- Raven's Exile
- The Anthropology of Turquoise: Meditations on Landscape, Art, and Spirit
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The
Last Cheater's Waltz Beauty and Violence in the Desert Southwest by Ellen Meloy The University of Arizona Press, 2001 |
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| The
Cold War was waged for nearly
40 years, but the scars it left behind on the earth -- the battlefields
of a nuclear arms race -- are much more lasting. Across vast stretches
of the desert Southwest where bombs were conceived and tested, life
will
never (and can never) be the same.
Visiting theTrinity test site where the first atomic bombs were created half a century earlier, Ellen Meloy writes: "When you put yourself in the bomb makers' boots, it is not difficult to see why they chose this particular edge of the universe for what was, on its face, a technical exercise. Here was a desolate void on which to stage a mesmerizing spectacle of engineering, the grand drama of abstract human science made fire. If there was love here, it was not for this desert but for perfection, success, the splendor of man's handiwork." |
"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." | ||
| Also by Ellen Meloy
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