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78 Western American Literature and bibliography. During the past three decades Robert B. Downs has also successfully addressed a nonspecialist reading audience as a scholar-bookman, summarizing and commenting on groups of “great books” in Western culture —west, that is, of China. His Books that Changed the World (1956) is a classic of the genre. Images of America, Downs’s most recent offering, is a seasoned perform­ ance in the latter line. Here he introduces us to forty works, issued between 1770 and 1944, all describing parts of America as seen by foreign travelers. Following a general introduction, he devotes one chapter to each of the titles under review. The reports of “standard” visitors like Mrs. Trollope, Dickens, and Stevenson all receive treatment, but Downs makes productive forays into less familiar territory. His accounts of independent visits to the United States in 1857 by a Japanese, Yukichi Fukuzawa, and a Russian, Aleksandr Lakier, are especially recommended. Downs’s claims for Images of America as a work of scholarship are mod­ est. His research, cited in the bibliographical notes, is not extensive. His book contains no footnotes, nor do page-references accompany his quotations. His practice of allotting on average about 1250 words to each author necessitates painful omissions and unsatisfying summary comments. Of course, Downs does not pretend to be encyclopedic or definitive. Instead, he offers a pleasant, well chosen, intelligently edited sampler. As he moves from author to author he agreeably varies the mix of biographical background, summary, and quota­ tion. (Henry Nevinson’s Good-bye, America! [1922] is represented almost entirely by a single long quotation, a memorable one.) And throughout the book Downs’s lifetime of reading shines unobtrusively through. Despite its merits, Images of America exhibits flaws that jar against the author’s reputation for workmanlike reliability. Its plain, sometimes quirky prose style is marred at several points by confused syntax. It includes errors of fact, especially in names and book titles. One example: Sir G. C. G. F. Berkeley, author of The English Sportsman in the Western Prairies (1861), is mentioned twice (pp. 4, 186). In the earlier reference, Downs names him as George Berkeley (the correct first name is Grantley), and in the later one he calls the book English Sportsman in Western Prairies. Only the second refer­ ence is recorded in the index, which contains other errors. WAYNE R. KIME Fairmont State College, West Virginia The Desert Is No Lady: Southwestern Landscapes in Women’s Writing and Art. Ed. by Vera Norwood and Janice Monk. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987. 281 pages, $29.95.) The editors of this collection of essays have chosen this poem by Pat Mora as their opening epigraph: “The desert is no lady. / She screams at the spring Reviews 79 sky, / dances with her skirts high, / kicks sand, flings tumbleweeds, / digs her nails into all flesh. / Her unveiled lust fascinates the sun.” The poem does a wondrous job of introducing and setting the theme; the essays do defy tradi­ tional “mainstream” conventions in order to be inclusive of the different experiences of women living in or recording the order that they have found in the southwestern landscape. The collection is about environment and gender and how, or if, the two are related and expressed through various artistic means. As the poem sug­ gests, no sense of force exists in the essays, just a genuine sense of observation and interpretation. If, as D. W. Meinig suggests, the notion of “landscape” implies “an intimate intermingling of physical, biological, and cultural fea­ tures,” then these authors attempt to explore the connectedness between being a woman and being an artist in the landscape of the Southwest. Three essays in particular stand out in my mind. Lois Rudnick’s “Re­ naming the Land: Anglo Expatriate Women in the Southwest” suggests that there is a connection between gender and type of expression, for in her subjects (Henderson, Luhan, and Austin), she identifies a spirit that is unlike male artistic response: a view of land as masterless and genderless, a respect for native traditions, and a belief that such myths and traditions are necessary for the Emersonian fulfillment of a truly national literature. Martha A...

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