BOOK REVIEWS
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Global West, American Frontier:
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Travel, Empire, and Exceptionalism from Manifest Destiny to the Great Depression BY
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Albuquerque: Univesrity of New Mexico Press, 2013. xv + 312 pp. Cloth, $39.95
David M. Wrobel acknowledges that his book on the history and development of travel writing, Global West, American Frontier: Travel, Empire, and Exceptionalism from Manifest Destiny to the Great Depression, “covers a good deal of ground,” just as the title suggests, including a short treatise on the history of the West and a concise historiography of travel writings (focusing on the one hundred years from the 1840s to the 1940s) from the same region (9). He also traces travel writing about the West through various prisms, including accounts written by world travelers during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and tourists who visited the West in automobiles, regional guides written during the Great Depression, and more recent accounts by Jack Kerouac, J. B. Priestly, and John Steinbeck. The range demonstrates the continuing vitality of the genre. Wrobel’s book includes some discussion and analysis concerning travelers who visited the Mormon West, including Howard Stansbury, Mark Twain, Jules Remy, Richard Francis Burton, Solomon Carvalho, and Mrs. Benjamin Ferris. He notes that these writers were all very (and perhaps primarily) interested in the practice of plural marriage. Burton, Remy, and Stansbury nevertheless wrote accounts that presented a relatively positive picture of Utah, whereas Carvalho, Ferris, and Twain were so struck by the Mormons’ idiosyncrasies that they were less inclined to write approvingly
about them. In fact, most travel writers who visited Utah Territory preferred to perpetuate stereotypes rather than craft fresh, firsthand observations of people and place. Wrobel observes at the beginning of his book that Alexis de Tocqueville’s famous Democracy in America established a certain benchmark that has become “a core text in the annals of American exceptionalism.” Thus, although almost two thousand travel accounts were published in the United States between 1830 and 1900, Wrobel focuses his work on “travelers’ accounts of potentially enduring value, ones that do follow in Tocqueville’s footsteps.” In particular he is interested in accounts that focus on the “nations’ norms as well as its exceptions, its commonalities as well as its peculiarities” (6–8). The author mentions one contemporary example of a travel writer who attempted but failed to follow in Tocqueville’s footsteps. Bernard-Henri Lévy visited America in the twenty-first century and entitled his memoirs American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville. Wrobel believes that Lévy “demonstrates a penchant for finding and fixating on the extraordinary for the sake of shock value” (7). He mentions Lévy’s foray into Las Vegas to demonstrate this tendency, but he could have also included Lévy’s description of Utah as “a surreal and artificial place, octagonal and rigid, built in the nineteenth century in the middle of the desert.” In fact, Lévy noted that when he interviewed Mormon church president Gordon B. Hinckley he found him to be “cautious and dapper, dressed in a double-breasted navy-blue suit with gold buttons, closer to a Cinzano drinker than to a WASP Dalai Lama.”1
1 Bernard-Henri Lévy, “In the Footsteps of Tocqueville (Part Three),” trans. Charlotte Mandell, Atlantic, July/ August 2005, accessed October 22, 2014, http://www. theatlantic.com/.
