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In The Paradise of Bombs, Scott Russell Sanders writes of a world both beautiful and vulnerable. He tells of hikes above the clouds on mountain trails, of expeditions in the predawn chill to hear the calls of owls, of fathers teaching their sons to hammer nails and miter joints. But Sanders also writes of the destructive urges that drape the world's splendors in a mesh-work of fear, luring men to caress guns and fantasize over war, populating toystore aisles with muscular plastic heroes and their faceless sworn enemies, concealing nuclear arsenals amid the peace of glistening forests.

Both reflective and probing, Sanders's essays weigh what lies on the surface of life but also seek the deeper currents that guide our actions and thoughts and form our history. Recalling a youth spent within the wooded boundaries of the enormous arsenal in Ohio where his father worked, "At Play in the Paradise of Bombs" describes how childhood afternoons playing at war against the "Japs" and "Nazis" gave way, as adolescence approached, to the dry-mouthed anxiety of the Cuban Missile Crisis. "Coming from the Country" contrasts the unassumingly self-reliant values of the people that city dwellers call "hicks" with such skills of urban life as knowing how to hail a cab, order dinner from an elaborate menu, mix complicated drinks, and find people who can be paid to repair things. "Digging Limestone" and "In Stone Country" find traces of our elemental passions and dreams in the quarries and rocky outcroppings of southern Indiana, in the ancient fossils transfixed in a slice of stone, the opaque depths of the lakes left by abandoned limestone pits, and the gargoyles and filigree carved by the stonecutter's air-powered chisel.

Today, the chain-link fence that surrounded the Ohio arsenal seems to have expanded to encircle the entire planet in its volatile grip. In a world caught in the cross hairs of potential devastation, these essays speak of the pleasures of daily living and the mysteries of our nature that propel us toward life but also toward destruction.

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