PrairyErth (a deep map) by William Least Heat-Moon (review)

164 Western American Literature story takes place, as well as identifying mass-produced formulaic fluff and juvenalia. Equally useful are the appendices, which cross-reference each entry by title, theme, genre, place, and region. Then for lagniappe Lewis tosses in another 207 titles which he feels may marginally qualify as New Mexico fiction, as well as a list of references. Don’t be fooled by Lewis’s prefatory disclaimer that his work lacks “the academic polish of definitive scholarly bibliographies.” Granted, he leaves criticaljudgements to others, but believing this bit of self-deprecating rhetoric could cost you because this is indeed a valuable book. BILL D. TOTH Western New Mexico University PrairyErth (a deep map). By William Least Heat-Moon. (Boston: HoughtonMifflin , 1991. 624 pages, $24.95.) In PrairyErth, William Least Heat-Moon presents us with an encyclopedic dissection of Chase County, Kansas—flood, fire, fauna (bison to woodrat),flora (cottonwood to osage orange), history (both white and Indian), personalities, controversies (Chase County is the site of a proposed Prairie National Park), legends, architecture (even an interview with a limestone cutter), geology, paleontology, and geography. I was re-reading Carl Bredahl’s New Ground as I read PrairyErth. Least HeatMoon ’s book is a book of surfaces in Bredahl’s sense of the word. The author imposes a grid upon the land, then he starts at the northeast quadrant and proceeds down and across, like a methodical player of tic-tac-toe. He introduces each patch with excerpts from his “commonplace books,” writers past and present, prairie and otherwise that relate, at least obliquely, to the topics at hand: historical surveys, interviews with local ranch hands and high school students, paens to plants and animals and, above all, attention to the surface, the land itself that spreads underneath the imposed grid to unify the text and Least Heat-Moon’s vision of the land as a power in itself destined to outlast present owners (three quarters of them out-of-county residents) and the “Saffordville Syndrome,”his term for out-migration and the resulting ennui. Least Heat-Moon’s stated purpose is to follow “the road maps in the marrow of our bones,” to discover the connection between man (especially himself) and the land. His exhaustive survey of the land itselfand the residents (he interviewed over 300 of the county’s 3,000 residents) presents to the reader one of the most thorough studies of the prairies. Nevertheless, perhaps as a result of his journalistic objectivity and his own nonresident status, in his attempts to convey his own responses to the land, his dream-time wanderings Reviews 165 across the land, he does not make the transcendental connections between surface and imagination that writers of literature convey. There is no passage that challenges the reader to make the emotional connections with place as Cather, Sandoz, and Morris do. Despite this quibbling point, PrairyErth is a welcome tome for lovers of the prairie land. If there is more “surface” here than any one reader can absorb, there’s something for everyone. Browse and enjoy. DIANE DUFVA QUANTIC Wichita State University Into the Great Solitude: An ArcticJourney. By Robert Perkins. (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1991. 219 pages, $19.95.) The Back River, Robert Perkins tells us, is the “king and queen of Arctic rivers: long, tough, beautiful, dangerous, and magnificent to canoe.” It flows across the top of the Northwest Territories and empties into the Arctic Ocean, and Perkins means to canoe it alone. Trouble is, he has no money and must raise the funds himself. Perkins is inexperienced at this, and he is occasionally made uncomfortable, as when an elderly man tells him point blank: “I see no reason to pay for your summer vacation.” Others, however, individuals and organizations, are more generous and have more faith, and when Perkins embarks on his summer 1987 solo canoe trip, he is carrying the flag, given to him by the Explorers Club, that Thor Heyerdahl took on hisjourney in Ra. “Not having a mast to fly it from,”Perkins explains, “I used it as a pillow.” With such beginnings, comic defeat might come as no surprise, and Perkins proves foolish enough...