Notices

Talking Machine West: A History and Catalogue of Tin Pan Alley’s Western Recordings, 1902—1918

By Michael A. Amundson

Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2017. vii + 200 pp. Cloth, $34.95.

Talking Machine West is an illustrated volume that seeks to contextualize the Western music of the early twentieth century, distributed in the form of sheet music and recorded cylinders. Northern Arizona University professor Michael A. Amundson points out how these songs reflected shifting attitudes about race and gender relations in the context of nostalgia for a vanishing frontier. The book, winner of the Popular Culture Association’s Ray & Pat Browne Award for Best Reference/Primary Source Work, also contains a catalogue of over fifty recordings with reproductions of their sheet music artwork.

Portrait of a Prospector: Edward Schieffelin’s Own Story

By Edward Schieffelin, edited by R. Bruce Craig

Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2017. 136 pp. Paper, $19.95.

This memoir recounts the story of Edward Schieffelin, one of the few nineteenth-century silver prospectors to strike it rich. Having left home at age twelve to wander across Utah, Nevada, Arizona, and California, Schieffelin continued his lifelong pursuit of mining and adventure even after becoming a millionaire. R. Bruce Craig, an independent historian and professor of American History at the University of Prince Edward Island in Canada, edited this volume and has included an introduction with historical context and Schieffelin’s family background. Portrait of a Prospector offers a firsthand account of a life spent engaged in pursuit of the opportunities that the West promised during the late 1800s.

Out of the Woods: Seeing Nature in the Everyday

By Julia Corbett

Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2018. 232 pp. Paper, $17.95.

This collection of essays from University of Utah Environmental Humanities professor Julia Corbett aims to draw the reader’s attention to the existence of the “natural” world within our everyday human contexts. Her approach includes highlighting—with humor, personal insight, and historical research—the contradictory ways in which we conceive of our relationship to nature. These essays may hold special interest for Utah residents, as several of the essays treat familiar Salt Lake City spaces such as the City Creek mall.