In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

148 Western American Literature passages on figures as various as Francis Bacon and Wallace Stegner by making them entirely appropriate commentary on the panoramas or crises at hand. Lastly, Rawlins moves easily from the humorous to the sublime, catching a ravenous partner stuffing himselfwith freeze-dried stroganoff, then lapsing into an “. . . almost saintly glow. . . . ” But then we’re reminded that the Shoshone Indians believed “. .. the souls of the dead go up into these mountains to spend eternity.” The following descriptions of an alpine empire that often seems all “. . . blue mountains and white storms” help us know the truth of the belief. What Sky’ s Witness offers, then, is not “nature writing” but fine writing that happens to be about nature. Hannah Hinchman’s illustrations are a wise addition to a graceful book. ^ E T E R W IL D University ofArizona I Got Cultured: A Nevada Memoir. By Phyllis Barber. (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1992. 189 pages, $24.95.) Growing up in Boulder City and Las Vegas, Nevada, during the forties and fifties, Phyllis Barber had to reckon with both the values of her Mormon family and those of secular society. Although her religion emphasized the transience of earthly things, she participated in a society that assumed the permanence of earthly things in its individual and collective pursuit of wealth and power, whether in the casinos of Las Vegas, the damming of the Colorado River, or the atomic explosions in the desert. Intellectual creativity and artistic endeavor constitute Barber’s means of accepting and rejecting parts of both inheritances. She sings, studies piano, and (against her parents’wishes) dances in the Las Vegas High drill team. Her fine sense of irony enables her to perceive not just Mormon parochialism but also the parochialism of “high” culture. When Leonard Bernstein conducts a sym­ phony in Las Vegas, Barber feels embarrassed yet perversely proud to see Bernstein’s dismay that the auditorium lights remain high and people freely leave their seats for refreshments. The creativity that Barber values most is storytelling, an activity enjoyed by her extended family, whose Christmas storytelling Barber always wishes would not end “because when it ended, we were all the same people. . . . We were something different inside a story; we had possibilities other than the ones in this yellow plastered room.” Although Barber’s memoir does not explicitly represent her emergence as a writer, its narrative style enacts this transformative power of storytelling. Frequent passages of fantasy that enlarge upon the main narrative’s realism also demonstrate storytelling’s potential to mitigate circumstances. Moreover, Reviews 149 fantasy makes the distinction between truth and fiction problematic. Barber underscores this problem since she previously published a chapter of the memoir in her collection of stories, The School ofLove, and also since the memoir evokes themes and characters of her novel, And theDesert Shall Blossom. How I Got Cultured is about self-creation and culture-creation as a process of telling stories. For Barber, the getting of culture is fabricating and refabricating your sense of who you are and where you are, whoever and wherever you are. ^PAlftELA WALKER Houston, Texas ^ Mifage-Land: Images of Nevada. By Wilbur S. Shepperson, with Ann Harvey. Foreword by Ann Ronald. (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1992. 190 pages, $19.95.) Mirage-Land is a historical survey of how Nevada has appeared to nonNevadans from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Over the course of his forty-year career, Shepperson, a distinguished history professor emeritus at the University of Nevada, Reno, perused national newspapers, popular maga­ zines, journals, letters, promotional brochures, travel narratives, histories, and novels, in order to trace Nevada’s changing image. As Shepperson documents with abundant and often amusing quotations, the Silver State’s reputation has usually been a tarnished one. In the mid-nineteenth century, Nevada was commonly regarded as an “abomination of desolation” with a “mean ash-dump landscape,” a formidable barrier to be endured on the way to sunkissed California. Then, with the discovery of Comstock silver in 1859, Nevada suddenly became one of the great treasure-vaults of the world, with “bones of silver and veins of gold.” By the 1890s the mining boom...

pdf

Share