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

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   October 5, 2001
8 out of 9 found this review helpful

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.


An oil-water mix of anti-human polemics and natural history   August 9, 2001
Mark E. Baxter (Layton, UT United States)
9 out of 27 found this review helpful

Odd book - a kind of oil and water mix of anti-human politics and natural history of a small portion of the American southwest.

Lots of the book concerns nuclear test sites and vague ruminations. However, the author rarely lets any chance to disparage humans pass. In typical socialist enviro-speak she sees humans and any human sign as an evil scar upon the land - of course with the exception of the house, well, out-buildings and cars on her piece of purchased wilderness in a place where before "there was no one". (Reminds me of the definition of an eco-freak as someone who already has his cabin in the woods.) A typical sentiment would be "In Utah, God wants you to have a lawn". Mildly entertaining when you first read it 50 years ago in Abbey's writings but about as fun as hearing Uncle Morty give you the 800th telling of his hemorrhoid operation - time to move on.

On page 145 she finds a piece of asphalt and yellow paint in her yard (which she thinks is nuclear waste of some kind)and spends until page 194 and lots of dead tree (paper) figuring out that it is harmless and not evidence of the end of life as we know it. This kind of makes the 200 pages of anti-nuclear sentiments impotent. In her defense, she at least tells the truth - unlike many anti-humans who openly state that any means justify the end.

A better question is why do I keep reading these "nature" writings that usually turn into political rants? I think it's because I love these areas and have spent time in them and once in a while - although much too rarely - I find a gem like David James Duncan's "The River Why" or Norman Macleans "A River Runs Through It", and hope to find another. Sadly, what passes for nature writing these days is usually an offensive slur to people I've known and loved in my years of rambling through Western North America with my itinerant geologist father.

In the end, maybe I'm the dumb one because I paid 15.95 for this book. I recommend that whoever reads this not.


Untitled   March 23, 2000
5 out of 6 found this review helpful

I have just finished Ellen Meloy's Last Cheater's Waltz. As a native of the Colorado Plateau and fourth generation "miner's" daughter, I was so pleased to see such a well researched and thought provoking work. It is such a work that will leave a person contemplating about the havoc we have let loose upon this fragile environment of the Four Corners. I have recently been drawing my own map of the Known Universe and ironically it covers much of the same territories. Thank you Ms Meloy, I could hardly put it down.


Buy this amazing Book!   January 19, 2000
Nate Sosa (The Abandoned Meander (as if))
3 out of 5 found this review helpful

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!