Review by Booklist Review
Strangeness, wordplay, and loss saturate Wheeler's debut essay collection, launched from southern New Mexico but aimed at the creaky mythology of American progress. Here in the underbelly of the West, folks are perversely proud to belong to the part of the state that is robbed or abused or forgotten entirely, where much of the land is grayed out on maps because of military installations, and where every household has a stash of trinitite, the glass formed when the nuclear Gadget was tested in 1945. Wheeler shows us a land of promised riches, like the rumored lode of old Atari video games buried in a toxic landfill, and false starts, like Spaceport America, built by Richard Branson and subsidized by taxpayers but left waiting for a commercial space industry that has yet to emerge. Wheeler visits a UFO festival, investigates the final days of a condemned criminal, and discovers a utopian asylum. Wheeler also introduces us to his family: proud, decadent, dying. If his hallucinogenic prose sometimes resembles the great twentieth-century gonzos, so does his moral outrage and his yearning for authenticity.--Driscoll, Brendan Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This unwieldy, sometimes inspired essay collection renders the banal strange and the strange even stranger. Wheeler¿s hometown, Alamogordo, N.Mex., provides setting and subject for an examination of how conceptions of American identity have shifted over time. His writing is mesmerizing in descriptions of a minor league baseball game¿¿Gordo¿s mascot getup is the epitome of semipro: the fins only come to his elbows¿¿or the special suit a daredevil must wear while freefalling 24 miles to Earth. But he can also get lost in his attempts at profundity, as when the cameras attached to the suit to capture the freefaller¿s point of view are dubbed ¿a Digital Empathy Imaging System of Mankind,¿ or DEISM, ¿a word we remember from our high school studies of the Enlightenment.¿ Most interesting is how Wheeler challenges conventions of the personal essay with unexpected stylistic devices, like the onomatopoeic crack of the baseball bat to punctuate shifting streams of consciousness in the essay about baseball, or breaking the essay about his ailing grandmother attaching her shoes to her feet using rubber bands into recursive vignettes in order to show how memory revises and edits itself with each remembrance. The collection is ponderous and self-important on the whole, but punctuated by moments of lyrical insight. (Apr.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
The subject matter of this debut collection of lyrical nonfiction by author Wheeler (creative writing, Louisiana State Univ.; coeditor, We Might As Well Call It The Lyric Essay) is uniquely American. The idiosyncratic and familial essays are set in the lower Southwest U.S. region; the essays themselves center on southern New Mexico. If readers haven't already considered the particularities of the region, these poetic, postmodern, and highly entertaining writings are a superb introduction. Topics include ethical considerations of the atomic era, the history of the Old West, and UFOs, all seemingly underscored by a backdrop of baseball. A standout piece considers the homefront of the atomic tests that occurred in New Mexico during the last century leading up to the bombs that were used in Japan as an effort to end World War II, a homefront that was permanently impacted by radiation. -VERDICT For lovers of a good postmodern romp through the Old West.-Jim Hahn, Univ. Lib., Univ. of Illinois, Urbana © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A collection of essays on life in the unenchanting part of the Land of Enchantment.There's not much for young folks to do in the Tularosa Basin, a swath of the brown land of what Wheeler (Creative Writing/LSU) calls SNMSouthern New Mexico, that is, which is far from the glamorous climes of Taos and Santa Fe: "There is no easy way to explain that here in the underbelly, south of the 34th parallel, which cuts the state in half, things are different." You can take drugs or go four-wheeling or go looking for UFOs or play video gamesand be repaid by the video game company's efforts to dump waste in your backyard, a story that rivals the tale of Karen Silkwood in circumstantial lethality if not toxicity. At their best, Wheeler's essays limn this American outback and its unsettled and sometimes-unsettling ways: "Momma is at the hospital, getting her broken blood fixed again. We're twelve, maybe, unsupervised and learning to get fucked-up. Choking each other out." In a dusty rejoinder to Chuck Klosterman's Fargo Rock City, Wheeler shows a fine eye for the stranger aspects of this country, from spaceports built before there are rocket ships to dock there to what he dubs "patrionoia," a blend of patriotism and paranoia that "runs rampant in Southern New Mexico." His account of digging ditches in the caliche soil to repair water lines is a masterpiece of proletarian wistfulness, calculated to make the reader sweat, and his accompanying notion that the water in those lines is haunted is a provocative one for any desert dweller. Still, the book runs much too long, and some of the essays are set pieces that don't do much: The author's take on the nuclear legacy of the region is unoriginal, and his foray across the line into Ciudad Jurez pales in comparison to the work of the late Charles Bowden.In need of trimming and occasional rethinking but with much promise as well. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
