Mirage-Land: Images of Nevada by Wilbur S. Shepperson (review)

Reviews 149 fantasy makes the distinction between truth and fiction problematic. Barber underscores this problem since she previously published a chapter of the memoir in her collection of stories, The School ofLove, and also since the memoir evokes themes and characters of her novel, And theDesert Shall Blossom. How I Got Cultured is about self-creation and culture-creation as a process of telling stories. For Barber, the getting of culture is fabricating and refabricating your sense of who you are and where you are, whoever and wherever you are. ^PAlftELA WALKER Houston, Texas ^ Mifage-Land: Images of Nevada. By Wilbur S. Shepperson, with Ann Harvey. Foreword by Ann Ronald. (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1992. 190 pages, $19.95.) Mirage-Land is a historical survey of how Nevada has appeared to nonNevadans from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Over the course of his forty-year career, Shepperson, a distinguished history professor emeritus at the University of Nevada, Reno, perused national newspapers, popular maga­ zines, journals, letters, promotional brochures, travel narratives, histories, and novels, in order to trace Nevada’s changing image. As Shepperson documents with abundant and often amusing quotations, the Silver State’s reputation has usually been a tarnished one. In the mid-nineteenth century, Nevada was commonly regarded as an “abomination of desolation” with a “mean ash-dump landscape,” a formidable barrier to be endured on the way to sunkissed California. Then, with the discovery of Comstock silver in 1859, Nevada suddenly became one of the great treasure-vaults of the world, with “bones of silver and veins of gold.” By the 1890s the mining boom had gone bust, and Nevada’s reputation had plum­ meted so far that there was talk of revoking its statehood. However, with the Newlands Reclamation Act of 1902, Nevada briefly entertained hopes of re­ demption: through irrigation, a new Eden would bloom in the desert and a moral agrarian society would spring up in the Great Basin. Such hopes proved grandiose and soon dried up. Hard up for cash, Nevada began experimenting with sin for profit, first with prizefighting, then with easy divorce and legalized gambling and prostitution. The image of Nevada as “a second Sodom,” a “dusty Gomorrah,” “the anathema of God,” the “cesspool of the world,”and a “neon-lit leprosaria”dominated the popular imagination. Today, irate state residents use bumper stickers to combat the latest image of Nevada as a radioactive dumping ground; their slogan, “Nevada is not a Wasteland.” Readers will take a kind of perverse delight in following Nevada’s shifting mirage over the sands of time. For, according to Shepperson, Nevada has never 150 Western American Literature evolved a community myth; lacking a Willa Cather or a William Faulkner to forge its past into enduring meaning, Nevada has only projected a series of grand illusions. -Chef ERYLL BURGESS GLOTFELTY University ofNevada, Reno -fjn Nature’ s Terms: Contemporary Voices. Edited by Thomas J. Lyon and Peter Stine. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1992. 212 pages, $35.00/ $14.95.) “Why is so much recent American fiction so barren?” asked Scott Russell Sanders in a 1987 essay called “Speaking a Word for Nature” (Michigan Quarterly Review). “That a deep awareness of nature has been largely excluded from ‘mainstream’ fiction,” he concluded, “is a measure of the narrowing and trivialization of that fashionable current.” What’s worse, this literary phenom ­ enon is “a measure of a shared blindness in the culture at large.” Fiction writers have become increasingly attuned to the environment in the past six years, but as this new anthology demonstrates, our “contemporary voices”for nature have spoken most powerfully in the genre of nonfiction. In their deep attentiveness to birds and bears, to trees, to place, to the present moment, to the passing of seasons, and to the consequences of human action and inaction, the twenty essays in this collection support Thomas J. Lyon’s observation that the nature essay originates in the author’s private fluctuations of consciousness, then reaches its reader by way of written stories. Thirteen of these essays appeared in Lyon’s special issue of the journal Witness devoted to “New Nature Writing” (Winter 1989). But these have been...