Overview
In this abundant space and isolation, the energy lords extract their bounty of natural resources, and the curators of mass destruction once mined their egregious weapons and reckless acts. It is a land of absolutes, of passion and indifference, lush textures and inscrutable tensions. Here violence can push beauty to the edge of a razor blade. . . . Thus Ellen Meloy describes a corner of desert hard by the San Juan River in southeastern Utah, a place long forsaken as implausible and impassable, of little use or value—a place that she calls home. Despite twenty years of carefully nurtured intimacy with this red-rock landscape, Meloy finds herself, one sunbaked morning, staring down at a dead lizard floating in her coffee and feeling suddenly unmoored. What follows is a quest that is both physical and spiritual, a search for home.
Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
The latest offering by the author of Raven's Exile: A Season on the Green River, winner of a Spur Award, is an eloquent account of the travels she embarked on throughout the 200 square miles surrounding her remote southeastern Utah home on the Colorado Plateau. While an implicit environmentalist argument informs the book, Meloy's tone is more elegiac than polemical, her stance more subjective than political. She felt driven to explore what she calls "a map of the known universe" because of a persistent feeling of alienation from the breathtaking scenery surrounding her. Her explorations took her to Los Alamos and to the Trinity National Historic Landmark in New Mexico, site of the first A-bomb test, where Meloy contrasts the stark beauty of the area with the test's cost to vegetation and animal life. She also meditates on the irony that current wildlife recovery programs are managed by the military at White Sands Missile Range. Meloy's sadness and anger over human predations on the landscape are heartfelt and moving. Musing on the technological and chemical penetration of the desert, she writes: "With consequences we likely underestimate, nature will take these intrusions into its own silent chemistry." (Mar.)Library Journal
Ever since World War II, when plutonium was manufactured in Hanford, WA, and the atomic bomb was designed and tested in New Mexico, the U.S. government has placed a number of nuclear facilities in the American West. How the development of atomic power affected this region is the subject of these two very different books. The Atomic West is a collection of papers presented at a symposium sponsored by the Center for the Pacific Northwest at the University of Washington. The well-documented articles examine both the promise and the problems of the Manhattan Project. Offering the perspective of someone who lives in the region, award-winning nature writer Meloy (Raven's Exile: A Season on the Green River, LJ 6/15/94) visited the Trinity Site, Los Alamos, and the sites of uranium mining. She describes the landscape and the effects of radiation on the area's plants and animals. Both books fill niches in history of science collections. Meloy's offers insight for the nonspecialist and is recommended to public libraries, especially regional collections. The Atomic West is for larger academic libraries.--Dale Ebersole Jr., Univ. of Toledo Lib., OHBill Sharp
[The] essays provide a painful juxtaposition of natural beauty and warrior wastelands....[She relates] the strange history that left these ...communities in thehands of bomb makers and missile testers.— The New York Times Book Review