Book Reviews

Utah: A Portrait.

Text by WILLIAM B SMART and photographs by JOH N TELFORD (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1995 xxii + 232 pp $39.95.)

To say this is a beautiful book is an understatement To consign it to the ranks of traditional coffee table books looked at once and set down as part of a room's decor, never being read, would be a true tragedy. Smart and Telford have created a book that gives the reader a grand tour of Utah, a general scope of its history, and an introduction to the contemporary issues affecting its people While not sporting the official centennial logo, it celebrates all that the centennial is about and is an excellent commemorative work that will not be dated for some time.

Although the beautiful color photographs have a tendency to dominate one's first impressions, the text proves to be equally important From the foreword by Leonard J. Arrington to the main text written by Smart, there is a personal feeling of love and appreciation for the land, its history, and its people. It is done with gentle humor as when Arrington says: "Utahns are also a practical people. The wiser ones appreciate the state's pluralism. . . . " (p. xiv) or an account by a Dixie pioneer who described the Black Ridge as a route with only one bump—but it was forty miles long And it is done by Smart who structures the book by dividing the state into geographical quarters with a separate chapter on the Wasatch Front and describes each from three different perspectives: original accounts of others, a historical summary, and a personal essay Smart loves good writing and beautiful words. The quotes from others are carefully selected and run the time spectrum from Father Escalante to Ed Geary with representation from articulate geologists, explorers, and literary giants like Wallace Stegner. While historical Hispanics are included, the only noticeable gap is the lack of descriptions from Native Americans, who have lived here the longest and perhaps know the land best, and other ethnic immigrants.

The history sections, while general in nature, are accurate and in modern terms "user friendly." They make an excellent introduction into knowing and understanding the past of each diverse area, giving insights into geologic time as well as historical time. There is just the right amount of archaeological and botanical information to provide a vision of the past and a feeling for the present. Although the space is limited, the survey of history is interspersed with occasional human stories, and the reader stays personally involved The personal essay that concludes each section makes the narrative immediate and alive. Smart obviously loves the land and shares wonderful experiences about his coming to know it through years of hiking and exploring I did find the lines used to delineate the personal essay sections somewhat distracting. They tend to clutter up what is otherwise a very clean and artful layout Perhaps a simple graphic at the beginning of these sections would have been more appropriate.

Telford's photographs, as usual, are spectacular. Although a variety of sizes are necessary for such a book, I often found myself wishing that each print covered a full page There is a wealth of detail to be savored and studied. Often I found myself metaphorically entering into some of the images so that my own story became part of the landscape I was viewing Telford shows Utah in all its diversity and glory, depicting the change of seasons and in some instances the effects of population change. While the book is not an advocacy piece for any special interests, it does show what we, in Utah, have and what we can lose The photo chosen to close the narrative (p. 222) is both a quiet image and a statement. Although I can never see enough of Telford's work, I did feel that the need to squeeze in several more pictures, sometimes separating the narrative and image description from an actual picture illustration by a page or two, happened a few too many times The collaboration of writer and photographer is always strongest when the words and image are on the same page and close together

Still, with only minor criticisms, this is a book I am proud to own and show to friends It is a book I will open again and again, and notjust for the pictures I do understand and appreciate Utah better after reading it.

DELMONT R OSWALD Utah Humanities Council Salt Lake City

Great and Peculiar Beauty: A Utah Reader.

Edited by THOMAS LYON and TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS (Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, Publisher, 1995. xiv + 1010 pp. $49.95.)

Once you see them all in one place—Utah's authors, that is—you will be amazed and delighted as I was at the quality, the quantity, and the breadth of writing this state has produced. Many of these writers will be familiar to any lover of Utah literature, but many of you might find yourself saying, as I did, "Oh yes, I had forgotten about this writer or that one." As far as I can tell, they are nearly all here—part-timers like Mark Strand and Edward Abbey, move-aways like May Swenson and Bernard DeVoto, move-ins like Stephen Trimble and Merry Adams, and natives like Dale Morgan and Helen Papanikolas Yes, one might quibble that someone like the chronicler of the San Juan, Albert R Lyman, should have been included instead of his father, Platte D. Lyman, but the editors have done a remarkable job of combing the state's literary heritage and adequately representing it in this centennial edition.

The editors' premise for organizing is original. They ask the question whether the state's cultural development has been inspired by the diversity of its landscapes: "Could the literary landscapes of Utah mirror the physiographic regions they have grown out of?" Perhaps it is not surprising that a celebrated nature writer like Terry Tempest Williams and a well-known editor and scholar of nature writing like Thomas Lyon would approach their task in such a way But what they have amassed is impressive Their anthology makes for a convincing argument that in fact Utah's landscape, be it rural or urban, has largely influenced its literature. The five terrains and literary provinces they have identified are: Urban Terrace, Great Basin, Colorado Plateau, Mountains, and Dixie (a corner of the Mojave Desert).

In addition to geographical diversity, this anthology includes authors from all walks of life in Utah Thus, in addition to such mainstream writers as Wallace Stegner and Ratherine Coles, the editors have added recollections of Topaz from Marii Ryogoku and Yoshiko Uchida, a Navajo Blessingway chant from Bernice O Bia Levchuk, the letters of a polygamous wife from Catharine Cottam Romney, and the journals of explorers Dominguez and Escalante. This collection reflects Utah's cultural diversity without being "pc." And these writers do seem to rise out of the landscape.

At over 1000 pages, the anthology makes for easy dipping Readers might want to read from start to finish or, as I did,just browse,jumping around from region to region, author to author.

They will find a lot of what might be expected from a Utah anthology: stories of pioneer struggles, of religious predicaments, and of nature appreciation. But they will also discover writers like Dianne Nelson exploring the dark side of life in Utah Her "In the Shadows of Upshot-Knothole" looks at the frenzy of her parents' sex life in the context of an open air nuclear test.

I would like to mention every story, poem,journal, or essay that I especially like, but that would be impossible Readers willjust have to purchase this book themselves (while overlooking numerous proofreading errors) and enjoy reading their way across the Utah landscape. It is a rich one.

JAMES M ATON Southern Utah University

Culture Clash and Accommodation: Public Schooling in Salt Lake City, 1890-1994.

By FREDERICK S. BUCHANAN (San Francisco and Salt Lake City: Smith Research Associates in association with Signature Books, 1996. x + 300 pp. $24.95.)

Dr Buchanan has written a most delightful book about Utah education. As his expert and objective eyes view the volatile and emotional context of public education, the reader becomes an eyewitness to tensions between Mormons and non-Mormons, the gradual accommodation of Mormon society to national norms, the wielding of raw political power, the effect of social and economic forces on the schools, the force of individual personalities, and the interplay of national education policy and educational organizations with local needs and outcomes The book's great appeal comes perhaps from its attention to local history Yet, by the end, the reader had become familiar with most national and state trends and events.

To write this history of public education took not only someone who knows how to research and write clearly but also someone who thoroughly knows education history, education theories and trends, and Mormon culture. It also took someone with objectivity and fairness. It took someone with a compassion for human aspirations and frailties It took someone with a passion for public education Buchanan exhibits all of these qualities.

Anyone who is directly involved in shaping public school policy will be surprised when reading this book to find that most issues facing today's schools—diversity, urban decay, crime, school closure, drop-outs, school-towork, student achievement, national educational goals, religion in the curriculum, school financing—have all been faced and dealt with many times before. The consequence of this revelation is a confirmation of Buchanan's thesis: namely, that schools have had only a limited effect in trying to correct society's ills. He believes that "schools mirror the societies that maintain them" and that "schools tend to follow, rather than precede, social and cultural change." Thus, the book gives policy makers and the public a muchneeded perspective on the limitations of public school policy and the need for a much broader base for effecting social change Nevertheless, Buchanan holds out the hope that teachers and administrators, when working closely with parents, can be called upon to help society at least address the problems of gangs, drugs, teen pregnancy, illiteracy, racism, and bigotry while promoting higher-order thinking skills in all students across the curriculum.

Buchanan's stated purpose for the book is to "communicate some understanding of how the schools came into being, the important changes that occurred and the issues and problems which were faced during the first century." He has succeeded in that purpose by tracing changes in the public's view of the city's schools as a bulwark against the "world" to the theme of the 2002 Winter Olympics that "The World Is Welcome Here."

The book is meticulously researched and well written. It will be counted as one of the finest of the many centennial historical contributions and will likely be the definitive history of Utah schools during the first one hundred years of statehood. But most of all, the book demonstrates the basic motivation of most people involved in public education—to do what is best for the children.

ROGER H THOMPSON Salt Lake City

The Frontiers of Women's Writings: Women's Narratives and the Rhetoric of Westward Expansion.

By BRIGITTE GEORGI-FINDLAY (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996. xxii + 349 pp. Cloth, $45.00; paper, $19.95.)

In A Century of Dishonor (1881) Helen Hunt Jackson aimed at the nation's Indian policy. In Frontiers of Women's Writings we have another study of a century of dishonor. The difference is that Georgi-Findlay has discovered the dishonor to have been of women That was, some of the women who made their way to the frontier were, as Georgi-Findlay frames the charge, "complicit" in the "westward expansion" (p. x). Of course, some did not make themselves accessories to that fact But insofar as women didjoin with men in the national enterprise, they stand guilty in Frontiers of the felony charge of "imperialism" (p xi).

Now, it would be misleading to weight Georgi-Findlay's words more carefully than she appears to have used them. But words are all we have to think with; words do reveal dispositions of mind; words can bewitch other intelligences That the Untied States should be lumped with those regimes to which "imperialistic" does apply is the first of the logical high hurdles you will go over.

There are more barriers to jump, notably four of them The women's "rhetoric" was so diverse that it elicited four modes of theoretical analysis: feminine discourse, narrative discourse, colonial discourse, and nationalistic discourse.

These amount to an awful tangle of jargon as, for instance, in a claim with respect to All Over Oregon and Washington, a guidebook published in 1872 by Frances Fuller Victor "It illustrates," according to Georgi-Findlay, "how a woman historian in search of a profession abandons a subjectivist personal narrative and suppresses discourses of femininity (and feminism) in the service of promotionalism" (p 197) Overlooked or denied is the possibility that women, too, could have thought the West a promising place for, say, those things basic to life—like putting up a house and bringing in a garden in advance of the coming cold season.

It is not the specific ills of the republic that come under attack. GeorgiFindlay's discontent lies with some vague concept of western civilization. But note well, it is the abstraction of civilization that has lately served the ambitious post-modern theorist as a "straw man." Civilization here is an idea that can be easily knocked down in the service of Utopia (My bet is the author makes her bed in a house and drives a car, like the rest of us.)

But on paper, hers is the stirring of—virtually the outline of—a new body politic. Culture will here ever after be regarded with the relativism holding that one is every bit as good as the next All this nasty business of seemingly strong cultures overwhelming or subsuming weaker cultures has got to stop.

Georgi-Findlay's critique may serve that end Or the result may be a perverse throwing away of even such fundamental civilization as frontier women helped found.

RUSSELL BURROWS Weber State University Ogden, Utah

Seven Trails West.

By ARTHUR KING PETERS (New York: Abbeville Press, 1996. 252 pp. $39.95.)

As far as I know, this book is unique in that it combines a popular history of our great traditional western trails— Lewis and Clark, Santa Fe, OregonCalifornia, and Mormon—with three nontraditional or "communication trails"—the Pony Express, the transcontinental telegraph, and the transcontinental railroad An unusual combination, but it works (Of course, one can argue that there was/is no such thing as the Lewis and Clark "trail." It was a boat's wake, an exploring route.)

Although not quite a coffee table book, it has an uncommon 10 by 7.5inch format and is printed on slick paper loaded with fifty-three handsome illustrations in full color, scores of valuable black and white photos from many archives, and twelve good maps.

One the plus side, this work makes excellent armchair reading and recounts the "big picture" by presenting the background of each trail. The author tells many fascinating stories of the various trails and enlivens the account with good quotations. (After all, history is hi-story or narrative—or is supposed to be.)

On the minus side, the author makes no pretense of scholarship. The jacket blurb gives him a Ph.D from Columbia University but fails to say in what discipline—I suspect French studies The book is largely anecdotal, episodic, and often discursive. The chapter on the Mormon Trail, for example, is as much a quickie history of that church as of that trail. While the Mormon account is objective, it is also often wrong The Book of Mormon had nothing to do with the Mormons' going west; it is twelve apostles, not elders; the chronology is a bit mixed up here and there; Brigham Young did not replace Joseph Smith in 1844 or in 1845 (it was in 1847); the number of plural marriages is wildly exaggerated; Emma Smith never divorced Joseph; just where Young said "this is the place" is debatable; the original pioneering trek lasted 111 days, not 100; the returning pioneers of 1847 did not "unexpectedly" meet westbound Mormons; and the handcart trail was more than 1,000 miles long, up to 1,300.James Marshall, by the way, was not a Mormon There are also a good many mistakes in the Santa Fe Trail chapter Such errors raise red flags.

The fifty-six-item bibliography is very basic and does not list many of the best trail studies There are only eightynine endnotes. Not only is this book armchair reading, but it appears to have been armchair written There is only the slightest evidence that the author has followed any parts of his chosen trails—been out "in the dirt." I found, for example, no photographs taken by him.

It is difficult to recommend this book It really is a "good read" and so well illustrated. I read every word and liked the author's style, but readers must be advised that the scholarship is exceptionally questionable.

STANLEY B KIMBALL Southern Illinois University Edwardsville

A World We Thought We Knew: Readings in Utah History.

Edited by JOHN S. MCCORMICK and JOH N R SILLITO (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1995 x + 491 pp Cloth $65.00; paper, $24.95.)

This commemorative volume, edited by two well-known Utah historians, comprises thirty rather uneven selections treating issues ranging from Mormon-Indian relations to Salt Lake City prostitution in the late nineteenthcentury, from the election to local office of scores of Socialists between 1900 and 1920 to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, from environmental history to the growth of a new urban West.

Unfortunately, the selections are not new, and so one wonders about the validity of this volume All but one of the articles selected have appeared in magazines,journals, or books, some of them as long ago as the 1970s, with the great majority having appeared in Utah Historical Quarterly. In organizing the selections into one volume, the editors said they were trying to "illustrate the expanding boundaries of Utah's history, and contribute toward building a more complete understanding of the state's past."

There may be differing opinions from the readers of this volume as to whether the editors succeeded in their goal, but this reviewer finds it ground already plowed. In fact, the essay toward the end, "Suggestions for Further Reading," includes many more interesting and more appropriate articles than the ones chosen for this volume, even though it is an incomplete list.

For a volume designed to tell some of the more salient facets of Utah's past, there are many subjects here that are of only superficial interest Indeed, the entire selection of essays could be easily dismissed as marginal and unlikely to appeal to the interests of a general reading public.

At least eight of the authors chosen for this volume read like an inside list of historians who have either worked for the Utah State Historical Society or published books under its banner Indeed, that may have been the more obvious reason for assembling these particular essays.

There is an essay on Utah's ethnic diversity, but there is no attempt to delve into the fascinating history of blacks in early Utah There are essays on the fur trade, prostitution, and the seagull, but virtually nothing about the importance of the Mormons in Utah's history Although the volume professes to place special interest on the twentieth-century, there is only a single essay about twentieth-century politics— Ernest Wilkinson's unsuccessful race for the U.S Senate in 1964 Strangely, there is nothing at all about the really important politicians in twentieth-century Utah, such as Governor J Bracken Lee, who stands out above all other political figures, or Calvin Rampton and Scott Matheson, who presided over a Democratic dynasty that endured for twenty years.

Clearly, Wilkinson, who raised many hackles in a lengthy tenure as president of Brigham Young University, had almost no political career at all, and therefore rates only an asterisk in Utah's political history.

In a collection made up mostly of academic articles, there are a few that seem glaringly out of place—such as reminiscences and puff pieces from the now defunct Utah Holiday Magazine. If the editors wanted to go in a less scholarly direction, they could have balanced their approach by including any number of better or more representative feature stories about Utah life and politics from the Deseret News and the Salt Lake Tribune. But do they want academic analysis, or do they want journalistic descriptions and impressions? The decision should have been made prior to publication.

There are only two essays that make an important enough contribution to Utah's history to in factjustify the price of the book—Robert Goldberg's fine essay on "Building Zions: A Conceptual Framework" and Sandra Taylor's insightful piece on the Japanese internment at Topaz.

DENNIS L LYTHGOE University of Utah