About a Mountain is a nonfictional, narrative, book-length essay about the experiences of journalist John D'Agata in the city of Las Vegas. It primarily concerns the titular mountain, Yucca Mountain, but it also incorporates broader commentary on the city and its inhabitants as a whole.
The book looks at how people interact with each other and their surroundings, particularly in the setting of a city like Las Vegas, which is sometimes seen as a representation of excess and artificiality.
The book opens with D'Agata's move to Las Vegas, where his mother wants to retire. He helps her move out and stays there for a little while, intrigued by the eccentricities of Summerlin. While he's there, his journalistic tendencies kick in, and he becomes interested in the problem of Yucca Mountain, a nearby mountain that has plans to be used as a giant dumping ground/storage container for nuclear waste.
The problems with this plan are plentiful: the mountain is too close to Las Vegas to be safe, the leakage results were fudged, and there's no way it will be able to sustain the waste for the estimated time period of its half-life of 10,000 years. This number is a shadowy story all to itself, as scientists generally agree that at least ten half-life cycles need to pass before radioactivity fades to safe levels. While in Vegas, D'Agata talks to locals and chases down leads, trying to find the source of this problematic issue. No one seems to be particularly helpful, and he keeps getting referred to different organizations. He believes this to be an important issue, but few people care enough to help him.
The mountain isn't the only thing on his mind, however. Vegas is a city that's beautiful in its own way, but it has a lot of problems. Suicide is one of the major ones covered in this book: the suicide rates in Las Vegas are incredibly high compared to the rest of the nation. D'Agata takes a temporary position at a suicide hotline, and he has the opportunity to interact with many people who are suffering from depression. One particular boy, Levi Presley, kills himself by jumping off a building, and this event provides the backdrop for the entire book, being introduced at the beginning and used as a closing device in the last chapter).
The authenticity of D'Agata's data has come into question, and D'Agata's responses have been less than satisfactory; it's unclear how much "fact" in this "nonfictional" work is entirely fabricated. Regardless, it's an impactful book, one that deserves to be at the root of some controversy and that alerts people to a crisis of which they might otherwise be unaware.
