Pacific University Books

In case you didn't read what I said about Alan Duff's previous book "Once Were Warriors", I shall point out again that I am not an Alan Duff fan, not by half!
This new book was a far better read than "Once Were Warriors". Sadly though it was also transparently obvious that "One Night Out Stealing" was written with the movie sequel in mind. Thus Jake is redeemed, he is proven to be innocent of the rape of his daughter and the rape is vaguely attributed to Uncle Bully to fit the movie.
There is also another of those charming deliberate factual errors of which Mr Duff is so fond; although this one is far less important than getting the Maori Land Wars and the Treaty of Waitangi `round the wrong way (many NZers at rec.sport.rugby might dispute that).
It's a subtle error this one. In a conversation with the (unrealistically English-squire-like) Mr Trambert, Jake discusses the drop kick by Zinzan Brook in the 1995 World Cup final against south Africa - but the goal was actually against the English in the semi. The irony being that the English kicking game had disposed of the Aussies in the quarter by a drop goal you see.
Well spotted huh? Do I win a prize for spotting these Mr Duff?

From the author of "Once Were Warriors" comes another gritty tale set in New Zealand's underclass. This book focuses exclusively on two thieves Jube (white), and Sonny (half-Maori) who also share an apartment. Their miserable existence sitting around a nasty bar full of ex-cons is rendered in full detail as they drink through the weekly welfare check. Jube is a insecure loudmouth of the kind that likes to drive his muscle car real fast and brag about everything. Sonny is more of a thinker and feels trapped and out of place. One night they rob a fancy house and score big, changing both their lives. It's a pretty nasty read, and gets a little tiresome at times as the duo move through a familiar cycle of hopelessness. Duff strings the two men's conversation together into single blocks so that who's saying what is a little confusing at times. Reminiscent in some ways of the Australian film "Romper Stomper."

I really liked this book - it's about two men who rob a house one night and it changes their lives forever. Duff is a great writer. Incidentally 'Errol' who wrote the review above this is actually talking about another Duff book called 'What Becomes of the Broken Hearted' (it's the sequel to 'Once Were Warriors' - it's really good - don't be put off by the cheesy title or the fact that it's a sequel) - I guess Errol got the titles mixed up - because 'One Night Out Stealing' is NOT the sequel to 'Once Were Warriors'.

This book is a very good book to have for any fisherman. Whether you're beginner or a seasoned fisherman you will enjoy this book. Full of useful information, tips & tricks, detailed illustrations and some good fishing stories. I've read it 4 times already! Thanks Mike Sakamoto!

A good read for the saltwater shore fisherman no matter where he fishes. However most of the material is specific for the Hawaiian Islands. A lot of detail in rigging for tackle busting fish. Covers tackle, technique, bait, chumming, and construction of homemade gear. A lot of fishing books include fishing from pier, boats etc. This is just from shore.

In the book store, I chose between this and "Fishing Hawaii Style" by Jim Rizzuto, but I think I should have bought the latter.

Mr Sakamoto does give you a good introduction on how to bait/tie knots/treat tides. He talkes about how to whip from the shore and patterns to reel.

But there are a lot of times you stop asking yourself "how?".
Take Slide-Bait fishing. There are almost no illustrations showing how this is to be done, only described in text.

He tries not to trample on anyone's feet by not being to specific on where on the Hawaiian Islands things take place.

This text, though unchanged in 30 years, is still the primary text for freshman engineering students at the maritime academy. No book Ive come across does a better job at linking the basic concepts of marine propulsion so that a freshman engineering student can clearly see the relationships between different components in an engine room. The major focus is steam turbine propulsion, which may be outdated, but is still important to understand. Steam merchant ships are still sailing and steam still powers nearly all electrical generation plants in the US.

Marine engineering may have changed greatly in 30 years (especially in the navy) but this is a must read for marine engineering students until another book out does the PNE.

This is still the definitive text in the Navy and at the maritime academy. There has been no revision, and the book is required reading for students.

Although this is represented as a new book (copyright 2001) it is actually a reprinting of the old navy manual that was last revised in 1970! The material may be of interest to some; it was a good manual in its time, but naval engineering has changed a lot since 1970.

As background information, I have read most of Dostoevsky's 14 novels including some of his early works and all of his most popular 6 or 7 novels. Among those I have read some from Oxford Classics and some Vintage translations by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. It took me about one week or so to read the 400 pages for this present novel.

This is not a quick light read. It is a heavy read that requires a substantial time commitment to get the most from the novel as with all of Dostoevsky's later works. I would not recommend the novel as an introduction to Dostoevsky. For that I would recommend The Gambler, which is a short novel or novella, or Crime and Punishment which is a light but an interesting read.

The novel is about 19-year-old intellectual, Arkady Dolgoruky, illegitimate child of the controversial and womanizing landowner Versilov. The story involves the meeting and reconciliation between Arkady and his father Versilov. Dostoevsky attempts to use this as a vehicle to tell a story and explain the changes in morality and religion and values in Russian society, especially in the 1840s. It takes place in a small Russian town.

The present work was written near the end of the writer's career. It and three other Dostoevsky novels have stories that revolve around the common themes of religion, morality, and Russian life and values. Those other works are Demons, The Idiot, and The Brothers Karamazov. Those three plus A Raw Youth were written near the end of his life and they follow a similar writing pattern: long rambling novels involving discussion of morality, good and evil, etc. The books are each a bit different. Some have strong plots, while some have more dialogue and less action and lack strong protagonists. The Brothers Karamazov is the best, followed by The Idiot. The Brother Karamazov is simply a better novel than most of his other works: more complexity, good descriptions of events, good characters, lots of drama, and lots of artistic confusion planted intentionally by Dostoevsky near the end - according to historical notes. The present book is the weakest of the four and most readers will want to skip the present book.

In any case, the novel is interesting but a bit slow. Some readers might give up. There is some action as we get to the last 100 pages. There are many sections and characters that are not memorable.

This is an average and a time consuming read. It is among the weaker of the Dostoevsky efforts. If you enjoy reading Dostoevsky and enjoy his characters and constant dialogue you will enjoy the novel. Other readers seeking a well balanced and compelling story will be disappointed.

A Raw Youth is, quite simply, bad. No, it's not terribly bad - in fact, it has a good deal of redeeming qualities. There are some dead-on accurate observations about human psychology in these pages, as well as some scenes (such as Olya's suicide) that are very genuinely poignant due to Dostoyevsky's attention to detail. But these pages comprise no more than 150 pages out of 560. That makes 400+ pages that could have very safely never been written. This book has a large number of plot lines that don't go anywhere - the only one of them that works is the one with Prince Sergei. The "main" plot line (the one revolving around Versilov) seemed brilliant to me in Part II, but by the end of the book it was negated entirely by the ridiculous, tacked-on resolution. All that stuff about Lambert, the "double" and all that nonsense was too silly and far-fetched to be taken seriously. And lest anyone forgets, I reiterate that it is an intolerable 560 pages long. Given Dostoyevsky's horribly meandering, repetitive writing style, the majority of this book is a chore to read and contributes nothing to the reader. In fact, I still can't think of one coherent theme for this book, and I'd bet Dostoyevsky wasn't too sure of his own intentions in writing it either. Stick with Crime and Punishment.

This was the first of the books by Dostoyevsky that I ever read and I was captivated by it. I can't say that it makes the most sense and that everything gets tied up in the end (some parts don't seem to have anything to do with the story), but it was written so well and the characters were so real that I loved it. It's about a young man, Arkady, whose legal father is a man he doesn't know and his biological father, Versilov, is someone he doesn't know how to deal with. Arkady ends up getting a very important document that many people want from him and the plot revolves around what he does with it. He hates his father, but desperately wants to feel loved by him at the same time. The book is very long and many times confusing, with a strange ending, but it's a classic work, because it has so much to say about death, love, jealously, and family. If you like strange books and literature and are willing to plod through the rough parts of it, it will be worth it.

These memoirs are a forgery. See "English Historians on the French Revolution", by Hedva Ben-Israel, page 64/65. The author is an "adventuress and a liar" it is "worthless a fiction".

(In that time many fake memoirs were published, this is one of them)

Lovely, thoughtful, tormented Princesse de Lamballe, close friend of Queen Marie-Antoinette, tells her story in her own words, as edited by her adopted daughter Catherine Hyde. As a student of the French revolution, I found this first hand account of the fall of the French monarchy to be indispensable. I came to am understanding of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette that I never had before. I highly recommend this report for those doing serious research or just looking for a good book to read.

How can anyone (except experts who can prove it's not true) place a value on a book written by a person who was actually there with Marie Antoinette and lived to tell the tale? Anyone with any interest in the beheaded queen will want to read this book.

Book hard to find - but Amazon has on used book list. Order revised edition, think it is 1990 version. Lots of basic help for those of us taming or creating our own woodlands gardens and trying to sort through what we have growing wild, what to edit, what is invasive, placement for sun, soil, water conditions. Written in the 1940s and updated by hands-on garden experts Uof W and Seattle. I view it as a core reference.

Very comprehensive, detailed, informative, and practical guide/reference source for information on trees and shrubs in the Pacific Northwest. From the amount of information in the book probably only very little is missing. Even though it is small print, very dense, very few illustrations, it is nevertheless very readable. Very well done.

Although the information in the book is detailed, more pictures are needed to give some idea how these trees and shrubs might actually enhance a garden. The photos contained in the book are sparse and are entirely in black and white. Pictures in books? Generally not needed, but in a gardening book, good graphics are essential.

This book is cutting edge stuff. The monologues are like arias: they are a portrait of a probing mind. Biespiel, unlike a whole lot of his contemporaries, trusts the medium itself. I have to say that after my first read through I found the work teetered on a mannerism, but then I just had to read it a second and third time (dictionary is a must here...some of the language is really lavish!) because the poems seemed so entirely unique. It was then that I understood how that these poems are terrifically new (yes, Mr. Pound, someone can still "make it new"). His calling these poems "American sonnets" is a real dare. American poetry needs to be whipped up and feverish. Biespiel is at the forefront. I wish other poets challenged us dedicated poetry readers the same way.

I found the majority of these poems obscure and unintelligable. There is also a lack of objects in his poems, their too "inward" or something. He has some talent, but these poems don't show it.

I read this poet's first book, "Shattering Air" (BOA), and little there prepared me for this one. It's an enormous departure, and my first reaction was "Wow! Incredible! Finally, something that breaks the style of decades of garden-variety, flat, tepid, music-less, formless free verse American poetry!" The writing in Biespiel's new book is so vibrant. It's unlike anything out there. Entirely unique and dramatic (though a dictionary is required!). "Wild Civility" rocks with rowdy, tempestous, lyric poems about the poet's hard drinking, hard partying days, his ambivalence toward faith and prayer, and his yearning for home--all in a blazing new form, his invented 9-line "American sonnet." Bold, to say the least (and his Preface at the beginning is even bolder--a must read to understand the dramatic voices he incorporates into his own). The language can be overwhelming, I have to admit, but the poems do what (I think) poems should do--tell the truth and reach deep inside of me.

Dr. Silva's book relies on seldom-used Hawaiian-language newspaper sources to document native Hawaiian resistance to foreign power in the islands. Most histories of Hawaii depend on English-language (and all too often missionary and American) accounts of the people and events in Hawaiian history, which means that they often miss, or ignore, the opposing, and generally native voices. It is as if the Hawaiians simply gave up. But, as "Aloha Betrayed" documents in some detail, this version of history is not true, and is in fact part of an on-going struggle to erase native struggles. At times, the book is one-sided, as if only native Hawaiians resisted imperialism and only foreigners supported it, but this tendency is forgivable because she is reacting to so many books on Hawaiian history that have written native Hawaiians out of Hawaiian history and created a mythical history where missionaries and capitalists take over the islands with great fanfare and little resistance. "Aloha Betrayed" is not the final history of the Hawaiian islands, but it is a well-researched, well-written and much-needed contribution to the field.

Noenoe K. Silva's contribution to Hawaiian history is an interesting work that is far too one-sided to stand alone. Her thesis--a refutation of the assumption that Hawaiian islanders passively allowed America to destroy native culture--comes across more broadly than early records show. Working from Hawaiian language sources allows her to see details non-Hawaiian reading scholars miss, but her closeness to the subject prevents her from seeing that many Hawaiians actively sought societal change. She is correct that passivity did not dominate the social landscape in the century before annexation, but, unlike her argument, not all active Hawaiian involvement opposed the new ways. Numerous powerful Hawaiian leaders supported the changes brought from Europe and America, but these figures receive only lip service, if that, in this study.

Technically, the book is a mess. Silva uses an enormous amount of Hawaiian quotes and terminology within the text without any visual distinction, arguing that Hawaiian is not a foreign language and should not be treated as such. Unfortunately, most of her readers do not know Hawaiian. Long Hawaiian language quotes pepper the work, each followed by a parenthetical translation. I understand her point, but the lack of italicization of the Hawaiian phrases makes for an exhausting read.

Overall, Aloha Betrayed is an interesting read but fails to present an objective view. Silva's radicalism polarizes her view, forcing a story of evil Americans subjugating an innocent people.

I marked this book down from four stars to three because the maps which were provided were poor since they were not detailed and requires the reader the unnecessary burden or locating important place names and filling them in. Good maps are essential to the understanding of army, fleet and air movements.

Douglas MacArthur, e.g., in his autobiography "Reminiscences", had a tendency to downplay the merits of others so that the spotlight could shine solely on him. An example of this is MacArthur's characterization of one of his most trusted lieutenants, General Walter Krueger (commander of the U.S. 6th Army in the Pacific in World War II), as at times too cautious, slow, and methodical. But the evidence suggests just the opposite, that Gen. Krueger was in fact a quick-thinking and fast-acting strategist who could outmaneuver and outfight any opponent. (To his credit, on several occasions MacArthur did lavish praise on Krueger.)

Kevin Holzimmer's biography of General Krueger rehabilitates this fine soldier's reputation by showing, for example, that it was apparently Krueger, not, as it is generally believed, Eisenhower (then Krueger's chief of staff), who came up with the successful operational plan of the 3rd Army in the well-known pre-war strategic testing operations by the U.S. Army in Louisiana and Texas in 1941.

In addition, the book demonstrates that Krueger was heavily responsible for the success of the campaign in New Guinea and the retaking of the Philippines.

Overall, the book makes a strong argument that Krueger (despite some positive wartime publicity and his selection to head Operation OLYMPIC, the invasion of Japan) never received his proper due as a wartime commmander and strategist. (He led, or was otherwise involved in, over 20 different military operations over the course of the war in the Pacific.) Part of the problem may have been due to Krueger's own abrasive personality and stubborness, which did not make him many friends in the military despite his brilliance.

In any event, this book is a long overdue examination of Krueger's contribution to the success of the Allied forces in the Pacific in World War II. (Although Krueger did pen in the 1950s his own account of his war time activities, the book was not well received. Although it has been reprinted on occasion, it is currently out of print.) In so doing, it does a very credible job of examining the tensions that often existed among MacArthur, Krueger, and Lt. Gen. Robert Eichelberger (commander U.S. 6th Army) during the battles in the Pacific.

Most of us enjoy ghost stories. We remember with nostalgia the ghost stories told to us in childhood. The seventeen ghost stories in Ann Ronald's latest book GhostWest: Reflections of Past and Present, however, harken back to an age when storytelling was an ancient art. Through an exploration of special regions of the western United States, Ronald's stories embody a multitude of cultural signifiers, traditions and values that are revealed through her critical examination of place and setting. These historical markers, some now only remnants of what they once were, like the American Bison, the Empire Builder railroad, ancient forests, or the family ranch are ghostlike reminders of the American past. Through the haze of history, Ronald's essays progress from the mid-19th century to the present using a multi-disciplined approach to scope out the particular elements that make each chosen landscape west of the Missouri unique.
In addition to her careful scholarship, and perhaps what makes her encounters with various aspects of place most enjoyable, is her gift of metaphor and ability to imagine and project the reader into the multiple aspects of place and setting. Ronald is fascinated with the heroic struggles of Native Americans, early emigrants, the 49'ers, and others who braved the Great Basin desert and the Sierra Nevada range to seek a new life in the West. But she does not concentrate solely on European American or Native American settings or landscapes. GhostWest is an attempt to capture the multilayered history that creates western American culture, from its geologic and biologic wonders to the flora and fauna of each region.
"The new settlers acknowledged few ghosts but, in truth, ghosts preceded them everywhere-ancestors of the American Indians, the dinosaurs that vanished, the glaciers that gave way to valleys filled with ancient trees. Ghosts pursued the pioneers too, for the miners and ranchers and shopkeepers and homemakers themselves were giving birth to their own ghosts with every footstep. I myself, in fact, am becoming my own ghost, even as I write this page."

Ann Ronald is a westerner. She grew up in Seattle, Washington in the Pacific Northwest. The natural surroundings and a childhood of hiking and camping instilled in this writer a sense of place. Her father, an amateur photographer influenced by Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter, taught Ann to visualize "scenery framed." Ronald thus credits her father with helping her develop an artist's eye for landscape. Her narratives of place reflect this ability to visualize and appreciate the multiple facets of the natural world. In addition, Ronald is both a scholar and professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno. Her university curriculum includes courses on Western American writers, Creative Nature Writing, Literary Nonfiction, Western Women Writers, studies of Major Environmental Texts and graduate seminars on writers such as Wallace Stegner and Edward Abbey. Ronald is also a contributing faculty member in UNR's English Department Literature and Environment graduate program, the nation's first program in literature and environment studies, or, ecocriticism, that offers both the M.A. and the Ph.D. degrees in English with emphasis in Literature and Environment.
Ronald's scholarly work reflects both her interest in the natural history and cultural traditions of the west. Her graduate thesis focused on nineteenth century British literature. Ronald reports that she was always interested in setting and a sense of place. She recalls her doctoral dissertation, Functions of Setting in the Novel: from Mrs. Radcliffe to Charles Dickens. "My thesis was a study of how 19th century British novelists changed, how setting was used as the century progressed-from Ann Radcliff, who used it for Gothic fright, to Sir Walter Scott and Charlotte Bronte who used it more complexly for meaning, to Charles Dickens who used setting symbolically. "
Ronald is the author of seven books. Her first book, Functions of Setting in the Novel: from Mrs. Radcliffe to Charles Dickens was followed by a monograph on Zane Grey. She believes her book on Edward Abbey: The New West of Edward Abbey is perhaps the best known to date. She also edited a "totebook," Words for the Wild for the Sierra Club and wrote Earthtones: A Nevada Album, a book of creative essays accompanied by photos by nature photographer Stephen Trimble. Ronald describes Reader of the Purple Sage: Essays on Western Writers and Environmental Literature as a work of scholarly essays. Currently Ronald is working on a sequel to GhostWest that is to be called "Oh, Give Me a Home."
The narratives of Ronald's travels are informed by studies of archaeology, paleontology, anthropology, ecology, as well as oral histories, memoirs and biographies. As a naturalist, Ronald is equally able to transport the reader through the cycles of nature. It is with seeming ease that she describes the sounds and movements of animals, the different songs of a bird, or other manifestations of natural phenomena. Reading about Ronald's travel through distinctive lands of the Western States is an exhilarating albeit exhausting process. The preparation of the GhostWest manuscript led Ronald up mountains, through ancient forests, and across prairies. She appears to be haunted by the need to understand and portray the dreams and failures, violence and promise of the people emigrating to the West. Sometimes Ronald travels alone to understand and recreate in her writing the atmosphere of each setting. She appears unafraid of the ghosts that linger in place.
GhostWest is in a certain manner reminiscent of the legendary Ghost Dance of the Northern Nevada shaman Wovoka. In its all encompassing descriptions of place, ecology, and culture, GhostWest is a celebration of world renewal, bringing to life all those that preceded us. Like the Ghost Dance, Ronald's book uncovers the drama of western struggle and conquest. GhostWest is a ceremony honoring the natural and human forces that came before us, but also argues for careful management of the earth and its creatures. The powerful vision of world renewal and hope that the 19th century Ghost Dance inspired among Indian people spread far and wide. For many, its message is still a part of the West. On one of her solitary walks in the Sierra, Ronald pays tribute to its message:

"I thought I saw her shadow, ruffling the rye-grass meadow. I thought I saw a second silent shape, just ahead. I thought I heard a Ghost Dance drum, though the sound was probably only the wind brushing the pines. I thought I heard a rhythmic chant, soft and slow and sad."
Whether she is writing about the latest forensic discoveries of the Montana battle of Little Big Horn, uncovering the ancient civilization of aboriginal Paiute people in Nevada, or unveiling Willa Cather's Webster County in Nebraska, Ronald's narrative digs deep down below the surface of things. A synergy created from her active life of hiking, bird watching, and exploring spills over in the creative process and produces works alive with the chatter of birds, the sound of desert silence, and the stories never told, but imagined, of long dead pioneers.
Ronald's work is well argued, serious and also wonderfully imaginative. She is able to capture and reveal the many dimensions and moods that surround a place as well as the magical quality of nature in action, the fleeting movements that many of us less observant certainly miss. Ronald doesn't hesitate to quickly change writing styles, inserting bits of poetry, that bring images to life under a difference guise, metaphor or color, to the surprise and pleasure of her readers. Her ability to incorporate techniques from different art forms into her writing (the boldness of a painter's pallet or the sound and brightness of music) produces dynamic new effects and imagery. At times the reader swears she's hearing ghost-like laughter coming from the pages of Ronald's work. In her essay Colorado Savage Basins, she makes the most of traveling up a narrow grade with Colorado's Dave's Jeep Tours. Seeing the red shirted guide talking on phone, she remarks:
"To the left, an almost perpendicular rock wall stiffened upward. To the right, a drop of perhaps two thousand feet plunged toward emptiness. Sitting in the open-air back of the truck, dust blowing in my face, I couldn't decide where to look." ...Reminding myself that Dave would be out of business if he bounced customers into infinity, I nonetheless shuddered with the rock ruts in the road."
In Texas Cowboy Country Ronald's ability to create imagery and contrast is again awakened:
"... Standing on the narrow planks of a catwalk, looking down at the seething cows, I smell the sweet stench of a west Texas summer, of dust and drought and manure and sweat. I hear a jazz ensemble gone berserk, clarinet and tenor sax, alto sax and bass, all squawking out of tune. Calves separated from their mothers, cows search for their calves, bulls irate, steers just bawling on general principles, their off-key pitches riffing up and down in half-step dissonance. Gates slam like cymbals, whips snap an emphatic beat, percussion hooves drum the powdered dirt, as the unhappy animals mill in their enclosures." (page 34.)


GhostWest also expresses Ronald's concern for the future and the tragic nature of much of Western history. Her work is motivated by places that have been altered by forces of history, wars, and displacements of people and the conquests and upheavals of nature. One of her interests, although they are many and wide-ranging, is in describing regions where past lives and historic events inform the sense of place. In her travels in Kansas, as she watches the birth of a calf:
One cow is particularly restless, lying down, pacing, lying down, pacing. Are those hoofs emerging from beneath her tail, those tiny castanets of color? I climb out of the truck. In the thirty seconds or so while I have my back turned, fully formed buffalo calf oozes onto the ground. ..Within minutes, the tawney calf shakes its head, breaks out of the fetal sax, and peers at the world..."

And in perfect counterpoint, in the same essay on Buffalo Gounds, Ronald points to the casual decimation of herds of 60 million buffalo in the passage of a few years:
"We went north about thirty miles and made camp for about forty days. We killed 2400 buffaloes and a number of antelope. Then we went northwest ... Camped there about thirty days and killed about 800 buffaloes."

As the essays of GhostWest progress from the distant past through intimate memories of Ronald's childhood summer camp in the Olympic Peninsula, she continues in her quest to present a fair minded picture of diverse environmental issues. She recollects "wash[ing] down buckets of huckleberries and water dipped straight from the streams" and at age ten "hiding a whole unit of little girls-twenty-four of us-behind a single [massive] Douglas fir."
Logging at Camp Robbinswold, her childhood summer haven, Ronald relates, was simply a part of the Olympic experience. Without the logging roads, in fact, her summer camp would not exist. With the caveat from Aldo Leopold that one should never revisit a wilderness, Ronald nonetheless returns to the place of her beginnings. In her final chapter "Washington: Ancient Forests" and after thirty years of absence, she is prepared to evaluate the contradictions and tensions that beset the parks, environmental activists, commercial logging corporations and government regulatory agencies in the modern era.
It is on the very property of her former summer camp that Ronald encounters a modern day tree farmer, a "custodian of the land." "I try to imagine that I am looking at a field of corn," Ronald writes. "But I find it impossible to be dispassionate. I want my trees in a high-diversity forest, not in a monoculture..." With the clear knowledge that this sentiment is often scoffed at as `a naïve tree-hugging point of view' by modern forestry initiates, Ronald quips: "I, on the other hand, cannot make the translation from forest primeval to amber waves of grain."
Using modern science as her guide, Ronald goes on to analyze the pros and cons of clear cutting, selective logging and forest management undertaken gradually and over a longer duration of time. Ironically, she discovers that forestry techniques, at least in this instance, are greatly improved since the era of her childhood at Robbinswold camp. As much as she wishes to retrieve the purity of her childhood memories of massive trees in an undisturbed environment, Ronald is a realist. Forest management and environmental activism have to co-exist. As is her wont at times like this, Ronald's thoughts turn to nature and its amazing regenerative abilities.
A badger, the flight pattern of a hawk, the sight of castors at work, or even a flutter of leaves can set her trudging off again. In one essay she will integrate many perspectives, academic disciplines, aesthetics, and voices. This malleability and unbound enthusiasm for the natural world gives her narratives a freshness and multiplicity of feeling, colors, and ideas. A place, like nature, or the natural processes cannot be static, and neither can she.
* * * * * *


Works Cited:

*On-line interview with Ann Ronald, 11/3/04 and 11/15/04
*Thorsen, Jim, "Library Journal," North Carolina: Central North Carolina Library System, Burlington, 2002

Suggestions for Further Readings:

*Abbey, Edward, Desert Solitaire, New York: McGraw Hill, 1968
*Lawrence, R.D. A Natural History of Canada, Ontario: Key Porter Books, Ltd: 1988
*Lopez, Barry, Desert Notes: Reflections in the Eye of a Raven, New York: Avon Books, 1976


Additional Books by Ann Ronald:

*Functions of Setting in the Novel: from Mrs. Radcliffe to Charles Dickens, New York: Arno Press, 1971.
*Zane Grey, Boise:Boise State University Press, 1975.
*The New West of Edward Abbey, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982; Reno, 1988, 2000.
*Words for the Wild: The Sierra Club Trailside Reader (ed.) San Francisco: 1987.
*Earthtones:A Nevada Album Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1995.
*GhostWest: Reflections Past and Present, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002.
*Reader of the Purple Sage: Essays on Western Writers and Environmental Literature, Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2003.

This book is the latest in a trend of overrated collections that seek to collect significant Western destinations and interpret them (Think Ian Frazier's "Great Plains" and Tim Egan's, "Lasso the Wind.") This book might have been recommendable twenty years ago but today it seems a bit behind the curve, as every professor with access to a rental car seems to be cranking these things out. Most of the topics within GhostWest have been covered more skillfully by other writers, and the author's own engagement seems distant at times. What is intended to seem like an insight-laden road trip instead reads like the measured transcript of a ford Aerostar full of Cather scholars on their way to the post-symposium bash at Applebee's.

It seems anyone who started backpacking when they were young is now a Western expert, and expertise consists of making insightless comments about the savage development boom in Colorado and the addled, uncurious nature of our tourist population. Discourse on the West demands more. And do we really need to hear what the author thinks about war? I'd rather hear what my crazy, tax protesting neighbor thinks about toe jam.

Ronald seeks to insert the element of ghosts in this book, which given the title, seems appropriate. However, sometimes it seems incongruous and inappropriate, and grasps for ghostly significance are inserted more frequently than ads for personal injury laywers in an episode of Jerry Springer. And if you are going to talk about Federal damlord Floyd Dominy, it might make sense to spell his name correctly (or at least consistently) throughout the book.

If you want to understand Man's uneasy relationship to the West, and how he wrestles with very palpable ghosts, go fish the Encampment River in Wyoming, or walk through the Badlands. Bring a copy of "Hole in the Sky" by William Kittredge, or "The NineMile Wolves" by Rick Bass. But leave this book on the shelf.