About a Mountain |  | Author: John D'Agata
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Category: Book
List Price: $23.95
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Rating:  7 reviews
Sales Rank: 109674
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 236
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.8 x 0.9
ISBN: 0393068188
Dewey Decimal Number: 979.313503
EAN: 9780393068184
ASIN: 0393068188
Publication Date: February 8, 2010
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
From “one of the most significant U.S. writers” (David Foster Wallace), an investigation of Yucca Mountain and human destruction in Las Vegas. When John D’Agata helps his mother move to Las Vegas one summer, he begins to follow a story about the federal government’s plan to store high-level nuclear waste at a place called Yucca Mountain, a desert range near the city of Las Vegas. Bearing witness to the parade of scientific, cultural, and political facts that give shape to Yucca’s story, D’Agata keeps the six tenets of reporting in mind—Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How—arranging his own investigation around each vital question.
Yet as the contradictions inherent in Yucca’s story are revealed, D’Agata’s investigation turns inevitably personal. He finds himself investigating the death of a teenager who jumps off the tower of the Stratosphere Hotel, a boy whom D’Agata believes he spoke with before his suicide.
Here is the work of a penetrating thinker whose startling portrait of a mountain in the desert compels a reexamination of the future of human life.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 7
 The Heights and Depths of Las Vegas February 28, 2010
takingadayoff (Las Vegas, Nevada)
5 out of 6 found this review helpful
It's about a mountain. It's about Las Vegas. It's about language change and nuclear waste and semiotics and traffic patterns and Senator Harry Reid and disaster preparedness. It's about living in a new town and Mayor Oscar Goodman and Edvard Munch's The Scream and building demolition and bringing water to the desert.
It's about a boy. A 17-year-old boy who jumps off the tallest building west of the Mississippi.
It's not easy to pin down what About a Mountain is about, despite the name. It moves quickly and covers a lot of ground. It never drags and I found that I was interested in everything author John D'Agata had to say.
His explanation of the Yucca Mountain controversy was the most enlightening I have read, making a complicated political football perfectly understandable. The proposed nuclear waste site is about 90 miles from Las Vegas. The problem of storing nuclear waste safely is difficult, maybe impossible. In addition, transporting all the country's nuclear waste, a massive amount, probably by truck, would hold its own set of dangers.
But even if your eyes glaze over at the prospect of Yucca mountain, you might be interested to learn about the culture of building demolition as spectator sport in Las Vegas, and the special complications of imploding a tall building like the 1,149 foot high Stratosphere. You might be fascinated to learn about the Boneyard, the dusty lot in Las Vegas where historic and not so historic neon signs are stored. Or about the remnants of the early days of Las Vegas that are being revealed as Lake Mead, the city's major source of water, drops to lower and lower levels.
And then there's the boy (the title evokes that of Nick Hornby's book About a Boy), whose suicide D'Agata can't get out of his mind.
Social commentary, literary nonfiction, or Las Vegas memoir? In addition to not being able to pin down what it's about, I can't pigeonhole it into any one category. I don't even know whether it's a short book or a long essay. Never mind, it's a quick read that's fascinating now matter what you call it.
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A hard-hitting series of investigative and philosophical essays May 17, 2010
Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA)
ABOUT A MOUNTAIN began when the author helped his mother move to Las Vegas one summer, and began following a local story of the federal government's plan to store the nation's high-level nuclear waste at nearby Yucca Mountain. His survey of the politics, social issues, health concerns and more surrounding this event creates a hard-hitting series of investigative and philosophical essays probing the heart of nuclear issues and impact.
About a Mountain by john D'Agata May 25, 2010
Mark Power
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Other reviewers have more than adequately described what is in this book so I'll just get right to what I think the book is about and that is, America at a certain point in its history, that is to say NOW. A future historian will find this polemic invaluable despite its disguise as fiction. As simply a reader I found it appalling and brilliant. I am used to being pessimistic about where America is going but now I am beginning to think the Empire is teetering on the edge of the abyss.
book for my son March 26, 2010
Barbara Wilder
0 out of 7 found this review helpful
My 33 year old engineering son did some work at Yucca Mountain while living in Las Vegas. I bought this book for him for his birthday to be given to him this weekend. He loves to read, so I thought this would be a personal touch to his book collection. His mom
 Virtuoso's Riffing Overwhelms Narrative March 11, 2010
J. A. Walsh (Boston, MA, USA)
10 out of 10 found this review helpful
The critical reviews I have read of D'Agata's About a Mountain have been substantially the same: this is a book that shows incredible breadth of perception and seemingly bottomless insight on human nature, all in a really well-written essay, BUT...where are we going in the end? NYT was also critical of some of the artistic liberties that D'Agata took with the facts. I share the former concerns and was less troubled by the latter.
In fact, for me the biggest criticism is that the book was almost too virtoustic on D'Agata's part. Early on, I felt that I was reading a transformative piece of nonfiction literature. D'Agata sets out on a very promising path, writing a piece of really compelling nature/environmental literature that is only enhanced by his ability to make the point without descending into pedanticism, as so much of today's advocacy lit does.
Unfortunately, the tenuous threads that connect D'Agata's observations and meanderings to the Yucca Mountain story in the beginning only fray as the narrative progresses. He leaves behind the bar room and the environmental advocates that he joins to watch the CSPAN debate over the mountatin's fate, and the tangents and associations that his mind makes are never quite as persuasive. Of course, a piece of literature need not be convincing or argumentative at all to be enjoyable and here is to what Phillip Nobile called "intellectual skywriting." Still, the beauty of a piece achieves full flower when it delivers both on its intended persuasion and artistry.
Without a doubt, there are moments where the reader is awed by D'Agata's skill. For example, describing a rag-tag Potemkin parade commemorating Vegas' founding, D'Agata recounts "An Elvis showed up briefly. Turned out he was lost." That is the kind of simple, declarative sentence that shows both the brilliance and the restraint that is necessary to trust yourself and your reader to understand and appreciate context and subtlety.
Unfortunately, there are fewer of these moments as the book progresses. And, when they come, they are too much like the moments when a basketball player passes up the open man to perform his own high-flying dunk. "He pulled the left sock on his left foot up," D'Agata later recounts, in one of the more heavily constructed retellings of an interview. Is this to imply that he might have had a right sock on his left foot? Or, is it merely redundant and gilded and trite?
In this way, the artist was too often allowed to fully indulge himself, and I wish someone had reined him in. There are other examples and they grated on me more as the book wore on (including D'Agata's tendency to string sentences along by taxing "and" to within an inch of its life, as if to prove that it is possible and acceptable to write scores of words without punctuation as long the sentence can still diagram properly).
Sometimes, an artist's best work is better constrained. Four stars for the author, two stars for the editor, three stars for the book.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 7
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