Aspen: Blazon of the High Country by Ann Zwinger (review)

Reviews 93 between:Jeri Tanners’ironic account of Ollie North, a prince kissed by Fortune and turned into a frog, a reversal of a motif. Kelton’s admission that his four best historical novels contain much stolen from Texas folklorists is more interesting than yet another defense of Dobie against the petulant, pre-Lonesome Dove author, Larry McMurtry. “The Pleasure Frank Dobie Took in Grass”is notwhatyou think. The title is as down to earth as “The Folksong Scholarship of Dorothy Scarborough.”The funniest writers in Texas are here: Paul Patterson, Robert Flynn, and Joyce Roach. Other writers, from the field and the library, illustrate Chaucer’s “infi­ nite variety,”including Kenneth Davis, RobertJ. Duncan, R. A. Hill, Paul Stone, Sylvia Grider, Connie Ricci, Tom McClellan, Janet Jeffery, Faye Leeper, Lera Lich, W. M. Von-Maszewski, and Charles Shafer. In short, this is another amazing collection of the fruitful interests of the Texas Folklore Society following along the lines of former collections such as T For Texas: A StateFull ofFolklore (PTFS #44, 1982), Paisanos: A Folklore Miscellany (PTFS #41, 1978), What’s Going On1 ?(In Modem TexasFolklore) (PTFS #40, 1976), but then we are skipping a bounty of others. This year’s is Number 49. JAMES W. BYRD East Texas State University CHARLES E. LINCK East Texas State University Aspen: Blazon ofthe High Country. Text by Ann Zwinger, photographs by Barbara Sparks. (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1991. 86 pages, $17.95.) Beyond the Aspen Grove (1970), Ann Zwinger’s illustrated description of the ecology of her family’s 40 acres in the Colorado Rockies, marked Zwinger’s debut as a nature writer and linked her name with aspens. Since that first successful book, Zwinger has produced a dozen more books about the natural history of various western ecosystems, from the alpine tundra to the arid desert. Most of Zwinger’s books contain her own illustrations; one of them—Run, River, Run—received theJohn Burroughs Award in 1976; and all of them are carefully researched, combining scientific accuracy with her personal response to and love of the land, written in a style one savors while simultaneously growing fond of Zwinger’s unpretentious personality. In Aspen: Blazon ofthe High Country Zwinger collaborates with photographer Barbara Sparks as they pursue their “aspen quest,”creating parallel portraits of North America’s most widely distributed tree. In this 8/4" x 10” glossy-paged coffee table book, Zwinger’s 25 pages of text complement Sparks’ 60 color photographs as both explore the beauty and natural history of the aspens of the western states. The reader learns about the aspen’s reproductive strategies, 94 Western American Literature about its adaptations, and about the various menaces with which it must con­ tend, from beaver, to spider mites and leaf beetles, to fungus, to burning winter sun. The photographs—like the text, arranged by season—capture not only the familiar flaming yellow aspen groves of autumn, but different spring wildflower understories, an elk-browsed aspen bole, a Basque sheepherder’s carving, and the dwarfed krummhollz aspens of high altitudes. Although very informative, the book is clearly intended to be beautiful rather than scholarly, as it lacks the index, references, plant lists, maps, and footnotes characteristic of Zwinger’s other work. The book is well done, al­ though one finds an occasional stylistic gaffe (“I stand standing on rough rocky soil”), an amusing typo (“U.S. Cavalay”), and the erroneous duplication of page 26 following the Acknowledgments section. Finally, Zwinger betrays that west­ ern defensiveness common to WLA meetings: “Northeasterners may praise their massive maples and grandiose oaks, all those russets and reds, but none of those leaves ignite light as aspen do.”So there. CHERYLL BURGESS University ofNevada, Reno REPRINTS OF NOTE Breitenbush Books Shetzline, David. DeFord. $9.95. The Chama Press DeShields,James T. Cynthia Ann Parker. $35.00. Da Capo Press Buscombe, Edward. The BFI Companion to the Western. Foreword by Richard Schickel. $26.95. Falcon Hill Press De Quille, Dan. The Gnomes oftheDead Rivers. With an introduction by Lawrence I. Berkove. $29.00/$10.00. Henry Holt and Company Haruf, Kent. The Tie that Binds. $9.95. Heyday Books Thompson, Lucy (Che-na...