A rollicking debut book of essays that takes readers on a trip through
the muck of American myths that have settled in the desert of our
country's underbelly
Early on July 16, 1945, Joshua Wheeler's great grandfather awoke to a
flash, and then a long rumble: the world's first atomic blast filled the
horizon north of his ranch in Alamogordo, New Mexico. Out on the range,
the cattle had been bleached white by the fallout.
Acid West, Wheeler's stunning debut collection of essays, is full of
these mutated cows: vestiges of the Old West that have been transformed,
suddenly and irrevocably, by innovation. Traversing the New Mexico
landscape his family has called home for seven generations, Wheeler
excavates and reexamines these oddities, assembling a cabinet of
narrative curiosities: a man who steps from the stratosphere and
free-falls to the desert; a treasure hunt for buried Atari video games;
a village plagued by the legacy of atomic testing; a lonely desert
spaceport; a UFO festival during the paranoid Summer of Snowden.
The radical evolution of American identity, from cowboys to drone
warriors to space explorers, is a story rooted in southern New Mexico.
Acid West illuminates this history, clawing at the bounds of genre to
reveal a place that is, for better or worse, home. By turns intimate,
absurd, and frightening, Acid West is an enlightening deep-dive into a
prophetic desert at the bottom of America.
