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Better Together
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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
Constant exposure to beauty, Ellen Meloy warns, can be a dangerous thing. Which is to say the river runner and natural-history writer found herself not long ago estranged from the rugged red-rock Colorado Plateau country in which she had lived for years. "As if by instinct," she writes, "I had long ago embraced the desert with the full knowledge that neither passion nor beauty comes without risk and that these conditions of being might well burn me right up." To regain her sense of self and place, Meloy embarked on a mission to travel through the cold war Southwest of her youth, its deserts studded with atomic-testing facilities and missile silos, confronting midlife crisis with the strangely comforting thought that Armageddon had once loomed in this dry place and had somehow failed to materialize. Along the way she stops in at the Los Alamos nuclear weapons laboratory where the atomic bomb was developed and the Trinity site at which it was first exploded, contrasting the scientific world-view with that of the ancient Anasazi people whose ruins dot the Southwest. Meloy writes with a fine poetic sensibility of the desert's captivating strangeness and of the surreal quality of life at ground zero; her essays touch on biology, physics, literature, spirituality, and psychology in a humane dialogue that readers will find enchanting. --Gregory McNamee --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From 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."
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
See all Editorial Reviews
Constant exposure to beauty, Ellen Meloy warns, can be a dangerous thing. Which is to say the river runner and natural-history writer found herself not long ago estranged from the rugged red-rock Colorado Plateau country in which she had lived for years. "As if by instinct," she writes, "I had long ago embraced the desert with the full knowledge that neither passion nor beauty comes without risk and that these conditions of being might well burn me right up." To regain her sense of self and place, Meloy embarked on a mission to travel through the cold war Southwest of her youth, its deserts studded with atomic-testing facilities and missile silos, confronting midlife crisis with the strangely comforting thought that Armageddon had once loomed in this dry place and had somehow failed to materialize. Along the way she stops in at the Los Alamos nuclear weapons laboratory where the atomic bomb was developed and the Trinity site at which it was first exploded, contrasting the scientific world-view with that of the ancient Anasazi people whose ruins dot the Southwest. Meloy writes with a fine poetic sensibility of the desert's captivating strangeness and of the surreal quality of life at ground zero; her essays touch on biology, physics, literature, spirituality, and psychology in a humane dialogue that readers will find enchanting. --Gregory McNamee --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From 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."
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
See all Editorial Reviews
Product Details
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