Alaska: Reflections on Land and Spirit ed. by Robert Hedin, Gary Holthaus (review)

188 Western American Literature The Western Hero in Film and Television: Mass Media Mythology. By Rita Parks. (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1982. 190 pages, $19.95.) Parks offers a useful, if somewhat outdated, survey of a type in its develop­ ment and subsequent reconstructions from historical reality to representation on large and small screen. She begins with a survey of different kinds of Western heroes—the Mountain Man, Soldier, Cowboy, Man with a Gun— and their convergence in the myth of the Westerner who emerged in the Beadle dime novels, The Virginian, and the works of Zane Grey. She then follows the transformations this figure undergoes through visualization, from its embodi­ ment in early screen stars like William S. Hart and Tom Mix through its codification and elaboration in the work of directors like John Ford and Sam Peckinpah. Against what she calls the “epic” vision of the West characteristic of films, Parks suggests that TV series like Gunsmoke and Bonanza domesticate the hero and redefine the vast open plains of the screen into a “pastoral,” a vision of an Edenic small-town glory. Parks covers a lot of cultural territory succinctly. If she tends to categorize a little stiffly, her essential analysis ishelpful and her range impressive. (Best is the historical section where she traces the mythic types back to their sources.) The study reads, however, as something of a period piece. There are no refer­ ences to any Western films or TV series after 1973, nor to any critical texts published after that date. Thus Parks doesn’t take advantage of much of the new thinking about popular culture and its relation to audience. She does not, for example, attempt to explain the relative failure of Westerns in the last years in films and TV (and their continued popularity in books). Nor does she confront issues of gender or race and how they have altered our analytic and descriptive assessments of the West as region and myth. PAUL SKENAZY University of California Alaska: Reflections on Land and Spirit. Edited by Robert Hedin and Gary Holthaus. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1989. 322 pages, $24.95.) The persistent theme of Arc.tic-American literature isnature, and for good reason: nature is the controlling force in the polar regions as it is not in lower latitudes and more benevolent climates. Alaska: Reflections on Land andSpirit is a celebration of nature on the last frontier, assembling a rich collection that includes works as early as John Muir (1879) and as recent as Richard Nelson (1989). It is only the third anthology of Alaskan writing—the other two being Ernest Gruening’s An Alaskan Reader: 1867-1967 (New York: Meredith Press, 1966) and Morgan B. Sherwood’sAlaska and Its History (Seattle: Uni­ versity of Washington Press, 1967)—and it is the first anthology to devote itself entirely to nature writing. The book includes a number of strong selec­ tions by both well known—Sigurd Olson, Jack London, Olaus Murie—and Reviews 189 lesser known authors—Richard Nelson, Clara Fosso, John Hildebrand. The editors have successfully attempted to “go beyond the typical cliches and adver­ tising slogans to provide an authentic record of a given time and place.” Visiting the Eskimo village of Wales, Alaska, just across the Bering Strait from Siberian Russia, John Morgan reminds us that “in fact not winter but summer is the alien season here.” Most residents of Wales “find summer boring” and long for what to them is the normal state of affairs: howling winds, subzero temperatures, and nine months of snow. Alaska challenges many of our assumptions in just this fashion. Anthropologist Richard Nelson, in an excerpt from a forthcoming book on southeast Alaska, writes of the other geographic extreme, the dense rain forests along the Pacific Coast. The spruce forest has a “dark, baritone richness, tinkled through with river sounds and chickadees.” Over everything is “a deep blanket of moss that mounds up over decaying stumps and fallen trunks like a shroud pulled over the furnishings in a great hall.” Nelson agrees with the Koyukon Indians of interior Alaska, who teach that “the forest is not merely an expression ... of sacredness . . . the forest is sacredness...