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Book Reviews171 Shoshones. We hear them in dialogue and through the "I" ofauthentic letters , diaries, and journals: "These are the most friendly, well disposed Indians inhabiting the Missouri. They are brave, humane, and hospitable," Clark wrote about their friends, the Mandan Indians. But of the Teton Sioux, he railed: "These are the vilest miscreants of the savage race, and must ever remain the pirates of the Missouri. . . ." I am not a history buff but I loved how this book put me there: in Washington where Jefferson, in the midst of a Clinton-like scandal, insisted that the expedition take place; along the Missouri River where each Indian tribe offered a new cultural identity; across the Rockies with no food, trail, or maps on how to proceed; along the Pacific shore, reveling in conquest— until the denouement of return. I loved realizing how far and fast we've come, and at what price, from the days when "nothing moved faster than the speed of a horse . . . and as far as Jefferson's contemporaries were able to tell, nothing ever would." Robert L. Root Jr. I recommend these nonfiction works, principally as an exemplary range of recent personal narratives of place and experience. The first book is an exceptional, perhaps sui generis, work; the others are notable collections which, as different as their authors are, have in common sharpness ofvision in every sense. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, by Jean-Dominique Bauby. Translated by Jeremy Leggati. Alfred A. Knopf, 1997. 144 pages, $20.00. Because of a stroke that left him totally paralyzed except for his left eyelid , Jean-Dominique Bauby found himselfa victim of"locked-in syndrome," like a man encased in a diving bell, physically isolated from the rest of the world except for a life line ofintravenous nourishment.Yet his mind was still intact and through an arduous process of internal composition, memorization , and dictation by blinking he wrote this amazing report from the interior . His is a life ofthe mind in the most terrifying and yet most compelling sense: "My diving bell becomes less oppressive and my mind takes flight like a butterfly." Drawing on reserves ofmemory and resources ofimagination he taps "a reservoir of sensations" to revisit a tactile world as intangible as a dream yet still vital and lively in his mind. Created under incredible circumstances , this book is stirring, beautiful, intense, and unforgettable. 172Fourth Genre Field of Vision, by Lisa Knopp. University of Iowa Press, 1996. 139 pages, $14.95. Few writers of "nature essays" give equal attention to both nature and essay, but Lisa Knopp balances both. One essay, "Excavations," starts out as an investigation of moles and ends up being "an essay on essaying;" in the process it embodies both the expressive and investigative aspects of the nature essay as a form of literary nonfiction. Knopp frequently uses the words "exploration" and "meditation" to describe these essays which (she came to realize) were thematically linked by their interest in ways of seeing not only the natural world but also the events at the center of the writer's personal life. Well grounded in immediate observation, judicious study, and wide reading, the prose is lively, flexible, and precise. About This Life:Journeys on the Threshold ofMemory, by Barry Lopez. Alfred A. Knopf, 1998. 270 pages, $24.00. In his introduction to this collection Barry Lopez summarizes his advice to writers: "Read. Find out what you truly believe. Get away from the familiar." The pieces are far-ranging in time (written over seventeen years), in subject (from a short cryptic narrative about a murder proposal to a long account of four flights encompassing 110,000 nautical miles to understand "what the world craved" in cargo), and in setting (Lopez is a tireless globetrotter and the places he touches down include the Caribbean, the Arctic, Japan, and the American Southwest). As individual as the pieces are, they are linked by Lopez's compassionate perception of everything he observes and experiences. His speculations about what he observes are grounded in intensely personal reflections, especially in an essay like "Replacing Memory," which includes a moving portrait of grief and loss in a meditation about the possibility of...

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