From Library Journal
These are superbly written pieces on a land marked by the "murky confluence of purity and filth... a troubled mixture of hope and despair... a place where chances are taken." Journalist Sloan writes not only of the casinos and bordellos of Las Vegas, Reno, and Lake Tahoe but of the Nevada countryside, its hills and desert, "the quirks and curiosities of its native life." In "Darkness Itself," he tells of the discovery of over a thousand dead mustangs, the wild horses that roam the West, all shot. "Joe Conforte's Unrequited Love" goes back to 1959, when the owner of the Triangle Ranch (a popular cathouse) tried to frame a crusading district attorney with statutory rape. "A Grain of Hope" looks at Mildred Miller's "miracle" clinic, which, using laetrile and dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO), claimed to cure over 300 ailments, from cancer to mental illness. Similar to Calvin Trillin's "American Chronicles" series in The New Yorker , this exceptional collection has obvious regional appeal but should also find a place wherever fine writing is appreciated.
- Ron Antonucci, Hudson Lib. & Historical Soc.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
- Ron Antonucci, Hudson Lib. & Historical Soc.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
A park ranger, Don Cox, cuts down the oldest living thing, a bristlecone pine, in the Snake Range on the Utah-Nevada line because he's trying to help the cause of science--in other words, the world's oldest living thing is destroyed as it is discovered. In "The Team," a woman goes to a casino looking for a job as a cocktail waitress, but is soon playing the slots for a quasi-legitimate company that has carefully calculated the odds; the woman wins $172,000, but must fork it over to her supervisor and take home her $5-an-hour check. In "Darkness Itself," a young rodeo rider is falsely accused of shooting mustangs. Animal rights advocates cry foul and lurid headlines run in the papers, but in truth only a few mustangs have been killed, it isn't clear that they were shot, and the Bureau of Land Management, inadvertently, may have been responsible. Moreover, because they are protected, there are so many mustangs in the mountains that ranchers regard them as rats. In "Frontier Justice," an overzealous DA cleverly extradites a convicted serial killer from California--the notion being that the murderer will never die in liberal California, but Nevada will take care of him. Sloan, a reporter for the Reno Gazette-Journal, appears to be fleshing out news stories here, but he brings to his unusual and universal "true" tales the sensitivity, style, and ironic distance of a great fiction writer. A wonderful book. John Mort
