In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

150 Western American Literature Hutton has done a remarkable job of research and the result is a wellwritten account of Sheridan’slast twenty years. Much of the information isnot new, but the author provides a different perspective in that the story is told from the General’s vantage point. Hutton does neglect such topics as the economic and social impact that the army had on the frontier. One also would have enjoyed more on the military justice system, figures on desertions, and medical problems that Phil Sheridan’s Army faced. Nevertheless, this is a fine book, richly illustrated with maps and photos, that should stand the test of time as a significant work on the western military experience. JOHN W. BAILEY Carthage College Rediscovering America: John Muir in His Time and Ours. By Frederick Turner. (New York: Viking, 1985. 417 pages, $25.00.) Two things, in the main, separate this study from the rest of the pack in the Muir revival. First, it offers a detailed, inner sense of Muir’s environ­ ments as Muir himself might have seen and felt them; and second, it presents a deeply informed economic, sociological, and environmental view of the United States in Muir’s lifetime—particularly the last three decades or so of the nineteenth century. In giving us Muir’s environments, Turner stops well short of novelizing: he states in his “Notes on Sources” that he has “invented nothing here, either of conversation or incident.” He goes on to say, though, that he has “ascribed to Muir some perceptions for which there is no precise proof,” and has “char­ acterized certain large events in ways for which there was no specific warrant in previous writings on John Muir,” and I suppose there may be some who will object to the latitude. But a new biographer has to see things anew; and Turner’s imaginative ability to stand beside Muir may well be the source of this book’s excellence. Turner went to the places where Muir lived, even to the seacoast town in Scotland, Dunbar, where Muir spent his first nine years, and he made an effort to absorb these environments. He learned things, he says, that he could never have found in libraries, and I would add that this further dimension of scholarship is evident on almost every page. Turner may have been the first Muir biographer actually to have gone swimming in Foun­ tain Lake, the pond on the Muir farm in Wisconsin; clearly, his ability to imagine the drudgery of farm labor in the hot Wisconsin summer, and the blessed relief of the pond, was enhanced. Later on, treating the period when Muir had become a public figure, Turner widens the context to include broad-gauge accounts of America as it changed from something like an agrarian, small-village, small-scale society to its modern industrial gianthood. His essays on this development are mar­ velously succinct, and they illuminate Muir—the Muir who had, after all, Reviews 151 grown up in the earlier America, and who made the adjustment without forgetting the land. Muir becomes representative in these latter chapters. Some may argue that Turner does not do enough with Muir’s “deepecology ” philosophy, his revolutionary concept of wilderness as pure order; perhaps one goes directly to Muir for this, to the journals in particular. But for Muir’s life and times, and for the sense of Muir’s place in American life at large, this book sets a new standard. THOMAS J. LYON Utah State University Jack Kerouac. By Tom Clark. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1984. 254 pages, $8.95.) Tom Clark’s biography of Kerouac is pure biography. It isn’t a thesis about Kerouac’s life, his times, or his works. Clark goes directly to his job of giving a short, coherent, vivid picture of the life of Jack Kerouac. In this sharp focus, his book is more like Ann Charters’biography than like the more diffuse books Dennis McNally and Gerald Nicosia, the other major biog­ raphers. But Clark has the advantage of a very large body of research pub­ lished since Charters’ pioneer book. Clark does not do as much original research, perhaps...

pdf

Share