<p>(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.)</p>

<p>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 <a href="https://www.librarything.com/work/20935892/book/162345087">Acid West</a> as largest (it has some pictures), read a sentence or two, and then go pick the smallest epub I hadn't read instead. </p>

<p>All that was a shame because when I sat myself down, not almost already asleep with a drifting mind, and said <i>That's it. I'm going to do this</i> 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.</p>

<p><a href="https://www.librarything.com/work/20935892/book/162345087">Acid West</a> by Joshua Wheeler went on sale April 17, 2018.</p>
<p><small>I received a copy free from <a href="https://www.netgalley.com/">Netgalley</a> in exchange for an honest review.</small></p>

Wow, Joshua Wheeler can WRITE. This short story/essay collection would be notable just due to it's wonderfully weird subject matter - the bizarre reality of life in Southern New Mexico, home of the Trinity Site, Roswell, Spaceport America, and a hundred thousand Atari games buried in a dump. But Wheeler's fantastic writing style and voice takes it to another level, evoking the dusty, sun-scorched desert delirium (as well as brief forays into other worlds, including a capsule in the sub-stratosphere, a death-row cell in prison, and an asylum on the outskirts of Juarez, Mexico) in a witty, poetic, unique way. Well done.

A book of essays about New Mexico, I found this entertaining and unique. Wheeler explores all the people, places, and stories that make New Mexico what it is. There are some oddities and interesting facts although parts of it I felt lagged. Overall an enjoyable experience though.

Welcome to Southern New Mexico

I know and love Truth or Consequences, Socorro, Bosque del Apache, the Very-Large-Array, Alamagordo, Cloudcroft, and Sunspot, so I was totally up for this collection of essays. It delivers on its promise, but it's also so much more.

This has been blurbed as a collection of "rollicking" essays that capture oddities and curiosities native to Southern New Mexico. Well, I guess in a way that's right, but that also just makes the book sound like an extra-funky "Roadside" travel guide. This book is much more ambitious, multi-layered, and rewarding than that.

Wheeler seems to have mastered the art of laid back next-level New Journalism. Writers like McPhee and Wolfe pioneered that style, but they still felt mostly like reporters, though opinionated ones. Wheeler's book is more personal. It's based on his roots in the area and his intimate and authentic knowledge of the people and the places and events about which he writes. He is more ironic, more pointed, less whimsical, and more deadpan earnest than would be an author aiming mostly at entertainment. He can also be extremely funny, but that may be the liquor talking.

This book is intended to make very clear points - at the outset, about the effect the detonation of the "Gadget", (the code name for the very first atomic bomb ), at the Trinity site had on "downwinders" in Southern New Mexico, and about what it meant for the world, and about the generations of dead and dying New Mexicans who were sacrificed to that test. Other favorite essays address topics like UFO believers, (Roswell is in Southern New Mexico), buried Atari video games, and Spaceport America. The essays share a few aspects - Wheeler is generous in writing about local people, he's wary of government, he's tolerant of ambiguity, he looks at every topic from a variety of angles, and he's willing to follow his intuition. And he's perfectly happy to declare "shenanigans" when warranted.

Sure some of the essays are overlong. Some thoughts are repeated. A few essays don't fit into the Southern New Mexico theme very well. But these are minor quibbles. At the heart of each essay, Wheeler seems devoted to, paraphrasing his words, "trying to differentiate the terrible from the awesome". If that strikes you as at all interesting, then this collection might be just what you want.

(Please note that I received a free advance will-self-destruct-in-x-days Adobe Digital copy of this book without a review requirement, or any influence regarding review content should I choose to post a review. Apart from that I have no connection at all to either the author or the publisher of this book.)

Fascinating stories! Sometimes a bit dense and overly written but overall very intriguing and hard to put down.

Well written and enjoyable read. However, I thought the description given by the publisher did not match the essays. I would not describe them as rollicking.

A fantastically fascinating read that's real hard to classify. Aliens, bombs, New Mexico, acupuncture, Mexico, baseball and more are covered in the various essays it holds.

4.5 stars. Very good collection of incisive, impressive writing. I liked this book a lot, though I would vociferously disagree with the official description leading with "rollicking". This book is the opposite of rollicking; it's almost unrelentingly grim. The moments of humor here and there are welcome, but tend to be black. Once my expectations were violently removed by the first essay, I was able to approach the rest in a more apt fashion. I would at least agree with a later assertion in the official description of the book as "intimate, absurd, and frightening."

Wheeler obviously writes from a place of complicated love for his hometown of Alamogordo, New Mexico, and transports the reader there, or at least into caring about what goes on and has gone on there. Each piece, be it discussing the atomic test sites, UFO enthusiasts, the death penalty, buried video games, Spaceport America, or other topics of local interest and import, is more or less a slam dunk in itself. The majority (all?) of these essays have previously been published elsewhere, but collecting them in this way gives them a weight they deserve and certainly attracts new readers such as myself.

Overall, however, it runs a bit too long, and a handful of the pieces -- each long in themselves -- either tread familiar ground, have a slightly off tone, or seem less thematically relevant to the whole. The essay on atomic testing in NM is very good, but probably won't bring much to students of the subject. The bit about Wheeler's great(great?)-grandfather settling in town is intentionally designed to read more like fiction than non, but since its the only thing in the book that's non a straight-up essay it's rather jarring in a not-great way. The piece towards the end that is set mainly in Ciudad Juárez rather than in NM feels totally out of scope and out of place among the rest and would have been better left out, in my opinion, and perhaps saved for some future collection of essays about contemporary Southwestern USA more broadly, and not about the area directly around Alamogordo, lying 100 miles north.

Upon learning that Wheeler works as a creative writing teacher, my first thought was something along the lines of "Wow, those are some lucky students." It makes me hopeful about the future of creative nonfiction to know that some teachers are actively producing work like this. I hope Wheeler keeps at it -- the writing and the teaching -- and I look forward to reading more of his work as it appears.

https://bookriot.com/2018/02/05/essay-collections-winter-spring-2018/