About a Mountain [Hardcover]

John D'Agata (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 8, 2010

From “one of the most significant U.S. writers” (David Foster Wallace), an investigation of Yucca Mountain and human destruction in Las Vegas.

When John D’Agata helps his mother move to Las Vegas one summer, he begins to follow a story about the federal government’s plan to store high-level nuclear waste at a place called Yucca Mountain, a desert range near the city of Las Vegas. Bearing witness to the parade of scientific, cultural, and political facts that give shape to Yucca’s story, D’Agata keeps the six tenets of reporting in mind—Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How—arranging his own investigation around each vital question.

Yet as the contradictions inherent in Yucca’s story are revealed, D’Agata’s investigation turns inevitably personal. He finds himself investigating the death of a teenager who jumps off the tower of the Stratosphere Hotel, a boy whom D’Agata believes he spoke with before his suicide.

Here is the work of a penetrating thinker whose startling portrait of a mountain in the desert compels a reexamination of the future of human life.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. In this circuitous, stylish investigation, D'Agata (Halls of Fame) uses the federal government's highly controversial (and recently rejected) proposal to entomb the U.S.'s nuclear waste located in Yucca Mountain, near Las Vegas, as his way into a spiraling and subtle examination of the modern city, suicide, linguistics, Edvard Munch's The Scream, ecological and psychic degradation, and the gulf between information and knowledge. Acting as a counterpoint to Yucca is the story of a teenager named Levi who leapt to his death off Las Vegas' Stratosphere Motel. It is testament to D'Agata skillful organization of the book, broken into Who, What, When, Where, and Why, and his use of a rapid sequences of montages—Levi's suicide is spliced with Orwellian Congressional debates on the stability of Yucca Mountain—that readers will be pleasurably (and perhaps necessarily) disoriented but never distracted from the themes knitting together the ostensibly unrelated voices of Native American activists, politicians, geologists, Levi's parents, D'Agata's own mother, and a host of zany Las Vegans. A sublime reading experience, aesthetically rewarding and marked by moral courage and humility. (Feb.)
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From Booklist

An innovative essayist (Halls of Fame, 2001) and dynamic anthologist, (The Lost Origins of the Essay, 2009), D’Agata brings his syncopated, collaged, and devastatingly deadpan style to a finely calibrated and nervy inquiry into civic follies. When his mother moves to Las Vegas, D’Agata becomes curious about the collision of science, politics, and corruption behind the ludicrous federal plan to transport deadly nuclear waste cross-country to unstable, porous Yucca Mountain. While trying to collect the outrageous facts about this doomed project, he also gathers troubling information about Nevada’s atomic-bomb test sites and Las Vegas’ dwindling water supply and its standing as the nation’s suicide capital. Shifting between a young man’s leap to his death from the Stratosphere Hotel and the absurd effort to design signage to warn future earthlings away from the proposed radioactive mountain, he sheds light on myriad delusions, scams, and lies. D’Agata’s distinctive narrative rhythms, melancholy wit, and keen perception of the social facade and the toxic darkness it conceals make for an acid test, and a ballad about the endless enigmas of humankind. --Donna Seaman

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 236 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (February 8, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393068188
• ISBN-13: 978-0393068184
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.9 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #504,683 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #79 in Books > Science & Math > Nature & Ecology > Mountains

More About the Author

John D'Agata is the author of "Halls of Fame," "About a Mountain," and editor of "The Next American Essay" and "The Lost Origins of the Essay." He teaches creative writing at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, where he lives.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Virtuoso's Riffing Overwhelms Narrative, March 11, 2010

By 

J. A. Walsh (Boston, MA, USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: About a Mountain (Hardcover)

The critical reviews I have read of D'Agata's About a Mountain have been substantially the same: this is a book that shows incredible breadth of perception and seemingly bottomless insight on human nature, all in a really well-written essay, BUT...where are we going in the end? NYT was also critical of some of the artistic liberties that D'Agata took with the facts. I share the former concerns and was less troubled by the latter.

In fact, for me the biggest criticism is that the book was almost too virtoustic on D'Agata's part. Early on, I felt that I was reading a transformative piece of nonfiction literature. D'Agata sets out on a very promising path, writing a piece of really compelling nature/environmental literature that is only enhanced by his ability to make the point without descending into pedanticism, as so much of today's advocacy lit does.

Unfortunately, the tenuous threads that connect D'Agata's observations and meanderings to the Yucca Mountain story in the beginning only fray as the narrative progresses. He leaves behind the bar room and the environmental advocates that he joins to watch the CSPAN debate over the mountatin's fate, and the tangents and associations that his mind makes are never quite as persuasive. Of course, a piece of literature need not be convincing or argumentative at all to be enjoyable and here is to what Phillip Nobile called "intellectual skywriting." Still, the beauty of a piece achieves full flower when it delivers both on its intended persuasion and artistry.

Without a doubt, there are moments where the reader is awed by D'Agata's skill. For example, describing a rag-tag Potemkin parade commemorating Vegas' founding, D'Agata recounts "An Elvis showed up briefly. Turned out he was lost." That is the kind of simple, declarative sentence that shows both the brilliance and the restraint that is necessary to trust yourself and your reader to understand and appreciate context and subtlety.

Unfortunately, there are fewer of these moments as the book progresses. And, when they come, they are too much like the moments when a basketball player passes up the open man to perform his own high-flying dunk. "He pulled the left sock on his left foot up," D'Agata later recounts, in one of the more heavily constructed retellings of an interview. Is this to imply that he might have had a right sock on his left foot? Or, is it merely redundant and gilded and trite?

In this way, the artist was too often allowed to fully indulge himself, and I wish someone had reined him in. There are other examples and they grated on me more as the book wore on (including D'Agata's tendency to string sentences along by taxing "and" to within an inch of its life, as if to prove that it is possible and acceptable to write scores of words without punctuation as long the sentence can still diagram properly).

Sometimes, an artist's best work is better constrained. Four stars for the author, two stars for the editor, three stars for the book.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Heights and Depths of Las Vegas, February 27, 2010

By 

takingadayoff "takingadayoff" (Las Vegas, Nevada) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

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This review is from: About a Mountain (Hardcover)

It's about a mountain. It's about Las Vegas. It's about language change and nuclear waste and semiotics and traffic patterns and Senator Harry Reid and disaster preparedness. It's about living in a new town and Mayor Oscar Goodman and Edvard Munch's The Scream and building demolition and bringing water to the desert.

It's about a boy. A 17-year-old boy who jumps off the tallest building west of the Mississippi.

It's not easy to pin down what About a Mountain is about, despite the name. It moves quickly and covers a lot of ground. It never drags and I found that I was interested in everything author John D'Agata had to say.

His explanation of the Yucca Mountain controversy was the most enlightening I have read, making a complicated political football perfectly understandable. The proposed nuclear waste site is about 90 miles from Las Vegas. The problem of storing nuclear waste safely is difficult, maybe impossible. In addition, transporting all the country's nuclear waste, a massive amount, probably by truck, would hold its own set of dangers.

But even if your eyes glaze over at the prospect of Yucca mountain, you might be interested to learn about the culture of building demolition as spectator sport in Las Vegas, and the special complications of imploding a tall building like the 1,149 foot high Stratosphere. You might be fascinated to learn about the Boneyard, the dusty lot in Las Vegas where historic and not so historic neon signs are stored. Or about the remnants of the early days of Las Vegas that are being revealed as Lake Mead, the city's major source of water, drops to lower and lower levels.

And then there's the boy (the title evokes that of Nick Hornby's book About a Boy), whose suicide D'Agata can't get out of his mind.

Social commentary, literary nonfiction, or Las Vegas memoir? In addition to not being able to pin down what it's about, I can't pigeonhole it into any one category. I don't even know whether it's a short book or a long essay. Never mind, it's a quick read that's fascinating now matter what you call it.

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3.0 out of 5 stars The information in this book is fascinating., October 25, 2011

By 

Wobert (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: About a Mountain (Paperback)

The Yucca Mountain situation is yet another example of the stupidity and shortsightedness of politicians and policy-makers. Thankfully the project was recently cancelled. Although the subject is interesting, I'm annoyed by D'Agata's writing style, which is very mannered and pseudo-poetic in a faux naive way, kind of like Josephine Hart writing investigative journalism.