I found this book to be simply luxurious from page 1. The imagery was vivid and the character sketches charming. The overall concept of the book is incredibly intriguing: a physical metaphor (actually, two) for the flow of history. And those two metaphors - the angle of repose and the doppler effect - are wonderful because they’re opposites, in a sense: the one is about the rush of events going past us as observers, and the other is about the way in which contrasting forces come to equilibrium. The narrator - a wheelchair-bound historian who can’t move his neck - is a perfect illustration of these two ways of looking at history. For all that he’s a stuffy old so-and-so who can’t seem to appreciate history even as it’s happening around him, I thought he was fun to read and enjoyable in his own way.

This book tells the story of the closing of the western frontier through the lens of the sexual revolution of the 1970’s, with all of the associated problematic assumptions you might imagine. For anyone who enjoys history, I’d highly recommend it.