The Last Cheater's Waltz: Beauty and Violence in the Desert Southwest

by Ellen Meloy

Book 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... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0816521530
• ISBN13: 9780816521531
• Release Date: November 2000
• Publisher: University of Arizona Press
• Length: 239 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.5" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

A quirky naturalist revisits the splitting of the atom

I enjoy a book that surprises me, and this one did that. At first glance you expect it to be a book of nature writing about the Southwest deserts. However, the quirky title should be a give away. Meloy's subject is the relationship between the arid regions of the American Southwest and the birth of the nuclear age. Not a duck-and-cover memoir of someone growing up in the 1950s, this book is a thoughtful inquiry into what is for the author a great irony: that nuclear weaponry emerged from uranium deposits mined from near where she lives in southern Utah and then processed and assembled into the first atomic bombs in the deserts of New Mexico. The contrast between the awesome, quiet beauty of the desert and its use to develop weapons of mass destruction is a supreme contradiction that drives Meloy on a journey that takes her to ground zero at White Sands Missile Range, Los Alamos, and a natural gas field bounded by Navajo, Ute, and Apache reservations. The book closes on a walkabout across the mesas and through canyons near her home in the San Juan River valley, which cuts across the Southwest's Four Corners.Also a surprise is the ironic humor she brings to the subject. While never forgetting the threat to survival of humanity that nuclear weapons represent, Meloy also marvels at the incongruities in the details of a story that encompasses the worlds of physicists, environmentalists, biologists, geologists, naturalists, anthropologists, Native Americans, tourists, and the ordinary working people and residents of present-day small towns and rural areas. On a parallel course with the story she tells are the incongruities of her own story, which starts with the accidental scalding death of a lizard in a coffee cup and ends on a high bluff in a tumultuous electrical storm. I recommend this book to anyone with an interest in the American Southwest, its history and geology, and a kind of nature writing that engages subjects beyond itself and attempts to reconcile them. Instead of using wilderness to escape from the realities of the modern world, Meloy attempts to embrace the two, with a wry smile, even while experiencing a shudder that sometimes shakes her to the core.

Irony, humor and compassion

I try to teach my American lit students the tools of objective analysis - for example, that a book is not necessarily "bad" solely because the reader disagrees with the author's views. I try to push them farther than criticism that serves their own prejudices. Meloy's book is a good example of the rewards of going farther.Here is a book that keeps people inside natural history where they belong, with all of our gifts and our hubris. In the author's search to understand the role of the Southwest in the nuclear age, she touches a universal humanism beyond the usual confines of nature writing. (What could be more anti-human than an atomic bomb?)Meloy's tongue-in-cheek phrases, wit and sense of irony may elude the more literal-minded and politically rigid who expect but won't get a polemic. In a few instances this playfulness weakens her serious conclusions about the bomb era in American history (although humor may be used as a catharsis for so horrific a scenario as nuclear war). Best are her fair-handed and lyrical images of the physical world and of places like Los Alamos, the Trinity bomb site in New Mexico, the Utah canyons and her own home acreage, which as a cattle pasture next to town and a graveyard is hardly a wilderness. The weeds and the Pennzoil bottles play starring roles in this funny chapter. This book inspired me to pay attention, to look harder at our past, present and future. It's well worth reading.

Buy this amazing Book!

Meloy's book is refreshing, humorous, and critical all at the same time. Superb imagery guides Meloy's writing as well as the reader throughout the Southwest exploring both the known and unknown like never before. I can feel the San Juan River in my veins, BUY THIS BOOK!

Ellen Meloy's book is recommended for its imagery and humor.

What an interesting and very different book The Last Cheater's Waltz was. Ellen Meloy has an artist's vision through an environmentalist's kaleidoscope. Yes, some of her transitions are disconnected as are some of her metaphysical railings against the atom bomb and desert testing in the southwest. However, she also has a deliciously unique sense of humor, which broadens the books appeal. She sufficiently subordinates her environmentalist tree-hugging or in her case, cactus-hugging compassion thereby avoiding preachiness. She also teases and twits, writing "In town a flying wedge of mountain bikers, dressed in painted-on spandex body gloves mail-ordered from Bulgarian sex manuals, overshot their mecca to the north, and ended up here, spreading the gospel of polymers and finding no converts in a land clearly devoid of granola and decent trails." Quoting one of her other humorous passages about her Utah desert home, where she lives with her husband, she writes:"I inhabit a place where there is not much chance of being eaten by large mammals. So far the possibility of a golf course is slim. The popular media are action videos and pulp info-dramas dished out by satellite. Say "Kierkegaard" around here, and some of us might think you are choking on a walnut. In town a mix of cultures, an artistic bent, and an unexpected worldliness breed a loose-jointed tolerance. In the surrounding country, values fall into the category of ultraconservative rural western,underlain with Utah's insular Mormon theocracy. In the county seat the building that houses local government shares its town block with the building that hosts the predominant faith: the distance between church and state is precisely 34.5 feet. I inhabit a place where I must drive to another state for a screw, and where, when I get to that state, go to a liquor store, stand before a decent selection of wine, and start to sob,the proprietor says in a voice sodden with pity, "You're from Utah, aren't you?"Meloy loves going into the desert on frequent voyages of discovery, both whetting and easing her own inner torments about life, death, and its interplay in nature. She uses wonderful word images. She lives in a place where running away from home means looking for "the nearness of the unimagined." The Last Cheater's Waltz rewards the reader with a glimpse of that home.

An Ironic Juxtaposition of Beauty and Conflict

Meloy's lyrical, witty prose fills "The Last Cheater's Waltz" with a picture of the Southwest Desert Country in all of its magnificence and stark character. In a close-up picture of a part of the U.S. few know as personally as Meloy , the book reflects a passionate interest in not only the unique beauty of place, but its conflicted history in the atomic age. No mere travel book, Meloy's elegant pen takes the reader on a memorable journey nevertheless - a perfect companion to her "Raven's Exile" book and other essays regarding the desert Southwest.