Last Cheater's Waltz (Hardcover)

Ellen Meloy describes a corner of desert hard by the San Juan River in southeastern Utah, a place long forsaken as implausible and impassable, of little use or value - a place that she calls home. Despite twenty years of carefully nurtured intimacy with this red-rock landscape, Meloy finds herself, one sunbaked morning, staring down at a dead lizard floating in her coffee and feeling suddenly unmoored, estranged from her own environs. What follows is a quest that is both physical and spiritual, a search for home. Guided by her "Map of the Known Universe, " Meloy sets out to reclaim her "neighborhood, " actually an area of hundreds of square miles, and discovers, bit by bit, the extraordinary details of the physical links between this patch of earth and the atomic age. Her Map grows to include Los Alamos, the home of the Manhattan Project; the site of Trinity, the world's first A-bomb test, and the larger borders of the White Sands Missile Range; and the primary sources of uranium - used to fuel the very cores of half a century of bombs - which lie in her own backyard.