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266 Western American Literature The American Indian in Film. By Michael Hilger. (Metuchen, N.J.: Scare­ crow, 1986. 206 pages, $18.50.) The reader looking for a detailed analysis of films about or containing American Indians will be disappointed. The essays introducing each major period are brief and sometimes too general to be satisfactory. Discussions of cinematographic techniques used to characterize Native Americans are inter­ esting and helpful, but again more suggestive than complete. Another frustra­ tion is the mystifying set of criteria followed in listing actors. Hilger indicates that he has focused principally on Indian roles, whether played by Indians or non-Indians, but no great consistency in following that principle is evident— sometimes films are listed with major white actors; sometimes not. What is very useful within each period is the apparently complete listing of films in which Indians had any part whatever, along with many contemporary reviews so that the work is a truly valuable resource for anyone doing research on the topic. Valuable also isHilger’sconclusion: “... the fiction of these films reveals little about real American Indians but a lot about the evolution of white American values.” JANE MADDOCK Western Montana College The Graywolf Annual. Edited by Scott Walker. (Saint Paul: Graywolf Press, 1986. 181 pages, $7.50 paper.) Rarely does a book startle our hearts with bright hope, if not for earthly salvation, then at least for literature. The Graywolf Annual is one of the promising exceptions. This for two reasons. First because, along with a couple of other recent anthologies, it signals the revival of the personal essay as a serious but now again beloved art form. Second because the selections themselves are so bright. Annie Dillard, who elsewhere sometimes strains to squeeze mystery from happenstance, here joins a group of Fundamentalist students singing each morning before the fountain of a western state university. We’re not taken by her disarmingly simple explanation that “I like to sing.” As the weeks go by, she notes that the hymns seem written “by the same people who put out lyrical Christian greeting cards and book marks,” but for the most part her observa­ tions are kindly, loving, and unexpectedly revealing of what we’re doing here in the universe. Ditto that for most of the other pieces. David Quammen tells of a triangu­ lar love affair he had with the lares of a trout stream in Montana, a down-atthe -heels novelist, and his quirky, grapefruit-addicted wife. Tearing us with Reviews 267 bittersweetness, it ends in divorce, both of the couple and from the stream. More journalistically, Terrence Des Pres investigates the instant mythology caused by the death of writer John Gardner. Western writers abound: Barry Lopez, Brenda Peterson, William Kittredge . If these varied selections are any indication, there are a good many essayists out there rendering their lives into seamless marriages of wisdom and art. PETER WILD The University of Arizona My Life in the North Woods. By Robert Smith. (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986. 328 pages, $17.95.) Robert Smith’s My Life in the North Woods is really two books in one. Unfortunately, in this case, two books for the price of one is not especially good news. The first book is a memoir recounting the winter during the Great Depression when Smith, at age eighteen, was forced to leave college and go to work as a clerk in a Maine lumber camp. The second book isa murder mystery —still nonfiction—which is set in the Maine woods and stars the characters whom Smith has introduced in the first half of the book. Both memoir and murder mystery are well-written, but the anecdote and exposition of the memoir are joined uneasily to the narrative of the mystery, and the resulting book is a hybrid of uncertain and therefore not quite satisfying form. The individual parts, though, are thoroughly satisfactory. Smith does not look back these fifty years through a haze of nostalgia. Instead, he tells it like it is—or was. His memoir is plain and largely unreflective, but by no means is it uncolorful. Whether Smith is describing the sudden death of one of his mean-spirited bosses, or the...

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