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Book Reviews109 intervention is explored further in the following chapter: healing (particularly of children), visions, and prophecies. The choice of a spouse, for instance , may appear to a person in a dream. In these stories, the Mormon writers are "telling the truth as they see it" (84). In two chapters, Swetnam finds that the congregation is not always harmonious ; some writers choose to include factual evidence that runs contrary to church doctrine or is not "uplifting." The "friction points" indicate that cooperation was not always the norm and that religious leaders could have faults. The writing by women suggests deeper discontent with their restricted roles in the church: "LDS women use these stories to shape the past in ways that help them cope with the present" (107). Whereas male writers tend to exorcise stories from biographies that present less than a perfect image, women prefer to leave in these stories—stories that detail women's dislike of housework, their dressing in men's clothes, or their tricking of their husbands. The most interesting facet of this study is how these factual accounts border on fiction as the writers most often try to meet the constrictions of LDS autobiography/biography. Swetnam performs a valuable service to the profession and the community in accumulating these archives; this lively book is but one departure point for the study of this material, and suggestions for further research are included in the afterword. JOYCE KINKEAD Utah State University JANE TOMPKINS. West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. 245 p. J ane Tompkins makes no secret of the fact: she likes Westerns. More specifically, she is drawn to the "power of Western heroes, the power that men in our society wield" (18). But she is also repelled by this power, jealous for this power, and horrified by the hero's exercise of power. In West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns, Tompkins attempts to capture the feeling of "being inside a Western," to better understand how this once wildly popular (and still compelling) genre has shaped behavior and attitudes . As she notes, Westerns, in one form or another, have touched the lives of nearly everyone who has lived in the first three quarters of the twentieth century, hence the importance of examining their impact on popular culture. Movies and novels, especially those of Louis L'Amour, Zane Grey, and Owen Wister's The Virginian, are her sources. This is a curious book in some ways, both a personal exploration and a professional examination of the emotionality of Western stories. It is divided into two parts, a discussion of the elements of the Western which she follows up with case studies. The elements include death, women, language, landscape, horses, and cattle but not, curiously, Indians. After a detailed explanation covering three pages, she concludes that Indians are there but "not there," in the same way women are "not there" (9). Nor are they in this 110Rocky Mountain Review book either, a striking omission for a feminist author of popular culture writing about Westerns. In the second half of the book, Tompkins has a chapter on The Virginian, or rather the influence of Wister's mother on his writing of the novel; one each on Zane Grey and Louis L'Amour; and a compelling account ofher visit to the Buffalo Bill Museum. Unable to reconcile her distaste for the "celebration of violent conquest" she found there with her personal response to "the shining figure ofBuffalo Bill" (202) she formed from reading novels, the author concludes that historical acts of violence and destruction are born in the individual despite their prevalence in the culture. In the epilogue, she notes the extent to which the Western genre exists in order to justify violence and ends with Amy's plea to husband Will Kane in High Noon: "I don't care who's right or who's wrong. There has to be some better way for people to live" (233). I found the most provocative chapter in the book to be "Women and the Language of Men" in which Tompkins examines the hero's relationships with women as seen through language. Westerns are...

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