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182 Western American Literature m ovem ents brewed from the combination o f the Depression and the state’s huge population of old people: the EPIC campaign for the governorship by Upton Sinclair, and the “Ham and E ggs” movem ent— both uneasy and unsuc­ cessful California variations on New Deal themes. Starr balances these disturbing or zany events of the ’30s with what are to him the era’s overbalancing successes in the arts, and in public works: the bridges and dams which, he writes with heady optimism, w ill last for a thou­ sand years. These monuments have evoked Starr’s most poetic writing through­ out the series; som e, like Hetch Hetchy, appear and reappear in different per­ spectives. At the same time, these monuments of steel and stone and concrete were matched by artists of word and image; by John Steinbeck and Dorothea Lange, by H ollyw ood’s best film s, and by the histories o f Carey M cW illiams. Thus is M cW illiams evaluated and subsumed into Starr’s own evolving narra­ tive. This vision of the Depression is unlikely to appease historians of the Left, such as Mike D avis, who considers him self the true heir to M cW illiams. From a left, noir perspective, Starr’s view w ill seem hopelessly patrician and amelioristic . The important history for Starr seem s made not by conspiracies or econom ic forces— it w ill be objected— but by the deeds o f hearty, well-m eaning men o f vision, usually members (like Starr) of the Bohemian Club. Endangered D ream s ends with California “com pleted”: its mighty dams and bridges in harmony with its landscape. As California celebrated itself at the Golden Gate International Exposition, a statue of “Pacifica” faced westward— toward the approaching war which would remake California, and which w ill provide the subject for Kevin Starr’s next history. CHARLES L. CROW Bowling Green State U niversity The Island o f C alifornia: A H istory o f the M yth. By Dora Beale Polk. (Lincoln: University o f Nebraska Press, 1996. 398 pages, $15.00.) Anyone with a scholarly interest in the persistence of myth and elem ents of romance in Renaissance geography, as w ell as those who wonder at the lure of California, w ill find Professor Polk’s Island o f California absorbing. The name “California” itself derives from an old Portuguese romance, the Am adis de Gaula, translated into Spanish about 1500 by Garcia Ordonez de M ontalvo, who added a chapter purporting to be the adventures of the son of Amadis. In one adventure he is aided by the black Amazons of an island near the Indies named “California,” ruled by Queen Calafia, a large woman of great beauty. M ontalvo’s California embodied the basic elem ents o f the m edieval “Isle”: a realm of exotic, formidable wom en, near the “Terrestrial Paradise,” remote, Reviews 183 guarded by demons, and possessing great wealth. As Polk demonstrates, it was a romantic legend built upon and sustained by myths as disparate and tenacious as the Eastern sealed Paradise, Prester John, the classical Amazon myth, and even King Arthur. It was in search of such islands as these that Columbus set sail. The name “California” was applied alm ost im m ediately to the land dis­ covered by Cortez in 1533, and thenceforth explorers proceeded to find there what the myth dictated. The Isla de Mujeras on maps of the G ulf of California testified to the presence of Amazons. Polk discusses the debate that ebbed and flowed throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as to whether California (both Baja and Alta, or N ova Albion, as the British called it) was an island or a peninsula— a debate Jonathan Sw ift satirized in G u lliver’ s Travels. Whether California was an island separated from New Spain by a strait, or a peninsula separated by a sea, depended upon the political advantage each definition might give to king or privateer, but the island theory persisted for two centuries, in the face of known fact, largely ow ing to the strength...

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