hadn’t gone on to write great books like Desert Solitaire and The Monkey Wrench Gang, this short novel would have been forgotten long ago. But if you can’t get enough of Abbey’s talent for descriptive writing, and I certainly can’t, this might be worth a quick read just once.