192 Western American Literature as he responds to McMurphy’s influence and begins to come out of the fog. Porter also notes Kesey’s emphasis on synecdoche as the chief concentrates on humor and characters’ faces and hands to present his fragmented view of the world of the ward. The book also contains a chapter on the critical reception of the novel and a helpful annotated bibliography. In short, Gil Porter’s One Flew O ver the Cuckoo’s Nest: Rising to Heroism is a fine supplementary text for students, a concise review for teachers, and a scholarly work with enough insights to be rewarding. MARK BUSBY Texas A & M University Natives in Exile. By Dirk Harman. (Santa Barbara, California: Capra Press, 1989. 202 pages, $9.95.) What a novel doesn’t do can be as much a virtue as its substance. Here, Dirk Harman creates Solero, a woebegone jerkwater town in the California desert, and peoples his dehiscing burg with Mexicans, Indians, and rednecks of his own imaginings. Pitfalls yawn in such a scheme. Once he abandons his mind to the temptation, the writer can have so much fun at it that he do-si-does through his book, serving up a parodical wackiness that is at once entertaining but not memorable. Harman wisely avoids such western vaudeville. Solero’s citizens can be eccentric, but their creator has the respect not to cheapen them with flippancy. His aging, ne-’er-do-well prospector may fit the stereotype of the garrulous hermit cadging beers from tourists, but in his depths of perception and care for his fellow Soleroans the old miner takes on human substance despite his characteristic babblings. The author refuses to let his down-at-the-heels rodeo clown, bizarre enough as he passes through on the make in his battered Thunderbird , to become simply a ribald picaro; in how he lives and what he does in order to live we also feel a gnawing pathos for humanity. Beyond that, two things immediately impress. Rather than lean on a plot to sustain him, Harman serves up a series of related vignettes. The cente­ narian rattlesnake shaman, the waitress divorcee, the two drunken Indians clutching a mite of old Spanish treasure appear and reappear, or disappear entirely, in the nature of detritus washed up on a shore anywhere. Here, facti­ tious plot doesn’t get in the way of character. Yet Harman is doing more than drawing figures. His creations stumble through their days, but now and then he gives them the chance to recognize the beauty of their mundane surround­ ings. Chased into his pickup by an evening storm, a bored highway worker idly stares out of his cab through rain on the windshield “distorting the lights of town into bright streams of color across the glass.” So Harman suggests that redemption may lie in seizing such moments, in Solero as elsewhere. PETER WILD The University of Arizona ...

62 Western American Literature Necessary Theater includes dramas by Judith and Severo Pérez, Milcha Sánchez-Scott, Luis Valdez, Arthur Girón, and El Teatro de la Esperanza. Soldierboy, the collaboration of Mr. and Mrs. Pérez, was first produced by the famous Teatro Campesino under the direction of Luis Valdez. The drama depicts a Chicano war hero’s return to his family in 1945, where he fights another war againstAnglo racism and family pressures. Valdez’sThe Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa also shows a family in crisis, battling over the Chícanos’ Mexican heritage in the postwar West. The Mexican cultural hero Villa becomes a role model for Chicanos and continues the tradition of the western outlaw. La Víctima by El Teatro de la Esperanza likewise blends fact and fiction in tracing the life of one family from its first border crossing during the Mexican Revolution to the present. The documentary thus exposes the infamous western history of mass repatriations of Mexicans. Although they often dramatize cultural conflict in the West, Chicano plays share many concerns of western drama. As the above synopsis shows, Chicanos, like westerners, regard their collective past as a still powerful deter­ minant of the present. Chicano characters struggle as fiercely with their Mexican heritage as western heroes do with the haunting frontier legacy. In Chicano and western drama, familial and cultural survival intersect. While the younger generation embraces the future, the older generation provides the link with the past. These and other parallels lend themselves to further inquiry. Because of its almost exclusive reliance on previously unpublished mater­ ial, Necessary Theater complements Nuevos Pasos or other earlier anthologies. The one reprint in the collection is the play by Luis Valdez, who more than anybody inspired the creation of Chicano theater. Valdez, of course, is better known for his still unpublished musical drama Zoot Suit and his collaborative efforts with El Teatro Campesino than for his first play. Although the Teatro’s “actos” are available in print, at least one should have been included in Neces­ sary Theater instead of two selections by El Teatro de la Esperanza. This is a minor omission in the otherwise superbly edited and annotated collection. Huerta, the leading critic of Hispanic theater in the United States, introduces each play with a brief biography of the author, a production history, and a commentary. Necessary Theater is, indeed, necessary reading for Chicanos and Anglos. RUDOLF ERBEN University of New Mexico Growing Up with the Country: Childhood on the Far Western Frontier. By Elliott West. (Albuquerque: University ofNew Mexico Press, 1989. 343 pages, $32.50/$16.95.) Those of us who grouse about the sorry state of today’s youth might con­ sider the antics of children on the western frontier. In Raton, New Mexico, boys stole gunpowder, loaded up a rusty cannon they’d found, and bombarded Reviews 63 their town. In Montana, a traveler tisked at eight-year-olds lounging in brothels. Elsewhere, a besieged schoolmaster kept his rakehell charges in line by firing a pistol now and then at a moose head hanging at the back of the room. Still “the frontier often deceived the casual observer.” Because life was hard, dangers and demanding tasks abundant, frontier children had to grow up fast, argues Elliott West. Yet he also argues that the hardships rarely trauma­ tized young psyches. The children of the Victorian pioneers grew up to be rather well-motivated Victorians themselves, respected ranchers and merchants with a firm sense of what it meant to be a “decent citizen.” If that’s the sum of it, then why a book investigating the role of children on the frontier, detailing their work, schooling, even their games? First of all, because the study tells us much about other aspects of the West. As to schools, even at an early stage in gaining footholds on the land, pioneers pitched in to educate their children. By 1870, for instance, Colorado had as many schools per thousand potential students as did the long-settled state of Massachusetts. In a region frequently dominated by single, often lonely, ranchers and miners, children were special, warmly taken into local activities and given the nurtur...

Reviews 281 nonsense Colville Indian customs but also with the help of a father who occa­ sionally objected to the stern orthodoxy of a fading lifestyle. In her mature years, when her lifewas a struggle for existence, Mourning Dove became a poli­ tically active individual who wrote in halting English sentences far into the night after her work as a seasonal laborer was done. Thus, as Miller explains in his introduction, “She led two lives—a public one as Mourning Dove and a private one as a woman struggling to make ends meet.” The pen name, no doubt, was her salute to the past but also her symbol of “freedom and escape.” The glimpse she gives of the seancing rite and of dancing in the spirit are well done and valuable but somehow fragmentary in terms of the overall tribal scene. Were these strange shamans holding the scattered groups togetherorhad their season already passed? Did the priests really turn their heads the other way? And was there no actual center in this society? Such questions are left with the reader only as left-over parts of a sober reflection on other and more puzzling times. Still, a common-sense wisdom permeates the volume and points definitely to a future where this author knew she belonged. The reader will not regret joining hands for a brief time with Mourning Dove. CHARLES BALLARD University of Nebraska at Lincoln For Earth’s Sake: The Life and Times of David Brower. By David Brower. (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, 1990. 556 pages, $24.95.) Some readers may be a little jolted by a two-volume autobiography begin­ ning: “If not for anything else, I ought to be remembered for my strawberry waffles.” Others will smile whimsically. This seems pretty much the David Brower we met twenty years ago in Encounters with the Archdruid, John McPhee’s portrait of the leading environmentalist. Yet if we already know Brower, why bother reading about him? For here we get some, but not many, details in the agonies-and-ecstasiesat -last-revealed category. Yet how Brower passes on what he does is revealing in its own way. He notes that his father lost his job in the depths of the Depres­ sion. The family clawed along the edge of poverty.A fewyears later, Lieutenant Brower was leading special mountain troops through the dismembering horrors of the Second World War. Then in his activist years, he suffered a series of career-bruising setbacks. Chief among them was his 1969 firing as executive director of the Sierra Club for his activist enthusiasms. But for the most part, Brower’snature is to push on rather than mope about the past. For instance, typical of several references to the firing debacle is: “The Sierra Club was displeased with me...,” a stunning understatement, given the protracted scandal. Perhaps the reason we’re puzzled by the writer’s lack of fang is that in his pages we’re confronting, of all things, a gentleman. And a gentleman knows what truly counts. As a rich-souled man, Brower is willing 282 Western American Literature to forgive past stings, especially when so many wild species near extinction and what little remains of our wilderness need saving. Ironically, among the most lively and useful parts of this discursive selfstudy are Brower’s sketches of friends most important to him, photographer Ansel Adams, writer Loren Eiseley, and Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. In a way, this first volume ends in a cliff-hanger. Brower has brought us up to 1989 and told us somany cheery anecdotes about his conservation cronies that we wonder what’s left for volume two. Unless it’s all the things he didn’t say about himself in volume one. PETER WILD The University of Arizona No Woman Tenderfoot: Florence Merriam Bailey, Pioneer Naturalist. By Harriet Kofalk. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1989. 225 pages, $19.95.) Few people today are familiar with the name of Florence Merriam Bailey, but in the early years of the century this “well bred” Victorian woman was widely known as a field ornithologist, nature writer and conservationist who traveled extensively throughout the western U.S. studying and...

382 Western American Literature and compelling thesis that contemporary critiques of American culture can be characterized by fears of, what I would term roughly, collapse, moral failure, subjection and impotence. Such fears unduly influence “the language and symbols in which policies are considered.” They also often contradict the con­ tinuing importance of the many forces that have shaped us, including the Turner thesis of the western frontier and the Puritan sense of mission. The fears Wilkinson delineates help account for the negativity of most post-war interpretations of American character. Wilkinson himself is not too hard on American culture and character. A fair critic of American excesses and extremes, he also shows the balance and judgment of a mature historian in his attack upon the stridency of recent studies in which “social-character theories become psychiatric smears.” He believes that some writers overstate their cases because ©f a failure to incor­ porate such factors as class and region. Nevertheless, he challenges strains in American character that condone selfishness at home while arousing a danger­ ous moralistic attitude abroad. Throughout this book Wilkinson balances contending values and forces in American culture such as individuality and community. One of the most illuminating portions of the book places such conflicts within specific historic and contemporary situations, which gives great credibility to Wilkinson’s theories about the nature of American culture. As history and social structure intersect in historical case studies—Northeastern revivalism, Overland companies, the Progressives, department store sales­ women, for example—the book establishes an important paradigm for cul­ tural change and continuity. Accordingly, this is a solidly documented and concisely written book that should be considered indispensable for all serious students of American culture. SAM B. GIRGUS University of Oregon A Sense of Place: The Life and Work of Forrest Shreve. By Janice Emily Bowers. (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1988. 195 pages, $19.95.) “Life is one thing, art is another,” said Spanish critic Ortega y Gasset. True enough for the Continent, but in the United States, and particularly the American West, writers base their art on things far more solid to the knuckles. Despite the emotional lushness of The Desert, John C. Van Dyke perspired mightily over zoological and botanical accuracy. Western novelists as different as Wallace Stegner and Larry McMurtry want, first of all, to be authentic, to get their facts straight. The fixation reflects Westerners’ acknowledged debt to their physical circumstances and the close relationship of western life and art. With this in mind, perhaps too easily we forget the unsung historians, anthropologists, and botanists whose scholarly works have served as writers’ guides and whose dis­ coveries have thus broadened the public’s concepts of the West. Reviews 383 The oversight is understandable, since scholars rarely enjoy the fanfare surrounding, say, a Louis L’Amour or an Edward Abbey. Certainly the lack of hubbub applies to Forrest Shreve. Born in 1878 to a family of Maryland Quakers, Shreve earned a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University, then spent much of his life in the Southwest as director of the Carnegie Institution’s Desert Laboratory. “The world knows nothing of its greatest men,” read the dour caption under his picture in a college yearbook. It was a prophetic observation. Decade after decade, perched in the Institution’smodestbuildings on a cactus-studded hill above Tucson or off on field trips across the deserts of Arizona and Mexico, the gentle botanist measured the growth rates of giant cactuses and expanded on C. Hart Merriam’s concept of life zones. The fact of the matter is that little of this lends itself to the zippy writing that sends a biography rocketing to the best-seller lists. Nonetheless, there is the quiet drama here of intellectual development as Shreve, far ahead of the common wisdom, recognizes deserts not as “wastelands” but as wonderfully complex and fragile ecosystems. His classic Vegetation of the Sonoran Desert not only defined the issues pursued by ecologists to this day, but its revelations of nature’ssubtleties lie at the heart of such far more popular writers asJoseph Wood Krutch and Ann Zwinger. PETER WILD University of Arizona Sailing to Corinth. By Irene Wanner. (Seattle: Owl Creek...

160 Western American Literature Evocative chapter headings move the narrative through a sequence both chronological and thematic, marking Brooks’s personal growth and profes­ sional development as, compass-like, she scribed an ever-widening circle of awareness from an immovable center of integrity and resolve: “Hen Leavitt’s Boy,” “Wed and Widowed,” “An Undefined Ambition,” “An Indispensable Apprenticeship,” “The Story She Was Bound to Tell,” “Giving Voice to John D. Lee,” “Old Lovers Gently Rocked,” “Perennial Spunk,” “In the Perspective of the Centuries.” Like all University of Utah Press books, Juanita Brooks is handsomely produced, enhanced with family photographs and Royden Card’sstrong wood­ block prints of regional landscapes. Over fifty pages of notes and sources attest to the thoroughness of Peterson’s ten years of research. An unusually compre­ hensive index makes the historical and literary riches of this quintessentially western volume blessedly accessible. WILLIAM MULDER University of Utah Dreamers and Defenders: American Conservationists. By Douglas H. Strong. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988. 288 pages, $26.95/$9.95.) Douglas H. Strong gives some of the flavor and substance of the American conservation movement by presenting sketches of nine activists: John Wesley Powell, Gifford Pinchot, John Muir, Stephen Mather, Aldo Leopold, Harold Ickes, Rachel Carson, David Brower, and Barry Commoner. Wisely, the author begins with an essay on their forerunners, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Law Olmsted, and George Perkins Marsh. Though one always can quibble over such a list—why the selection of quarrelsome if not virtuperative Ickes over large-visioned Franklin Delano Roosevelt?—for the most part the choices reflect the consensus wisdom on the matter. This will be a good first book for readers unfamiliar with conservation history. Students of the movement, however, will find little new here. And they may fear that the portraits yield a bit too much to the Great Man theory of history while slighting the social and cultural changes providing the contexts for successful reforms. PETER WILD University of Arizona ...

Reviews 275 Magpie Rising: Sketches from the Great Plains. By Merrill Gilfillan. (Boulder, Colorado: Pruett Publishing Company, 1988. 196 pages, $16.95.) A romantic, restless people, Americans have always yearned for the exotic. Now, having ransacked the world for it, they are discovering mystery and wonder in their own back yards, whether those rare qualities are there or not. But the Great Plains, dismissed as “Desert” on many a nineteenth-century map? Are we that hard up for thrills? In Merrill Gilfillan’smeditation, stippled with history and memories of nights camping out star-mad among the coyotes, we often feel that he is convincing us, feel that he is putting us in touch with a new wonder. A couple of examples stand for the best of Gilfillan’s poetic transport based on a rediscovered reality. Unlike most North American natives, the Pawnees believe they came from the sky. At night they yearned skyward, each village taking on a star patron, even positioning their settlements in relation to the constellations above. They had what we romantics desperately crave, a com­ forting link with the universe. Gilfillan’s enthusiasms do not always ring true. Dining in a west-Kansas restaurant, he makes much of a man “in a black net shirt that revealed a full upper-torso tattoo job featuring a portrait of Jesus Christ.” So what? In his eagerness for transcendence, Gilfillan can mistake the simply bizarre for revela­ tory substance. But not often. When he sticks to his job, probing the relation­ ships of land and people, he can rattle off a transcendental moment with the ease of a Barry Lopez or a John McPhee at his mind-rearranging best. In the Texas panhandle, Gilfillan considers the windmill, a device simple in design but awesome in its effect, for it converts “wind to water in one of the great alchemies.” In South Dakota, he finds himself driving across a land so beautiful that it makes “the heart stammer in some foreign tongue.” PETER WILD University of Arizona Utah Wildlands. By Stewart Aitchison. (Salt Lake City: Utah Geographic Series, 1987. 110 pages, $15.95/$24.95.) Utah Wildlands is the most ambitious volume in the Utah Geographic Series. The other three books in the series restrict their scope to a part of the state: Utah Canyon Country, Utah Ski Country, and Utah’s Wasatch Front. But Utah Wildlands addresses the three major regions: the Middle Rocky Mountain, which lies in the northeast, the Colorado Plateau, which lies in the southeast, and the Basin and Range, which covers nearly the entire western half of Utah. Like the others in the series, Utah Wildlands is at once a coffeetable book, a guidebook, and a political essay. That’s attempting a lot, admit­ ...