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

From the award-winning author Eating Stone . A painful juxtaposition of natural beauty and warrior wastelands. — The New York Times Book Review

Feeling disconnected from the wildly beautiful desert that she has known intimately for twenty years, award-winning writer Ellen Meloy embarks on a search for home that is historical, scientific, and spiritual. Her Map of the Known Universe, devised to guide her quest, reveals extraordinary details of a physical link between the atomic age and her home on Utah's San Juan River. The Map grows to include Los Alamos, the Trinity A-test site, White Sands Missile Range, and primary sources of uranium.
Meloy casts her naturalist's eye on the Southwest's geography of consequence, where she finds unusual local bestiaries, the bodies of long-buried neighbors, an underground bubble of nuclear physics in a national forest, and the rich textures of nature on her own eight acres of land.  The Last Cheater's Waltz: Beauty and Violence in the Desert Southwest  is multilayered and far-reaching, yet always infused with Meloy's prodigious research, finely tuned prose, and wry humor.

The Last Cheater's Waltz is an elegant confrontation with mortality, heartsprung, funny, and profound. —William Kittredge

Morbid, macabre, elegant, graceful, beautiful, and flat plain funny, this book crackles with that most wonderful of phenomena, life. It's startling to see how Ellen Meloy sees the world. I'm grateful for her vision. —Rick Bass

A thoughtful recounting of one woman's travels in the post-Cold War American West. — Kirkus Reviews