Essays. Early on July 16, 1945, Joshua Wheelers great grandfather awoke to a flash, and then a long rumble the worlds 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, Wheelers 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...