Book Notices

Wanted Dead or Alive: The American West in Popular Culture.

Edited by RICHARD AQUILA (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996 xi + 313 pp $29.95.)

The typical 1950s baby boomer who shared Saturday mornings with the respectable likes of Roy Rogers, Sky King, and the Lone Ranger and Tonto had a television line-up that would answer any need to reinvent the self The mythic West was, geographically, where most youngsters wanted to be and, ideologically, what they wanted to be What the pixels did not say about the development and meaning of an evolving relationship with the American dream is explained in Wanted Dead or Alive: The American West in Popular Culture, a collection of tightly scripted and authoritative essays by specialists in their fields—popular fiction, wild west shows, films, television, music, painting, and advertising—who chart the birth and growth of the "pop culture West."

However defined—place, process, hope, construct—the West is a product of its own time whose changing images reflect who and what we want to be With each generation using "this shared myth for its own purpose, to define itself and the problems of the nation," it is little wonder that the public appetite for "pop culture West" is insatiable As long as nostalgia pushes the need for historical accuracy into the back seat, mass marketers will accommodate the need to see ourselves in print, in song, and on screen.

In Wanted Dead or Alive, Richard Aquila and his authors share an understanding of the past with those who continue to live it.

Stephen A. Douglas

By ROBERT W JOHANNSEN (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997. xiv + pp. Paper, $24.95.)

Douglas, as a U:.S representative and senator from Illinois in the 1840s and 50s, knew the Mormons during their Nauvoo years. As author of the concept of popular sovereignty and architect of the Compromise of 1850, he had much to do with the creation of Utah Territory These matters will be of special interest to readers of Utah Historical Quarterly, but the entire study is worthy of a serious reading by anyone who seeks to understand mid-nineteenth-century U.S. history. Originally published by Oxford University Press in 1973, this excellent biography of the Little Giant is now available in a paperback edition from the University of Illinois Press.