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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 Perkins Marsh. Though one always can quibble over such a list—why the selection of quarrelsome if not virtuperative Ickes over large-visioned Franklin Delano Roosevelt?—for the most part the choices reflect the consensus wisdom on the matter. This will be a good first book for readers unfamiliar with conservation history. Students of the movement, however, will find little new here. And they may fear that the portraits yield a bit too much to the Great Man theory of history while slighting the social and cultural changes providing the contexts for successful reforms. PETER WILD University of Arizona ...

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