THE PARADISE OF BOMBS by Scott...

THE PARADISE OF BOMBS by Scott Russell Sanders (Beacon Press: $12; 176 pp.). Sanders’ short pieces suggest a cross between personal essays and memoirs. Intimate and unpretentious, his writing is refreshingly free of the rhetorical excesses and naval-gazing that often blight the form. In the title essay, he recounts growing up near a military arsenal in Ohio during Korean War. His explorations of the guarded dump sites left him bearing traces of deadly poisons: “Perhaps at this very moment one of those alien molecules, like a grain of sand in an oyster, is irritating some cell in my body, or in your body, to fashion a pearl of cancer.”