Joshua Wheeler

(Yesterday I went to write this review and one of my cats sat on my hand, so I didn't write anything. Today that cat is sleeping on the floor downstairs, so I have no excuse unless I spill my iced coffee on the keyboard or something.)

It took me more than one try to get into this book. More than two.
Maybe even three or four. I order epubs on my kobo by size and then pick the largest file I haven't read. Or, the smallest. I kept hitting rel="nofollow" target="_top">Acid West as largest (it has some pictures), read a sentence or two, and then go pick the smallest epub I hadn't read instead.

All that was a shame because when I sat myself down, not almost already asleep with a drifting mind, and said That's it. I'm going to do this and started reading, I completely fell in Wheeler's essays of New Mexico, of cows blanched by nuclear bombs, of space ports built by millionaires, of low hung houses and ranches, all of it. But the tales did require concentration. View them as an antidote to internet listicles and mindless candy crush games, a mental cleanser for an afternoon such as the ones I have here, a continent away from New Mexico, full of snow rather than sand.

Acid West by Joshua Wheeler went on sale April 17, 2018.
I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.… (mehr)

Writing good essays is hard. It's hard to strike the necessary balance between personal and universal, between telling a story and making a point, between what's in your head and what's in your gut. Good essays have to be grounded in both the individual experience of the author and in more generalized concepts so the reader can feel welcome, feel invested. And this collection walks that balance beautifully, stitching together the author's family history with the tidal surges of local, national, and international history. The author writes about South New Mexico, a place not many of us have ever visited or even thought about that much but by engaging with events that ripple all the way across the world-- the first atomic bomb detonation, Virgin's "Spaceport" built on former ranchlands, the exhumation of legendary buried video game cartridges--the local and the global become intertwined, inseparable.

There is a palpable sense of grief pervading most of the essays in this collection: grief for the dead and dying, grief for a city and its murdered multitude, grief for the poison unleashed by the birth of the atomic age, grief for what's forgotten, what desperation forces the brain to cling to, what is passed down in the blood and bone and stories of a family. But there's no nihilism here, not really. There are reminders that faith doesn't necessarily have to be about religion but about the land, the existence of others, the hope that maybe small things can make small changes, that small stories about forgotten people can bring dignity even in the midst of overwhelming pain.

Highly recommend this book… (mehr)