The Last Cheater's Waltz: Beauty and Violence in the Desert Southwest
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About this book
From the recipient of the 1997 Whiting Award. Feeling disconnected from the wildly beautiful desert that she has known intimately for twenty years award-winning writer Ellen Meloy embarks on a search for home that is historical scientific and spiritual. Her "Map of the Known Universe " devised to guide her quest reveals extraordinary details of a physical link between the atomic age and her home on Utahs San Juan River. The Map grows to include Los Alamos the Trinity A-test site White Sands Missile Range and primary sources of uranium. Meloy casts her naturalists eye on the Southwests "geography of consequence " where she finds unusual local bestiaries the bodies of long-buried neighbors an underground bubble of nuclear physics in a national forest and the rich textures of nature on her own eight acres of land. The story is multilayered and far-reaching yet always infused with Meloys prodigious research finely tuned prose and wry humor.
