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apostrophes),where a commercial fisherman named Buckler would often taunt Fats about his competitor’s business practices. “Old Taylor guarantees his baits, fat man,”he would say. “Are these worms guaranteed?” “Damn right,”Fats would reply. ‘They’re guaranteed to be exactly as good as they are. One hundred percent.”As Buckler chuckled his way out the door, Fats would add, “If they ain’t, you bring ’em back and I’ll double-check ’em for you.” This casebook is guaranteed to be exactly as good as it is. M. GILBERT PORTER University ofMissouri Reviews 347 Ace ofHearts: The Westerns ofZane Grey. ByArthur G. Kimball. (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1993. 278 pages, $27.50.) The thesis of this confused, contentious, and condescending treatise is that Zane Grey was a writer of romance. It is not, despite the author’s claim, an original idea, but the book’s crippling flaw is its lack of a clear definition of the term, which appears at various times as simple boy-gets-girl love interest, pruri­ ent eroticism, or the high romance ofHugo or Stevenson. Kimball seems almost completely unfamiliar with Grey’s own writings on the subject: his two 1924 American Magazine articles and “My Answer To The Critics,” in The Zane Grey Collector#* (1978). These writings might have helped him locate Grey accurately where Grey himself thought he fit as a writer of romance. They also would have indicated something of Grey’s deep immersion in Social Darwinism, which Kimball thinks later scholars have overemphasized. So this ace ofhearts, when the chips are down, turns out to be only a deuce. The appendix deserves a last-place mention as surely the most curious entry' in the entire corpus of western literary criticism. This is a sort of Cliffs Notes version of Zane Grey, with plot summaries ofeach ofhis Westerns. “Each entry',” Kimball explains, “includes a ‘key’word or phrase intended merely as a sugges­ tion to help the reader.” The “key” to Heritage of the Desert, for example, is “hands”; for The Border Legion it is “thrill.” May these keys unlock greater treasures for other readers than they do for this one. GARYTOPPING Salt Lake Community College Made From This Earth: American Women and Nature. By Vera Norwood. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993. 368 pages, $37.50/$17.95.) To read almost any history ofAmerican environmentalism or collection of American nature writing, one might think thatwomen have made only minor, if ...

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