Juanita Brooks: Mormon Woman Historian by Levi S. Peterson (review)

Reviews 159 something of what it must have been like for Escalante or Jedediah Smith. Even though the book will not serve as a complete guide to the trails, it has enough maps and close descriptions to get would-be explorers excited, oriented, and out the door. In almost every way, the book is very handsomely produced. The writing is not only readable, but lively. The maps, however, would be better if they had more topographic detail. And some of the photos would be more illum­ inating if they were wide-angle shots of the country the trailblazers crossed. The close-ups of plants and the sweeping skyscapes, beautiful as they are, don’t really carry the subject forward. As absorbing reading, and also as an attractive piece for a coffee table, Old Utah Trails is a good bet. RUSSELL BURROWS Utah State University Juanita Brooks: Mormon Woman Historian. By Levi S. Peterson. Woodblock prints by Royden Card. Foreword by Charles S. Peterson. (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1988. xi + 505 pages, $19.95.) The “Woman” in the title of this definitive biography of Juanita Brooks serves, of course, as a badge of honor, a conscious corrective of the slights and difficulties she encountered, as a woman, in pursuing her historical research. But “Juanita Brooks: Mormon Historian,” without the feminist cachet, would be an even greater compliment, signifying acceptance at parity within the profession, an acceptance Peterson’s account fully justifies. His narrative, told with a practiced novelist’s skill, is an informed “life and times” of a tenacious western woman who was at once representative and singular as a profoundly provincial Mormon wife and mother, teacher and community activist who, as her intellectual horizons expanded, burned to know the truth about a devastating episode in the Mormon past, searched until she found it, and did not flinch in the face of official displeasure to publish it. The gaps and silences in Brooks’s own charming but incomplete memoir, Quicksand and Cactus, are here filled in, the whole story told, sometimes with an overburden of domestic history. But the details of daily routine and family duties that had to make room at the kitchen table for scholarly labors, for shelling peas and sifting pioneer diaries, are cumulative and compound the wonder of what Brooks accomplished. Peterson’s thesis of the “historian as tragedian” informs and unifies the work so that a memorable portrait emerges. Any interpretive essay on Brooks hereafter will have to get its facts from Peterson and benefit from his insights, notably his discernment that Brooks’s “native Dixie was a miniature replica of Nathaniel Hawthorne’sNew England, burdened with a deep and covert guilt.” That is a liberating analogy and gives both the witch trials at Salem and the massacre at Mountain Meadows aesthetic distance. 160 Western American Literature Evocative chapter headings move the narrative through a sequence both chronological and thematic, marking Brooks’s personal growth and profes­ sional development as, compass-like, she scribed an ever-widening circle of awareness from an immovable center of integrity and resolve: “Hen Leavitt’s Boy,” “Wed and Widowed,” “An Undefined Ambition,” “An Indispensable Apprenticeship,” “The Story She Was Bound to Tell,” “Giving Voice to John D. Lee,” “Old Lovers Gently Rocked,” “Perennial Spunk,” “In the Perspective of the Centuries.” Like all University of Utah Press books, Juanita Brooks is handsomely produced, enhanced with family photographs and Royden Card’sstrong wood­ block prints of regional landscapes. Over fifty pages of notes and sources attest to the thoroughness of Peterson’s ten years of research. An unusually compre­ hensive index makes the historical and literary riches of this quintessentially western volume blessedly accessible. WILLIAM MULDER University of Utah Dreamers and Defenders: American Conservationists. By Douglas H. Strong. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988. 288 pages, $26.95/$9.95.) Douglas H. Strong gives some of the flavor and substance of the American conservation movement by presenting sketches of nine activists: John Wesley Powell, Gifford Pinchot, John Muir, Stephen Mather, Aldo Leopold, Harold Ickes, Rachel Carson, David Brower, and Barry Commoner. Wisely, the author begins with an essay on their forerunners, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Law Olmsted, and George...