Lucifer Ascending: The Occult in Folklore and Popular Culture

432 The Journal of American Culture  Volume 27, Number 4  December 2004 Book Reviews Adult Head Jeff Tweedy. Lincoln, NE: Zoo Press, 2004. In his role as the dominant songwriter and lyricist of the ‘‘alt-country’’ (and of late, very much post-‘‘alt-country’’) band Wilco, Jeff Tweedy’s work has always had a poetic ambivalence to it, a self-conscious use of language that calls into question the very viability of language’s ability to communicate anything other than just words and sounds. Even when Tweedy’s lyrics seem nonsensical, though, meaning still echoes through, seeping and flooding through the barriers of language that he constructs. However, this is not to say that anything is communicated, necessarily. As on the song ‘‘I Am Trying To Break Your Heart,’’ enough meaning filters through the lyrics to let the listener know what the song might be about, but the song is always only about or around that meaning, approaching it without resolution or definition. When Tweedy sings ‘‘I am an American Aquarium drinker / I Assassin down the Avenue,’’ thematics of consumption, loss, and so on might be evident, but certainly no more so than the fact that the four most emphatic words (both grammatically and as sung) appear in the order they would if one opened a dictionary to the A section. Shortly after this, however, Tweedy sings the titular line, which is anything but ambiguous. This juxtaposition of clarity and undecidability makes listening to Wilco a delicious mess to unravel (or not), as language and linguistic effects collide and intermingle without ever quite settling down. Not surprisingly, the same is true of Tweedy’s first collection of poems, Adult Head. Any of the forty-three poems presented would be right at home as or in any of the last three Wilco recordings. Indeed, several poems consist entirely or mostly of lyrics from the recently released Wilco effort, A Ghost is Born. This is not to suggest that Jeff Tweedy’s poems are just song lyrics; rather, his lyrics are poems set to music, lyrical in the truest sense. For example, the poem ‘‘Hell’’ in Adult Head is the song ‘‘Hell is Chrome’’ on the album A Ghost is Born: ‘‘When the devil came/he was not red/but chrome/and he said/come with me.’’ At a glance, the imagery and language in the poem might seem childish, cartoonishly simple. It is, but that simplicity fades as the speaker of the poem finds the sanitized, glittering hell a place where he or she is ‘‘. . . welcomed/with open arms/ unmarked’’ and receives ‘‘. . . every kind of help.’’ The dynamic that develops throughout the poem is more immediately present in the song, however. Tweedy’s voice, an imperfect, singular instrument that just might go down in history alongside Neil Young’s and Bob Dylan’s, strains to whisper the opening lines after lilting piano chords drop out of the mix, only to return and reassure the singer as the words ‘‘come with me’’ are sung. Tweedy’s delivery makes the problematic of the lyrics more immediately and more acutely sensible. It is not so much that the poem is deficient, but rather that the song seems to more fully realize the lyrical possibilities that the poem presents. There are other denser and more specifically textual poems in the collection, such as the short ‘‘Prayer #4’’: ‘‘as little as we are / saints need to be smaller / actually on the page’’ and ‘‘I am One of You’’: ‘‘I am one / stupid- / looking book, / a thick Book Reviews song / too tired / to half-talk,’’ but even with these, I can’t help but hope that they eventually find their way onto a Wilco recording. Jeff Tweedy’s sonic gift is so strong that it is present on every page, even if only as an echo of something yet unsung. —Ilya T. Wick University of Wisconsin The Art of Lionel Trains: Toy Trains and the American Dream Roger Carp. Waukesha, WI: Kalmback Publishing, 2004. One Christmas, when my son was just a few years old, my father presented his first grandchild with an elaborate Lionel train set. It was only after reading Roger Carp’s The Art of Lionel Trains: Toy Trains and the American Dream that I truly understood the meaning and significance of this gift. Carp, a member of the editorial staff of Classic Toy Trains magazine since 1988 and the author of two other books on Lionel trains, chronicles the history of Lionel toy trains through an analysis of the images in its catalogs and advertisements. He shows how the artwork inspired by Lionel reflects American attitudes and values, especially related to childhood, gender, family, success, and technology. Founded by Joshua Cohen (later Cowen) as an ‘‘electrical novelties’’ company in New York in the early 1900s, Lionel went on to become one of the most recognizable brands in America. Early on, Cohen set out to dominate the American toy train market, and knew that the best way to do this was to capture the public’s attention through attractive annual catalogs and color advertisements in Sunday newspapers. Although this era was the ‘‘golden age of illustration,’’ artists’ names were not mentioned. Instead, Lionel adopted an 433 overall graphic style characterized by elegance and sophistication that captured the attention of American consumers interested in top-of-the-line, high-quality products for their families. Through a highly developed marketing plan, Lionel convinced the American public that youths needed trains, which were, in fact, the keys to happy and productive childhoods, at least for boys. Illustrations showed that by operating trains, boys, often wearing white shirts and ties or full suits, were learning how to build character and become successful men. Train play also enhanced male bonding across generations as fathers, sons, and sometimes grandfathers learned together about engineering, electronics, and transportation. As Carp asserts, ‘‘The implication was clear: Lionel trains were for boys, especially mature ones able to appreciate their beauty and merit’’ (43). Mothers and girls in Lionel advertisements, if they were depicted at all, stood off to the side, looking on passively as active males enjoyed all the fun. If Lionel advertisements reinforced traditional gender roles and cultural values, they also established an important holiday ritual: the train circling the Christmas tree. Although it is uncertain when families began placing trains around their trees, by December 1923, a colorful Lionel advertisement in the American Review of Reviews reflected the practice. Lionel trains, which were incompatible with other brands and designed to set the industry standard, were the train of choice. Americans embraced ‘‘the Lionel experience’’ even during the hard times of the Depression, when a Mickey and Minnie Mouse line of line of mechanical handcars became popular. During World War II, when toy manufacturing took a back seat to the war effort, Lionel produced binoculars and other precision instruments. But afterward, toy train sales skyrocketed as Lionel advertisements emphasized postwar dreams of domestic security and new technology. Lionel’s slogan, ‘‘Men of Tomorrow Choose Lionel Today,’’ reinforced the notion that the right childhood toys would provide baby-boom boys with both happy times and bright futures. A father who experienced the joy of train play with 434 The Journal of American Culture  Volume 27, Number 4  December 2004 his son was not only fulfilling his parental responsibility, but also providing a welcome leisure activity for himself after a day of hard work. Girls continued to recede into the background in advertisements. They did nothing more, as Carp notes, than ‘‘smell the smoke’’ (91) of the innovative new line of smoking steamers. Throughout Lionel’s history, the company adopted no icons or celebrities in its advertising, allowing the products themselves to take center stage. The strategy worked as Lionel continued to be a household name throughout the 1950s. By the end of that decade, however, cultural changes characterized by a more pronounced counterculture and a new interest in air and space travel and superhighways signaled the end of Lionel’s dominance in the toy arena. Still, the fascination with trains prevailed, and Lionel advertising entered new phases marked by graphic styles depicting images of nostalgia and futuristic technology. As Carp writes, ‘‘The message underlying recent Lionel art is plain: Our new trains have never been more mechanically advanced, but you’ll find them as comforting as ever’’ (135). The Art of Lionel Trains explains why generations of fathers and grandfathers have purchased Lionel trains for their families, and the dreams and excitement that accompanied them. It is a beautifully illustrated book that illuminates the story of one of the most recognizable and bestloved toys in American culture. —Kathy Merlock Jackson Virginia Wesleyan College Artists of Colonial America Elisabeth L. Roark. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2003. In recent years, the scholarship on nineteenthcentury American art has become increasingly sophisticated, historically and methodologically. It has engendered an ever-widening and vibrant discourse. Other than a handful of monographs on portraiture and gravestones in the 1970s and the 1980s, and some significant work on Copley since the 1990s, it is therefore surprising to find that the field of colonial American art has been largely ignored. Artists of Colonial America is a significant corrective to this collective and unaccountable oversight. Elisabeth Roark presents the first historically rigorous, comprehensive narrative of the arts of painting, sculpture, printmaking, pastel drawing, and silversmithing in colonial America. Roark examines the art and lives of ten specific colonial artists. In the introduction to the book, she describes how these ten artists were chosen and presents her theoretical and methodological orientation. The ten artists examined include John White, an artist-explorer from the late sixteenthcentury Roanoke Island colony; John Foster, the first known colonial printmaker from Massachusetts; the unidentified late seventeenth-century painter of the Freake family portraits in Boston; Joseph Lamson, one of the first early eighteenthcentury stonecutters whose work is found in both northern and southern colonies; Henrietta Johnson, the first professional woman artist to work in the early eighteenth-century colonies; Gustavus Hesselius, the first significant portrait painter to work in early nineteenth-century Philadelphia; Paul Revere, the silversmith, printer, and revolutionary whose fame spanned both pre- and postRevolutionary Boston; John Singleton Copley, the first late-colonial portrait painter from Boston to achieve fame and fortune in the colonies and in England; and finally, Benjamin West, the first latecolonial history painter from Philadelphia, who ultimately became painter to King George III and second president of London’s Royal Academy. Roark explores the respective historical, political, economic, social, religious, and cultural milieux from which each artist emerged. This contextual analysis is then buttressed by extended passages identifying very specific political, religious, or cultural pressures that were brought to bear on each artist. In chapter three, for instance, Roark interweaves her art historical narrative of the painter of the Freake portraits with extended 435 Book Reviews expositions on the character of mercantile and Puritan Boston in 1670. She explicates the intricacies of how the portrait of a third generation American Calvinist (Mr. Freake) could function as a visual display of both spirituality and prosperity. In chapter six, Roark describes how and why Henrietta Johnson chose to work in the medium of pastel, and how medium and scale determined the reception of a work of art in the colonies. In chapter eight, Paul Revere’s silversmithing and printmaking are connected to his political aspirations and activities in the revolution. In chapters nine and ten, devoted to Copley and West, respectively, Roark includes an historiographical analysis of the reputation of each artist. Despite the exhaustive historical context provided in each of Roark’s case studies, however, this book is a work of art history rather than of history. Artists of Colonial America centers on the agency of art and artists in society, rather than on the use of art as documentary evidence of the mores of a society. Roark’s book comprises a series of parallel and interwoven narratives: how artists negotiated their tenuous role in early colonial America; how they coped with the physical and intellectual challenges of colonial life; how artists negotiated the often divergent demands placed on portrait painters by competing religious groups (such as Puritans, Friends, Anglicans, and so on); and how artists were asked to present visually the interaction between various colonists and both Native American Indians and African slaves. Roark’s central argument is that the products of colonial artists functioned not only to represent, but also to demarcate and even define the very foundations of an American identity and nation. Artists of Colonial America is written in clear and direct prose that makes it accessible to any student of American art. Indeed, Roark’s precise and detailed expositions of particular times, places, and works of art indicate that her book might be well used as an effective teaching tool, particularly because it also includes a comprehensive timeline and further readings for each chapter. Artists of Colonial America is both a long overdue and a significant scholarly contribution to the study of colonial American art. It is essential reading for American art historians and for any scholar interested in the foundations of American culture and nationhood. —Joy Sperling Denison University Audacity Personified: The Generalship of Robert E. Lee Peter S. Carmichael, Editor. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004. The Civil War, as everyone knows, may have ended, but it is not over. The culture of the South in many ways is still status quo ante, based in large part on the resonating personality of the near-mythological Robert E. Lee and the questions still circulating about his role in the Confederacy and the War. In addition to being connected to the George Washington family by marriage, did he take the generalship of his Revolutionary hero too seriously and follow his tactics to the destruction of the Confederacy? Was Lee too timid to take the offensive, being in fact the ‘‘granny’’ that the popular voice sometimes dubbed him? Or was he too much on the offensive, following the experience he had gained in the Mexican war, willing to sacrifice his troops when he realized that he did not have a chance of success? Did Lee depend on too small a staff of advisers to counsel him on carrying out his tactics? At the time and through the years, many Civil War authorities have suggested that any of several Confederate generals would have been more successful than Lee was. General Scott once said that Lee was the one general he would entrust with heading the American army. Would it have been a misplaced and desperate commitment? This collection of half a dozen essays attempts to cast light on, though not to settle, the many 436 The Journal of American Culture  Volume 27, Number 4  December 2004 controversies in the Lee career. Though they do not open the man and the War to all of the possibilities, they cover enough angles to help modify the Lee myth. Their conclusions, in effect, are that Lee was not the ‘‘audacity personified’’ he is often held to have been; that he could have used more advisers had he used them wisely; and—what we all know—that Lee from the start knew that the idea of the Confederacy was a lost cause. Other questions still stick out like skeletons. Why did he let his sense of honor pull him into a stupid and disastrous cause for himself and the South? Why was he so personally withdrawn and ‘‘dignified’’? In other words, the Lee wheel only partially turns, but the insights are interesting and valuable. —Ray B. Browne Bowling Green, Ohio Books, Maps, and Politics: A History of the Library of Congress,1782^1861 Carl Ostrowski. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004. Not only has Ostrowski written a highly readable account of the Library of Congress from 1783 to 1861, but he has also successfully positioned the Library of Congress within the history of print culture in America. The Library of Congress has not always been perceived as the nation’s library. Instead, during 1783–1861, there were conflicting viewpoints regarding the library’s function. During the nineteenth century, the primary function of the Library of Congress was to provide books to members of Congress and to certain members of the executive and judicial branches in order to write legislation for the new nation. A secondary function was to provide reading material for entertainment and instruction for members of Congress and their families. Ostrowski uses titles from Library of Congress catalogs in his examination of the relationship between the library and America’s literary culture. The Library of Congress’s symbolic function varied. For instance, for supporters of a limited government in the early years of this nation, the Library of Congress could represent a luxury that the young country could not presently afford; for others later in this era, the Library was perceived as a symbol of the nation’s cultural achievement. Finally, the Library of Congress also symbolized the progress of American art and architecture through its function as an art gallery and a tourist attraction. Ostrowski’s Books, Maps, and Politics, which is based on his dissertation, belongs in every academic library. —Camille McCutcheon University of South Carolina Upstate But Is It Garbage? Steven L. Hamelman. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004. Would you hesitate to review a book with this title? I did. I have no special expertise with garbage, even though I’ve dealt with it over the years. I read on. But wait. This is about another kind of garbage. Trash that has been polluting the rock ‘n’ roll landscape since the first amplified guitar riff tore through American mass culture over half a century ago. Hamelman calls this product ‘‘trash trope’’: throwaway tunes, wasted fans, crappy reviews, junk bins of remaindered albums. In other articles, I’ve chosen to give it another more generic name: glut. We might be inclined to make a thesis statement: American culture is sometimes trash trope. Like many aspects of the book, this is overkill, but very provocative overkill. A professor of English at Coastal Carolina University, this young rebel isn’t afraid of wretched excess. He 437 Book Reviews makes thirty-four ‘‘explorations,’’ giving us what he calls ‘‘challenging thoughts into how rock’s creators, critics, and consumers both transform and are transformed by trash.’’ Why do we love rock ‘n’ roll? (Well, why do some of us love it?) Because, says our author, it involves the broader culture of disposability. Put more positively, it allows us to cope with the culture in the Age of Anxiety. Why might we be willing to praise this book? People like Theodore Gracyk, who in a back cover blurb urges us to ‘‘chill some beer, crank some tunes, and start reading anywhere.’’ Or consider these words by the author about one of his special heroes, Jimi Hendrix: ‘‘In terms of years on this earth, twenty-seven, this man (demigod to many music lovers) came and went even faster than did Jesus Christ’’ (5). There, I would suggest, the comparison stops. Not for Hamelman. He continues, ‘‘Jimi’s recordings were instantly canonized as holy writ, so that Hendrix watchers were quite upset by posthumous albums by a ‘misguided producer.’’’ I am intrigued by the constant Christian references in this open-ended text. There are testimonies. We are told by Robert Pollad that he made rock his religion, which eventually become his church. Clearly, rock ‘n’ roll was largely an idiom through which adolescents expressed their feelings about fast cars, big waves, square parents, school, work, sex, and being in love. As times change, how did the idiom change too? Even more compelling and puzzling is the testimony by Iggy Pop (yes, that is his assumed name). When we first started out, we are told by Iggy, ‘‘it was like early Christianity.’’ We are not given an explanation or analysis. Are we to assume that the faithful were saved by rock ‘n’ roll? Do we have a new religion in the making? Here is a clue. Part three of Steven Hamelman’s book has as its title ‘‘Saved.’’ ‘‘First there was the Bible, then Marx, and then there was rock ‘n’ roll’’ (205). —Marshall W. Fishwick Virginia Tech The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature F. Abiola Irele and Simon Gikandi, Editors. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. This is a monumental endeavor and accomplishment. It is daunting to try to put between four covers the literary and cultural lives of the varying peoples of a whole continent and many histories, as the editors of these concise volumes try to do. Their intentions and methods are perhaps best explained in the words of the preface: In conformity with accepted practice, therefore, the term ‘‘African literature’’ has been taken here to mean the literature that has been produced on the African continent, whatever the specific provenance of the oral or written text and of the corpus being considered, and whatever the language of expression of the text in question, the particular modes it employs, or the conventions to which it conforms. The languages of expression therefore include Arabic and the various other languages in use in Africa, but English is the common language that permeates and connects the literatures of all of Africa and the Caribbean. Because of the nature of the cultures of Africa, a great deal of time and space (eight essays) are devoted to oral literature: ‘‘Africa and Orality,’’ ‘‘The Folktale and Its Extensions,’’ ‘‘Festivals, Ritual, and Drama in Africa,’’ ‘‘Arab and Berber Traditions in North Africa,’’ ‘‘Heroic and Praise Poetry in South Africa,’’ ‘‘African Oral Epics,’’ ‘‘The Oral Tradition in the African Diaspora,’’ and ‘‘Carnival and the Folk Origins of West Indian Drama.’’ These are valuable contributions to the understanding of comparative American cultures. The same must be said with qualification for the essay on popular culture, ‘‘Popular Literature in Africa.’’ The reader would have been delighted and informed with a longer paper with more details and examples. The author, Ode S. Ogede in the Department of English at North Carolina 438 The Journal of American Culture  Volume 27, Number 4  December 2004 Central University in Durham, spends most of her time arguing with Bernth Lindfors of the English Department at University of Texas (possibly the leading authority on African popular culture in the United States and others)—perhaps an unnecessary exercise. In the conclusion, Ogede apologizes for the popular literature of the African masses, saying that it is characterized by being concerned with the sleazy side of culture—but, as she says, it is much more. Again, perhaps it would be best to let the essay speak for itself: What makes the genre appealing to its audiences, what makes it distinctive as a mode of communication, is the quality of melodramatic suspense that characterizes its urban settings as well as its sententious phrasing, emotional sensationalism, narrative extravagance, and the phantasmagorical platitudes that the antiheroes or villains who populate the texts take as their inspiriting values. This ‘‘encyclopedia’’ is indispensable for anyone interested in the literature of the continent of Africa or in comparative literature in general. Most of us know far too little on the subject, and these 900 pages should generally bring us up to date. —Ray B. Browne Bowling Green, Ohio Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another Philip Ball. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2004. This is a big book by an author who thinks big. Holding a PhD in physics, now a writer and consulting editor in England, he asks essential questions. Why is society the way it is? Are there laws of nature that guide human affairs? Do we have complete freedom in creating our societies? Just how, in human affairs, does one thing lead to another? Where are we headed? Can applying concepts from physics to our culture (he calls this ‘‘the physics of society’’)—to the social, political, and economic areas—improve societies, lead to better decisions, and make for a safer and fairer world? His answers are thoughtful and original, and deserve our thought and attention. He waxes poetic and scientific, bringing the insights of poets and Taoist scholars to bear on the subject. His first chapter centers on the brutish world of Thomas Hobbes, fathering the Enlightenment enthusiasm for a mechanistic philosophy that looks naı̈ve to us now. Still, in the work of authors like Galileo and Newton, there are deep and elegant truths about the way the universe works. Their ideas, expanded in later centuries, underpin the physics of society. Understanding what atoms do when they get together is one of science’s greatest triumphs. But no one could have expected this to lead where it has. Today, we have confronted ‘‘phase transitions,’’ which explain processes of sudden change in social contexts. Postmodernist Charles Jencks calls these ‘‘sudden jumps in organization,’’ and Thomas Kuhn, ‘‘paradigm shifts’’ in scientific thought. Our task now is to know something of why and how phase transitions occur. How did we ever get to what the author calls ‘‘The Grand Ah-Whoom,’’ the atomic bomb that altered world thinking and acting? And the idea of the ‘‘Global Village’’ and synthetic society, which lands some countries in cyberspace, others in riot, exploitation, and war? In the past, cultural beliefs and values were bound up with dreams of empire. Today they favor a commercial imperative and cultural imperialism. We are determined to teach the world to enjoy the benefits of Coca-Cola, computers, e-mail, and hamburgers. My travels have taken me to many parts of the Global Village, meeting people from countries in Europe, South America, Africa, and Asia. I was usually well received and accommodated, but I did not always feel at ease in the highly touted Electronic Utopia. I heard from various leaders and sociologists a word seldom used in prosperous America: pillage. I checked my dictionary for an exact meaning: ‘‘The act of looting or plundering; to take booty.’’ Book Reviews Are we pillaging many Third World countries, taking their products and labor at near-starvation prices to resell for huge profits? There are still a billion people in the world working for less than $2 a day. Many of their products end up in the United States—plunder? People everywhere are being bombarded, entertained, and enticed by the new mass media. The world walks under our golden arches and watches our Hollywood movies. But have they really changed deep down? Scratch globalism and up pops the ancient nationalism and regionalism that have held sway for centuries—and beneath that, the tribalism that existed when history was still blind. Can and will the electronic supplant the historic? If so, at what price? Certainly, the Global Village has glamorous toys and tools. Computers, faxes, e-mail, photocopiers, modems, and cable boxes are universal signs of ‘‘being up to date.’’ Increasing numbers listen to CNN, talk about eating a Big Mac, and know that Coke is the Real Thing. The Internet and Superhighway are already overcrowded. New travelers jostle for space every day. Like it or not, we live in an age when the value of sound bites, images, and ideologies has often proved more attractive than material acquisitions and physical space. The virtual drives out the real. Good news, bad news, and stale news pops and crackles instantaneously. Somewhere something is happening to someone. Do you mean you haven’t heard? What you know has become more salable than what you own. Call your TV station or newspaper if you have a story. You may end up being famous for fifteen minutes. Is all of this uniting people or keeping them apart? Might it help explain the new cynicism that blankets the world? Could our ever-expanding communication network be affecting us emotionally, eroding ancient values and customs? Is it not naı̈ve to assume that expanding world communication necessarily leads to peace and understanding? There are twenty-three wars raging around the world, and daily acts of terrorism and sabotage worldwide. Diversity as a culture ideal is one thing, but quite something else when it becomes an ideology 439 and an obsession. Look what ‘‘diversity’’ and ethnic feuding has done to Yugoslavia, Asia, the former USSR, the Middle East, and much of Africa. Or check out the decaying centers of many cities to see diversity in the raw—but don’t go out alone at night. We have been led astray by the siren call of diversity. What we need is less dissonance and more harmony. At home and abroad, diversity is often linked to separatism, imposed quotas, and victimization. Ball understands this. Professor Ball is wary of what he calls the Cyber-Commonwealth, where an electronic virus can strike down the Internet as their biological namesakes can leave us bedridden. Count on overload, transmission errors, local breakdowns, and attacks with malicious intent. The infamous May 2000 ‘‘I Love You’’ virus caused untold anguish, immobilizing the e-mail systems of the US Senate and the British House of Commons. The Love Bug virus disabled South Korea’s whole Internet network. One thing leads to another. The author’s final question: Are we headed toward Utopia? Or toward hell and social planning? Once we become part of a group, we can never be sure what to expect. Stay tuned. —Marshall W. Fishwick Virginia Tech Culinary Tourism Lucy M. Long. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004. Lucy Long’s edited volume Culinary Tourism uses the methods of folklore studies and anthropology to ‘‘explore food as both a destination and a vehicle for tourism’’ (2). Linking food and tourism creates an interesting dialogue because personal and social identities are constructed in both sites through comparison with racial, ethnic, religious, class, or national ‘‘others.’’ The anthology’s foundation is Long’s insightful introductory 440 The Journal of American Culture  Volume 27, Number 4  December 2004 essay on culinary tourism, which occurs both domestically (through ethnic restaurants, for example) and through travel. Although culinary tourism is an important concept, and several of the individual essays are excellent, the anthology suffers from a narrow definition of topic and method. The best essays are multifaceted, considering culinary tourism as a method of identity construction and part of a consumer culture that relies on the concept of authenticity. Jeffrey M. Pilcher’s essay, for example, is a historical analysis of Mexican cuisine in both Mexico and the United States. He is particularly sensitive to class, demonstrating that Mexican culinary tourism began with Mexican elites eschewing indigenous food to feast on European cuisine in Mexico City in the late nineteenth century. Visitors from the United States who ‘‘embraced the exoticism of supposedly primitive Mexico as a release from an overly materialist society’’ (76) came as well. Pilcher also considers indigenous Mexicans who perform for the tourist gaze. Other useful essays—Kristin McAndrews on the Hawaiian Poke festival, Miryam Rotkovitz on kosher certification in the United States, and Liz Wilson on Asian food for baby boomers—all similarly consider multiple perspectives on food culture and interrogate how authenticity changes over time, within consumer culture and by social position. Several of the remaining essays have a ‘‘Reader, I have been there’’ quality that either reduces the piece to a descriptive travelogue or ignores the author’s subject position in creating a narrative of food and place. Jacqueline S. Thursby opens her essay on Basques and Basque Americans by writing that she is looking to ‘‘understand the Basques’’ (186), an unfortunate essentialism that is repeated throughout the volume. An interdisciplinary perspective that includes insights from cultural studies, sociology, or American studies would have added academic depth to these first-person experiences and made Culinary Tourism more valuable outside anthropology and folklore studies. —Mary Rizzo University of Minnesota Culture in the Age of Three Worlds Michael Denning. New York: Verso, 2004. Michael Denning, professor of American Studies at Yale University, wants to rethink the Age of Three Worlds—that short half century between 1945 and 1989 when we imagined that the world was divided into three: the capitalist first world, the communist second world, and the decolonizing third world. Where does the radical tradition fit into all of this? And where is it going? For a while, the focus shifted to issues of discrimination and identity: race, gender, and sexuality. Now we must move forward and include such issues as corporate power, labor rights, and a working global economy. Well written and documented, this leader of the New Left admits that culture is mass-produced, like Detroit automobiles or Big Macs. Now the masses have culture and culture has a mass. Some of us have argued this for years and are happy to know that some of the university elite have reached the same conclusion. Denning includes a table (82) of the chief voices of the New Left, including names and years when they reached twenty. They didn’t take part in the earlier ‘‘great student uprisings,’’ but they were teachers, literally or symbolically, of a new generation of student leaders. They are his admired standard bearers, people like Raymond Williams, Betty Friedan, Noam Chomsky, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, and Doris Lessing. His archvillain is Ronald Reagan, with his utopian promise and fantasy bribe. Along with Britain’s Margaret Thatcher, he gave us the ‘‘Great Moving Right Show.’’ They championed a mindless mass culture, and the Old Left did not (and has not) refuted it. His somewhat glib conclusion: ‘‘Mass culture has won. There is nothing else’’ (103). All culture is mass culture under capitalism, he continues. There is no working-class culture that is not saturated with mass culture. What do we need? ‘‘A new conception of the spectrum of cultural forms . . .’’ Book Reviews Don’t look for it in ‘‘the genteel tradition of a provincial middlebrow petit bourgeoisie’’ championed by postmodern yuppies. We must move on to a mapping of the popular aesthetic and the cultural values of the working classes. What do we need from Denning’s canon? A national system of sabbaticals for working people, a better affirmative action program to open universities across lines of race and class, and the building of international links between university lefts around the world (146) Can we form a new culture, a new conception of the world? Not until we get rid of left-wing bureaucrats unable to recognize and support new forms of art, new culture, and revolutionary movements. Otherwise we may sink into a paralyzing despair. Denning’s final chapter comes in the form of a question—A Cultural Front in the Age of Three Worlds?—that depends on the solidarity across tiers of writers and artists, teachers and professionals, with casual workers, immigrants in sweat shops and garment factories. We cannot recycle the old images of labor, Archie Bunker, or Homer Simpson. We must see new forms of struggle and solidarity in places we never thought to look. Is he conjuring up a new utopia? —Marshall W. Fishwick Virginia Tech Embodiment of a Nation: Human Form in American Places Cecilia Tichi. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004. Facing America: Iconography and the Civil War Shirley Samuels. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. These two books are two skins of the onion of American culture, the second with a new and 441 pungent sting. Both add considerable insight into what constitutes America. Embodiment of a Nation is concerned with the growth tying American consciousness and its representation to nature. From the first inhabitants of this continent, settlers have been impressed, even overwhelmed, by the awesomeness of the topography. This impression has been reflected in America’s statues and iconography. Tichi traces this development from Mt. Rushmore (which, though it attracts 2 to 2 1/2 million impressed visitors a year, is often the object of scorn) to Thoreau’s Walden Pond to Yellowstone, the moonscape, Hot Springs, Arkansas (the nation’s first national park) to Love Canal. Tichi demonstrates how these icons, as they grow or fade in the nation’s consciousness, are the icons of the moment that grow or fade as society’s awareness and needs continue. Samuels’s Facing America pulls back a sharp layer of understanding on America’s iconography. Reading closely all printed expressions of American culture of the Civil War—broadsides, fiction, ballads, caricatures, pictures, statues, and so on—she adds the very significant expression of photography, through which and behind which she reads the real meaning of American culture concerning pro- and antislavery sentiment and indifference to the issue. All, in one way and to one degree or another, reveal the burning issue of the time in American development leading up to and living through the war that built a nation. One of the more grisly of her treatments is that of the corpse of slain Abraham Lincoln as it was prepared for and kept presentable for its trip to Illinois after assassination. But this examination reveals the details and insight that Samuels focuses on the vital iconography of the Civil War period. Both volumes are vital to the growing shelf of treatments of Civil War America and its culture from which present-day America developed. —Ray B. Browne Bowling Green, Ohio 442 The Journal of American Culture  Volume 27, Number 4  December 2004 Encyclopedia of American Folk Art Gerard C. Wertkin, Editor. New York and London: Routledge, 2004. The Encyclopedia of American Folk Art includes one very manageable volume—a guide to the objects, artists, and cultural background of three centuries of folk art in America. This comprehensive reference is a welcome contribution to a field dominated by the study of particulars, with most publications either monographs or exhibition catalogues. Editor Gerard Wertkin, the longtime director of the American Folk Art Museum in New York, engaged ninety-two contributors, most of whom are elite scholars from academia, and the curatorial staffs of America’s leading fine and folk art museums. As specialists, they maintain the particularity required to do justice to a subject as diverse as folk art, but by their number, cover the subject broadly. Each of the 607 entries contains abundant information and is so well written that one is compelled to read beyond the original query. Readers will also appreciate the cross-references and individualized bibliographies following each entry. Unfortunately, the illustration quality falls short of text quality. Some reproductions are indistinct, as if overenlarged, and some of the color plates are dull or yellowed. Inexplicably, the text does not reference the illustrations, a problem especially for the color plates, which are grouped together away from the entries that they illustrate. Four categories of entries provide different types of information. One category comprises entries on types of objects, including functional objects like face jugs, quilts, and weathervanes; religious objects like retabalos and gravestones; and aesthetic objects such as folk versions of landscape and still-life painting. A second category comprises entries on individual artists. With about four hundred biographies, this is by far the largest category, and one that reflects the idiosyncracy and individuality contrasting American folk art with the more class-based and tradition- bound folk art of Europe. A third category comprises entries on the art of communal groups, identified by hyphenated terms such as German-, Scandinavian-, Asian-, African-, Native-, JewishAmerican folk art, and so on. These essays furnish historical background for situating individual objects and artists. Communal groups generally are defined ethnically or geographically, but there are also entries on the art of groups defined by estrangement from community, such as outsider art and visionary art. Most intriguing are communal groups defined by institutions and practices of industrial modernism, the supposed destroyer of folk art. Prison art, circus art, vernacular photography, and political folk art all are classifications that could emerge only within the social, economic, technological, and political conditions of modernity. A fourth category, essays on major museums, groundbreaking scholars, and originating collectors, will appeal to folk art specialists. These entries, combined with Wertkin’s excellent introduction, give a critical history of the field, with its shifting parameters and contested terminology. The Encyclopedia of American Folk Art is a highly successful summary of current knowledge that, as Wertkin recognizes, is grounded in ‘‘patterns of institutional collecting, museum exhibitions, and related publications and programs’’ (xxvii). The museum perspective means that there is less contextual social history applied to objects and artists than historians of popular culture might wish. In the essay on the nineteenth-century portraitist Ammi Phillips (1788–1865) for example, the rigidity and austerity of his style is explained as a provincial version of Romanticism. A broader consideration of culture might identify parallels between Phillips’s style and the industrial ethos, already a commanding force in antebellum America. Many entries might include more on audience. Though folk art looks quaint, its patrons were not necessarily old-fashioned. More likely, they were enthusiastic art consumers in the nineteenth century—citizens of what David Jaffee has called the ‘‘Village Enlightenment’’— and later, even more sophisticated consumers. Recognizing that American folk art was not Book Reviews produced and received by a folk culture but by the mainstream suggests many possibilities for future scholarship. For the opportunities for further work that it forecasts, and for the rich compilation of ideas and information that it delivers, the Encyclopedia of American Folk Art will benefit scholars and enthusiasts for many years to come. —Joyce Bernstein Howell Virginia Wesleyan College The Essential Guide to Werewolf Literature Brian J. Frost. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003. Brian J. Frost’s book provides a comprehensive overview of werewolf fiction and nonfiction, from ancient Roman writers such as Virgil and Ovid through what Frost calls ‘‘the boom years’’ of the 1990s. The breadth of Frost’s coverage is impressive, making this book an essential reference guide for those interested in the literary pedigree of the werewolf. Although the term ‘‘werewolf’’ itself is Anglo-Saxon in origin, Frost notes that stories of human beings who transform themselves into wolves (or other kinds of animals) are common in world mythology, folklore, and literature. The task Frost then establishes for himself is a formidable one: to catalogue most (if not all) of the known appearances of the werewolf in Western literature. He does so in workmanlike fashion, annotating the references as he sees fit. The end result is a book that is somewhat inconsistent in the amount of detail given in the story synopses, and the depth of its commentary on the literary significance of the werewolf. However, the book cannot be faulted for its exhaustive listings and lengthy concluding bibliography. The bibliography alone makes this volume indispensable for scholars with an interest in the subject. Chapter one, ‘‘The Werewolf Phenomenon,’’ situates the werewolf legends of England, France, 443 Spain, Greece, Sweden, and other northern European countries within the larger mythological tradition of hybrid monsters. Based on such legends, Frost profiles the physical appearance of the werewolf, the duration of the transformation, and the methods (either voluntarily or involuntarily) by which one becomes a werewolf. Frost then makes a crucial distinction between the terms ‘‘lycanthrope’’ and ‘‘werewolf,’’ the former referring to a person who believes that he or she is a wolf, and the latter referring to an actual shapeshifter. Frost points out that occult belief in werewolves as literal shape-shifters or psychic projections of inner savagery continued through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Frost also summarizes the Freudian and Jungian psychological explanations of the werewolf as symbolic manifestation of unspeakable internal desires. Chapter two is entitled ‘‘A Survey of Reference Works.’’ Frost observes that most reference works on the subject address the ontology of the werewolf tradition and/or the literal existence of werewolves; until recently, few works have catalogued the werewolf in fiction. The works cited in this chapter approach the werewolf legend from a variety of perspectives, including occult, theological, anthropological, and psychoanalytic. Frost identifies the most important studies as originating in the sixteenth century. Within the larger context of a belief in witchcraft and demonology, these works tend to conclude that so-called werewolves are mentally ill people under the satanic delusion that they have been transformed into beasts. Not until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, did several noted reference works bring the werewolf to popular attention. Some of the more recognizable twentieth-century authors (and a host of more obscure ones) cited by Frost include Montague Summers, Ernest Jones, and Robert Eisler. Toward the end of the chapter, while noting the contribution of writers such as Basil Copper and Stephen King, Frost states the purpose of his own work: to fill a void in the cataloguing and literary criticism of fictional werewolf tales. In chapter three, ‘‘The Werewolf Enters Fiction,’’ Frost embarks upon this primary mission. 444 The Journal of American Culture  Volume 27, Number 4  December 2004 He points out the earliest known literary occurrences of the werewolf theme in works by Virgil, Petronius, and Marie de France. After the end of the medieval period, Frost says, the werewolf rarely appears in fiction again until the nineteenth century. Frost displays his impressive knowledge by pointing out such disparate moments as the first novel to have a werewolf as a central character (George W. M. Reynold’s Wagner, the WehrWolf in 1846), and the first known introduction of a female werewolf character (Frederick Marryat’s novel The Phantom Ship in 1839). Celebrated authors who incorporated werewolves into their fiction include Alexandre Dumas, Guy de Maupassant, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, and Algernon Blackwood. Novels that are not, strictly speaking, centered on werewolves are also included in that these novels deal with lycanthropy or the transformation of man into beast. For example, Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous tale of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is discussed, as is Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf. As is typical of the rest of the volume, Frost furnishes the reader with thumbnail summaries of most works. Chapter four, ‘‘A New Approach,’’ focuses on the era between world wars, when cheaply produced, mass distributed periodicals (the ‘‘pulps’’) brought exciting and often lurid fictional stories to a wide readership. Within the pages of magazines such as Weird Tales, numerous werewolf stories were published during the 1920s and 1930s. Characteristically exuberant, Frost claims that the Weird Tales stable of pulp writers, such as Robert E. Howard, H. Warner Munn, Robert Bloch, and Seabury Quinn, essentially saved the horror/fantasy genre, and the werewolf tale in particular. Of particular interest here is Frost’s discussion of pulp female writers, such as C. L. Moore, who penned memorable werewolf stories. Chapter five’s title, ‘‘The Beast Within,’’ is appropriate in that Freudian psychological theory, reliant on a binary opposition between the conscious and unconscious minds, structures most of the werewolf tales from the 1930s through the 1960s, especially Guy Endore’s well known novel, The Werewolf of Paris (1933). Frost rightly notes that of all of the known werewolf fiction, The Werewolf of Paris is the only work accorded some degree of literary legitimacy by traditional critics. Perhaps this recognition is due in part to the novel’s emphasis on the Freudian psychosexual dimension of the werewolf legend. Frost also examines the influence on the genre of the magazine Unknown, the only serious competitor in the 1940s to Weird Tales. In response to the innovative stories being published in Unknown, Weird Tales writers such as Robert Bloch and Manly Banister struck back with their own werewolf stories. By the 1950s, however, the pulp magazines were being replaced by magazine digests and inexpensive novels that were tailored to more sophisticated tastes. Frost explains that, coinciding with this development, werewolf stories began to relocate their settings into urban environments and more often appeared in science fiction magazines. For example, science fiction writer James Blish published the oft-anthologized werewolf story ‘‘There Shall Be No Darkness’’ in Thrilling Wonder Tales in 1950. Publication of werewolf short stories and novels continued at a slow but steady pace throughout the 1960s, with some of the stories, such as Dan Lindsay’s story ‘‘The Beatnik Werewolf’’ (1961), humorously reflecting the sociopolitical concerns of the decade. Frost calls the 1970s through the 1990s ‘‘The Boom Years’’ for werewolf fiction. He contends that genre rode the coattails of a larger cultural interest in supernatural and occult-themed thrillers beginning in the 1970s. Chapter six thus details the plots of well-known recent novels, such as Whitley Strieber’s The Wolfen (1978), Gary Brandner’s The Howling (1977), Thomas Tessier’s The Nightwalker (1981), Stephen King’s Cycle of the Werewolf (1983), and Robert R. McCammon’s The Wolf’s Hour (1989). Short stories also proliferated, including contributions by noted fantasy writers such as Harlan Ellison and Angela Carter. Frost concludes the chapter with an overview of the many werewolf novels of the 1990s, the advent of werewolves as characters in paranormal romances aimed primarily at female readers, and listings of works written for children. Chapter seven, entitled ‘‘Werewolf Anthologies,’’ conveniently names the major anthologies on the subject Book Reviews to date, including Frost’s own collection, Book of the Werewolf (1973), Stephen Jones’s The Mammoth Book of Werewolves (1994), and Pam Keesey’s Women Who Run with the Werewolves (1996). As impressive as this study is in its scope, some problems exist. For example, while Frost typically maintains the detached academic style customary in reference works such as this, his undeniable enthusiasm for the subject sometimes produces odd tonal dissonance. For example, in his more unrestrained rhetoric, Frost can fudge the line between objective analysis of belief in the werewolf phenomenon and advocacy of a belief in same: ‘‘[Transformation into a wolf] sounds incredible, to say the least, and goes against all known scientific principles—but then, strange phenomena always do. Let us not forget that our knowledge of the world we live in is far from complete; every day we are discovering something new, and perhaps some day the piecing together of all of this dissociated knowledge will open up terrifying aspects of reality’’ (23). While the caution against intellectual complacency is well taken, is Frost suggesting that there may be some basis in fact for supernatural tales of shape-shifting? Such a claim might be better suited to some of the occult texts that Frost examines. In addition, Frost does not hesitate to praise or condemn a given story’s literary merits or demerits. Typical are overly generalized comments such as these: ‘‘All three stories provide first-rate entertainment for those who enjoy storytelling of the good, oldfashioned kind’’ (92), or ‘‘Cliché-ridden potboilers [these novels] are deservedly forgotten today’’ (101). Because Frost clearly wants his literary judgment to be heeded, the reader may occasionally wish that Frost had better defined his terms so that one has a better sense of what Frost considers to be ‘‘first-rate entertainment.’’ Moreover, on the basis of these qualitative judgments, Frost often extensively summarizes some works at the expense of a cursory listing of others. Certainly, authorial decisions must be made as to which works to linger upon, lest a study of this sort bog down and become too lengthy or esoteric. However, the reader finds oneself often making great 445 leaps of faith in accepting Frost’s endorsement or dismissal of a given short story or novel. Though at times rhetorically overwrought and somewhat vague in its criteria for judgment of literary value, Frost’s study nevertheless catalogs and synopsizes an incredible range of works centering on werewolves. The casual reader with an interest in werewolf fiction will find this study accessible in its language and helpful in its direction for further reading. The scholar will appreciate the book’s overview of the publishing trends and specific works of a given historical period. Finally, the study’s bibliography is invaluable for any reader, collector, or critic looking to read more about one of the most fascinating figures in the pantheon of supernatural monsters: the werewolf. —Philip L. Simpson Brevard Community College, Florida Folk and Fairy Tales: A Handbook D. L. Ashliman. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004. If all music, as star trumpeter Louis Armstrong believed, is folk music, then all culture is folk culture. And if that is correct, this book is for us all. Its purpose is to give brief historical explanations (and examples where needed) of all kinds of folk cultures, with contexts of their importance in the lives of cultures around the world. Much of the material being endemic in our everyday cultures is familiar. Much, however, is new: additional explanations and examples, and at times, corrections to accepted understanding of items of historical value. Ashliman’s page on Aesop, for example, changes the understanding of who Aesop (if he ever existed as single individual) really was—his life and career, and importance to us today. Many other entries shade our understanding into different directions. As a result, this is a book that needs to be handy for all scholars of 446 The Journal of American Culture  Volume 27, Number 4  December 2004 books and of life. It will enrich our lives by making everyday aspects more everyday. Ashliman, one of folklore’s finer scholars, is to be congratulated on his excellent book. —Ray B. Browne Bowling Green, Ohio 2004 Cawelti Award, Honorable Mention Recipient Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon Anthony Harkins. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. ‘‘The enormous success of commercially recorded rural white music, today commonly labeled ‘country music,’ played a central role in putting the word hillbilly and its image squarely on the national cultural map’’ (71). I was struck by the title of Anthony Harkins’s book even before I read it. The title is provocative —Hillbilly—especially considering the renewed popularity of the term. As Harkins’s subtitle suggests, this critical history touches on many different readings of the word, from literature to popular entertainment, from satire to pejorative, from regional pride to national embarrassment. The six chapters, introduction, and epilogue are divided into three basic themes: the cultural significance and history of the term from Yankee Doodle to the silent films of D. W. Griffith and others; the positive spin on the term with the rise of country music between the wars; and the satirical, even sarcastic interpretation in midtwentieth-century visual culture from comics to Hollywood and television. ‘‘The continuous popularity and ubiquity of the hillbilly portrait stems from the dualistic nature of this cultural conception,’’ Harkins wrote. ‘‘It includes both positive and negative features of the American past and present, and incorporates both ‘otherness’ and self-identification’’ (6). Even in the years prior to the Civil War, the mountain man and the pipe-smoking granny were popular images on stage, in literature and in cartoons. But these images represented picturesque rather than dangerous stereotypes, ‘‘. . . colorful, even quirky men and women oddly out of step with modern society’’ (33). It was after the war, inspired in part by news of the now famous feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys, that the stereotype took on new qualities of belligerent, almost subhuman associations. The view of the hillbilly as a threat to modern civilization continued to proliferate after 1900 by way of the new popular medium of cinema, from D. W. Griffith’s Mountain Honor in 1909 right up to John Boorman’s Deliverance in 1972. Significantly, the violence of many such films was usually directed toward women. It is in the realm of music that the hillbilly type took on a positive connotation when, in the years following World War I, some southern folk musicians began adopting the term as a matter of pride. Promoters of the genre capitalized on the inherent ambiguity of the word as something of questionable taste but at the same time distinctively American. The contradictory nature of the term continues to influence its popular appeal—a self-mocking name appropriate to a genre unsure of its identity, its origins, or even its purpose. In comic art, the hillbilly found himself transformed once more, now into a socially acceptable form of joke-telling in the likes of Snuffy Smith and Li’l Abner. Cold War era television reintroduced the hillbilly into popular visual culture, in its preCivil War guise, as representing small town family values of simplicity, honesty and downright unapologetic Americanism! Anthony Harkins’s book is well researched and thoughtfully and sensitively written. His style is light and personable, and, perhaps like the topic itself, just a little self-mocking. Consider the following chapter subheadings: ‘‘Hillbilly Semiotics . . .’’ (72), ‘‘Solidifying Ambiguity . . .’’ (62), and phrases like ‘‘. . . over bearded and over hatted hillbilly . . .’’ (154). My only concern might be 447 Book Reviews with the book’s scope. As a ‘‘cultural history’’ it is too cursory; perhaps Harkins discovered (too late), as many of us have, that the topic, heretofore unexplored in so comprehensive a manner, was bigger than originally thought. Almost unmentioned in the book, for instance, is the rich theatrical tradition from antebellum hillbilly spoofs with characters like Nimrod Wildfire and Jedediah Homebred to modern musicals like Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. One of the most important contributions of this book, and one on which I congratulate the author, is the extensive bibliography and source list. It is, and perhaps could be, almost a book in itself, and will surely serve well for future researchers on this important topic of American popular culture. —Robert Sheardy Kendall College of Art and Design In the Work of Their Hands Is Their Prayer Joel Daehnke. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004. This book examines a hundred years of writing about the frontier experience. Its theme is the uniting power of the native landscape, and redemption on America’s frontiers from 1830 to 1930. The editor, who teaches American literature at the University of Northern Colorado, is an avid fly-fisherman. His must be the only acknowledgment that includes the Rocky Mountain trout, ‘‘Who taught me the value of a good presentation and a drag-free drift.’’ He hopes that the lesson was not lost on this project. I think it wasn’t. The pace is lively and the drag minimal. The western frontier was a kind of temporary Eden: fortunate topography, good climate, fertile soil and virile health, fine perceptions, noble faculties—privileged ground for our national history. It is also a good place to pick up the nostalgia and lost Utopia theme that now moves across our land. It found a landmark in the funeral and long eulogies of former president Ronald Reagan. This is a book he surely would have loved. Leaning on Mark Twain and Willa Cather, Daehnke examines the manner in which the imagery of the human body at work and play on the frontier under girded the ‘‘civilizing’’ of westward expansion. He believes that our belief in human perfectability grew along with crops in the landscapes of the West. He makes much of the founding of Yellowstone National Park, which still houses elk, grizzly bears, and wolves. The discovery of thermal basins there quickly evolved the national park idea and the general belief that sight-seeing was a democratic right in the pursuit of happiness. In Wonders of the Yellowstone, James Richardson called it ‘‘a grand national playground of incomparable marvels,’’ free to all men for all times. That line has a Jeffersonian ring, as indeed does the whole book. Today’s visitor to Yellowstone is asked to reflect on the currents of history and destiny, and how they inhere in the American landscape (62). The nineteenth century also saw the flowering of American landscape painting. The works of artists like Frederick Church and Albert Bierstadt combine realistic detail with an overall effect informed by a Christian model of the subject. This spiritual aesthetic was heavily influenced by transcendentalism and by writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. They helped to foster a sense of unity and Manifest Destiny characteristic of many of our leaders, especially presidents from Theodore Roosevelt to George W. Bush. Daehnke’s chapter four returns to his trout fishing and ‘‘the Fraternity of Anglers.’’ He ties this in with ‘‘National Manhood and the Blessings of American Leisure.’’ Some women made fun of the ‘‘simple fisher’’ who never knew what lay in wait for him. They resented John Donne’s advice to them in ‘‘The Baite’’: Let course bold hand, from slimy nest The bedded fish in banks out-wrest. 448 The Journal of American Culture  Volume 27, Number 4  December 2004 Centuries later Kate Osgood hit a resounding feminist note: The girl who sits beside him Will land an easy prize, And carry him homeward captive To the bait of two blue eyes. Copious notes and a lively text make this an excellent book. —Marshall W. Fishwick Virginia Tech Internet and Personal Computing Fads Mary Ann Bell, Mary Ann Berry, and James L. Van Roekel. New York: Haworth Press, 2004. This wide-ranging, well-researched book attempts to give an overview of the world created by computers, and the obvious advantages and frightening problems that came with it. Their history can be traced back as early as 450 BC and the abacus. The first mechanical computer was developed by Wilhelm Schikard, a German, in the early seventeenth century. Britain’s Charles Babbage invented his ‘‘analytical machine’’ and the card system in 1834; his assistant, Lady Lovelace, Lord Byron’s daughter, wrote directions from which ‘‘programs’’ were developed. From the early history, women played a vital role in developing computer technology and our move into cyberspace. The history of the Internet began when the Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957, and in 1972, Ray Tomlinson created the first e-mail program. The World Wide Web (WWW) was released to the world in 1992. Today we see people carrying and using pagers, cell phones, PDAs, laptops, CD players, and many new items. In his book What Will Be (1997), Michael Dertouzos described a world in which people will not wear conventional clothes but techno-bodysuits. The book is not divided into conventional chapters, but alphabetical topics, beginning with ‘‘Acceptable Use Policy’’ and concluding with ‘‘Y2K.’’ Included are items that many never have heard of—or at least never used. Examples are Power Point Poisoning, Shareware, Spamming, Twain, URL, Usenet, Webcams, and Webquests. The goal is to include as much data as possible. Two of the three editors are assistant professors of library science, and the third ( James Van Roekel) is the director of academic instruction technology and distance learning. All see this as a handbook that takes a practical look into the computer world. They employ short, jargon-free explanations of terms often used but not always understood. They want to show us how to deal with all of these culture benders. The editors make no value judgments, but some of us floating about (often lost) in the world of computers, Internet, e-mail, and indigestible spam think that we should and must take value judgments and ask, Where are we going? Do we want to be there? Will all of this enhance our lives? Is a little learning a dangerous thing, as Alexander Pope warned? New computer worries emerged in 2004 when the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition issued a warning about e-waste. Now e-mail isn’t alone as a problem. US companies are releasing large amounts of lead, polyvinyl chloride, and other hazardous materials used in computer manufacturing. IBM computers also contain brominated flame retardants, which are suspected of blocking hormones and impairing biological process in humans. The health and environment impact of all of this is yet to be determined. The National Safety Council estimates the United States will be awash in 500 million defunct computers and monitors by 2007. Less than 10% will be refurbished or recycled. How’s that for creating massive waste and new unsuspected dangers? These questions involve our physical health. What about the effect on our psychic health, as we turn to the 7/24 calendar, turn night into day, and work a whole extra month each year at the demands of our technology? Who’s really in charge? The European Union has put the burden of recycling on manufacturers; Japan has passed laws 449 Book Reviews requiring manufacturers to recycle. Now we ship our outmoded computers off to Third World countries like China, where the machines are disassembled with alarming harm to the environment and workers. One recalls the plight of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Obviously we can outproduce more than we can consume or adequately dispose of. An oldfashioned word describes our predicament: glut. Now techno-glut is becoming global as we flood the world with our ever-changing new models. Our environment looks more and more like a junkyard, and our medical clinics puzzle over mysterious new ailments coming in from Cyberland. Can we find the necessary cures? The Sorcerer’s Apprentice couldn’t. In that fable (re-enacted by Mickey Mouse in a Disney cartoon), the apprentice could command buckets to bring water in endless succession, but couldn’t get them to stop. Result? His once-comfortable world was flooded and destroyed. Might we be headed in that direction? Why isn’t that question raised in all of the new euphoria about technology? How did all of our gee-whiz hardware perform in our recent Middle Eastern invasions? We need to call not only on scientists and technicians, but also on poets. This is from one of my favorites, Alexander Pope: Created half to rise, and half to fall Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all The glory, jest, and riddle of the world Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled! —Marshall W. Fishwick Virginia Tech Latin American Mystery Writers: An A-to-Z Guide Darrell B. Lockhart, Editor. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2004. Here we have a valuable book that has been too long in the making. Most of us are familiar with the catalogue of American crime writers— including most of the various cultures—but because of the language barrier, we know next to nothing about our friends in Latin America who are intrigued by the same fields. Now we have at least an open window into that world and should follow up on it. In a lengthy introduction, Mempo Giardinelli, one of Latin America’s leading scholars, outlines the differences between standard American hardboiled crime fiction and that of Latin America. His point is that American crime fiction, like American culture, is based on the assumption that something can be done about the world of crime around us, so our crime fiction is corrective. Latin American crime fiction, on the other hand, based on a much older assumption of the evil of human nature, and expects little improvement but respects the effort. He also points out that American crime fiction passed from the shadow of being second-rate literature, while Latin American crime fiction has just reached the edge, or is still considered subliterature. The summation of his attitude can and perhaps should be outlined in his final paragraph: Detective fiction in Latin America today pays a necessary tribute to the hard-boiled tradition. I don’t believe that today it would occur to anyone to write classic detective fiction, which is why one can say that the hard-boiled genre has had a revolutionary influence on all Latin American narrative. In sum, the Latin American writer also demands better living conditions, but money in his works are only a means, not an end or motivation. Corruption is not a deviation from the norm; the causes run deep and are almost never corrected. Power is neither flexible nor something that can be changed with hard work and tenacity; it is an objective to reach in order to change things. Politics is not a public service or charge; it is a passion born of desperation. And literature, of course, is not only evasion and entertainment: it can also be—and in many cases has been and is—an ideological weapon. In this anthology of criticism, the works of fifty-four authors are considered generally by 450 The Journal of American Culture  Volume 27, Number 4  December 2004 American critics. Most are professional writers, though some, like Rene Vergara (1921–1983), came to their calling after careers in other fields (Vergara was a professional detective and police officer for some four decades). All are analyzed and generally approved by American scholars in Latin American literature. The result is a collection of short analytical essays that everybody interested in Latin American literature and international crime fiction—and certainly every library—must possess. —Ray B. Browne Bowling Green, Ohio Louis Owens: Literary Reflections on His Life and Work Jacquelyn Kilpatrick, Editor. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004. This collection is a labor of love by a dozen academics who knew and cared deeply for the author, who died prematurely. Owens was a mixture of Choctaw, Cherokee, and Irish blood, living in a strange ‘‘American’’ environment. His bloodline confused and somewhat irritated Owens, and he set out to understand and explain it. In addition, he wanted to be one of the important theorists of the day, but he had spent time in the Cascades as a forest ranger and the sap of his experience would not leave his veins. He had done his PhD dissertation on John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, and for a long period, he remained wrapped in the pages of the conflict that Steinbeck pictured. Perhaps unfortunately, perhaps fortunately, he desired to write close enough to the everyday people of his world for them to understand. He once said that he was writing for his siblings who had not received the advantage of a college education. The result is a series of realistic novels tied to Indian crime and symbolism that digs deep into Native American culture and melds the two into one stream of humanity. These novels are driven by the power of violence, though most rise to another level and taper off into positive sunshine. But he never loses his suspicion of academics, and as often as not, pours fire on the artificiality of the academic world. Owens died prematurely—just, as we say, when he was at the height of his potential as author and critic. Not all aspects of his works—his treatment of violence and his crime fiction, for example—are covered in this volume. But these essays open the book on Owens’s accomplishments and potential. With his death, as the authors in this fine collection point out, literature lost a strong and definitive voice. —Ray B. Browne Bowling Green, Ohio LuciferAscending: The Occult in Folklore and Popular Culture Bill Ellis. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004. The Harry Potter series serves as a guide through an examination of popular occult traditions in Europe and America. Building on Ellis’s previous work, this scholarly yet accessible volume provides extensive detail on magical practices that Americans have long had a part in developing. From chain letters and rabbit’s feet to black books and mirror gazing, Lucifer Ascending covers a wide range of occult lore, properly reminding us of the supernatural origins of some activities that may be seen as mundane. Occult practices have been used by marginalized folk as a form of social protest. Here we do not see an organized underground Satanic religion seeking to destroy Christianity, but attempts by ordinary people to challenge authority and assert power. Occasionally, simple adolescent fun may be the motive; hence, nighttime visits to graveyards allow teenagers to ‘‘escape what they perceive as a restrictive, adult-oriented, everyday Book Reviews world.’’ Ellis winds his interpretation around the dialectic between occult proponents and antioccult crusaders. Among the results of this method are the occasional agreements reached between the two groups on the possible ‘‘dangers’’ of occult involvement, particularly regarding the infamous cursing Ouija board. In addition, it is good to see Ellis pay attention once again to the German pastor Kurt Koch, who indeed had a substantial impact on twentieth-century Christian antioccult literature. Lucifer Ascending handles its dark subject in a very even-handed and middle-of-the-road manner. Despite Ellis’s background in skeptical inquiries of the supernatural, I did not find this book to necessarily be the ‘‘myth buster’’ claimed on the jacket. As an impartial folklorist, he is reporting on the origin and meaning of unorthodox beliefs. Here he plays that role well. When it comes to a thinker on the spookier side of American life, they come no better than Bill Ellis. —Richard Ravalli, Jr. Humphreys College Making American Boys: Boyology and the Feral Tale Kenneth B. Kidd. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. Kenneth B. Kidd’s fascinating and well-documented book, Making American Boys: Boyology and the Feral Tale, outlines two distinct patterns of representation that have constructed the image of the ‘‘boy’’ in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The first is ‘‘boyology,’’ a term that derives from Henry William Gibson’s handbook Boyology or Boy Analysis (1916). It is a typical period piece of biological pseudoscience that epitomizes the American concern with the character building of boys, particularly through organizations such as Scouting, the YMCA, and 4-H. The second is the feral tale, a literary subgenre that Kidd has 451 ‘‘coined to suggest a resemblance between the fairy tale and a group of narratives that might not otherwise be intelligible as a genre’’ (3). The feral tale describes the nature of the ‘‘wildness’’ of boys, and an ideology that insists on studying, managing, and controlling that wildness. The first pattern is peculiarly American and valorizes the white middle-class boy and our ability to reclaim bad white boys for democratic and capitalist ends, while the second is international and embraces the problems of cultural contact with the colonized other—boys who are darker, more exotic, and more dangerous than their white counterparts, but also boys (such as Mowgli in Kipling’s The Jungle Books) who may be properly socialized as imperial subjects as long as they finally reject their animalistic behavior and typically Orientalized heritage. To illustrate these patterns of representations and the effects they have had in constructing the image of the ‘‘boy,’’ Kidd draws upon a breathtaking number of texts that range from the intricacies of theory (Michel Foucault, Eve KosofskySedgewick, Freud), to conduct manuals and serials (Rural Manhood, Farming For Boys), to literary works (Emerson, Hamlin Garland, William Dean Howells, Mark Twain), to self-help literature and ethnography (Gurian’s The Wonder of Boys, Christina Hoff Sommers’s The War Against Boys), to cinematic popular culture (Boys Town, Teen Wolf ). Kidd’s greatest critical strengths lie in cleverly historicizing such a disparate group of writers and texts as supporting the conservative social formations that persist in constructing the nature and evolution of ‘‘boys.’’ These writers and texts frequently assume the universal simplicity and innocence embodied in ‘‘real’’ boys, denying the complexities of boyhood, the nuances of being a boy. Boys who are queer or racially other will find themselves within a ‘‘production of heteronormative masculinity’’ (187). However well intentioned, professional fields such as psychology and psychiatry ironically perpetuate this normativity because they medicalize the social and cultural differences of boys, thereby keeping the otherness of some at a safe distance. Perhaps the most fascinating discussion in Kidd’s dense book concerns Father Flanagan’s 452 The Journal of American Culture  Volume 27, Number 4  December 2004 Boys Town (founded 1917), which spurred Norman Taurog’s film of the same title, starring Mickey Rooney and Spencer Tracy (1938). Kidd exposes the treacherous narrative ground of both Flanagan’s biography and the hagiographic film of his life. Ironizing Flanagan’s ‘‘personal touch’’ (a phrase that Kidd acknowledges has a queasy contemporary significance), Kidd probes the historical Flanagan’s fiercely protective attitude toward troubled boys and his attack on a juvenile justice system that criminalizes their delinquency. While Flanagan builds Boys Town as a version of his civic-minded, religious, democratic, heterosexual boytopia, he simultaneously opens up a space for sexual queerness and racial otherness of which the public remains keenly interested and desperately afraid. Not coincidentally, the cinematic Flanagan embodies this heteronormative spirit of boyology by resocializing ‘‘Whitey’’ into a ‘‘real’’ boy who relinquishes his antisocial behavior and ‘‘theatrically queer’’ mode of dress. When Whitey is elected mayor of Boys Town, he reifies white America’s desire for cultural survival accomplished through its boy rescue project. In a very literal sense, even the Catholic doctrine that underwrites Flanagan’s ostensible religious mission is evacuated by his social catholicity, the universalizing of bad boys into family men whose whiteness and straightness save the United States from the dangerous and destructive incursions of racial and sexual others. The pseudoscience of boyology and the genre of the feral tale intersect, therefore, in their mutual interest in refashioning boys by naturalizing their wildness and their difference as part of a normal process that transforms fragile homosocial boyhood into firm, heterosexual manhood. Not surprisingly, Kidd, an openly gay man himself, views this process as both ‘‘deeply embedded’’ within our systems of boy work and ‘‘perversely resilient.’’ Boyology and the feral tale endure, therefore, as reminders of the difficulties of social and cultural change, particularly because our family institutions mightily resist it. —Jeffrey Cass Texas A&M International University The Ongoing Civil War: New Versions of Old Stories Herman Hattaway and Ethan S. Rafuse, Editors. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004. Freedom, Union, and Power: Lincoln and His Party During the Civil War Michael Green. Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press, 2004. These two volumes represent the bookends of the current study of history. The first, The Ongoing Civil War, seems to be floating down the current flood of historians’ interest in broadening and enriching the study and understanding of the importance of history among both academics and nonacademics. The former are now enriching their studies by concentrating on history as storytelling, joining at the heart the past as being the bloodstream of the folkloristic perpetuation of the past as belonging to people in general, not just those who are looking for ‘‘the truth.’’ Historians are now increasingly insisting that ‘‘the truth’’ (partially, at least) is outside the traditions and accounts perpetuated in history books. In fact, as we all have observed, historians are constantly offering differing different theories and differing interpretations about history. Why not, therefore, bring into the mix the understandings of popular culture? The editors of this volume are more interested in correcting the old misconceptions of popular history so that truth is more nearly approached. But that is fine; a little truth (or its near relatives) can only help what is perhaps the hottest academic subject these days: the Civil War. The other bookend of the shelf of the Civil War, Freedom, Union, and Power: Lincoln and His Party During the Civil War, is a precise interpretation of the birth and motivation of the Republican party with the election of Lincoln in Book Reviews 1860. Green traces the birth of the party from its initial limbs of ‘‘free soil, free labor, and free men,’’ to ‘‘freedom, union, and power,’’ to what everyone knows: that power encourages the seizing of more power, and the aggrandizement of the pristine ideology into ‘‘the ideology of freedom, union, and power: upholding freedom, preserving the Union, and retaining political power.’’ Green does a thorough and commendable job of tracing this growth (some might say natural perversion) of ideology. One interesting similarity about these two volumes is their demonstration of the continued dedication and development of the Civil War as perhaps the hottest nonbelligerent topic in America today. Both are lighted fuses ready to fire the empty cannon—not at the ‘‘enemy’’ but at ourselves—as we continue to try to understand the senseless, but seemingly inevitable and necessary, war between two sections of America that had to come to the realization that because of geography, history, and culture, they had to live together, not apart. —Ray B. Browne Bowling Green, Ohio Oprah Winfrey and the Glamour of Misery: An Essay on Popular Culture Eva Illouz. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. In a book of staggering breadth, depth, and detail, Eva Illouz successfully launches a vigorous defense of both popular culture and Oprah Winfrey while formulating her own critique of Oprah Winfrey’s cultural enterprise and the practice of cultural criticism. Illouz achieves these feats by relying on extensive research, a tireless patience for minute detail, and a highly original methodological practice. Drawing on Oprah’s website, O magazine, the novels chosen for Oprah’s book club, and the TV show itself, Illouz demonstrates 453 an astonishing understanding of the way Oprah, as a cultural and economic force, appeals to her global audience. In order to locate the meanings in these cultural text, Illouz steers away from an ideological or a strict discourse analysis in favor of a slightly more risky tack: reading Oprah’s cultural empire through the very intentions that are deeply embedded in the empire—Oprah’s own. While acknowledging the dangers of the ‘‘intention’’ argument, Illouz successfully explains that Oprah’s own intentions are deeply implicated into all aspects of her cultural production. Arguing that we cannot judge a cultural phenomenon such as the Oprah enterprise on outdated or arbitrary grounds dictated by the standards of ‘‘high’’ culture, Illouz persuasively argues that cultural critics must judge Oprah based on her own stated and implicit intention: to heal. Significantly, Illouz argues that Oprah in fact fails to live up to her oft-repeated intentions. The ‘‘glamour of misery’’ referred to in the title of the book points to how the theme of suffering pervades the Oprah show, Web site, and magazine. Misery and suffering serve as the link, Illouz argues, between Oprah and her guests. Illouz wants to link Oprah’s emphasis on the theme of suffering ‘‘and the institutions that have produced the forms of suffering she stages’’ (112). In other words, modernity itself has unleashed a laundry list of real forms of suffering, and telling stories about our suffering is one way of having a self in modernity. Moreover, Oprah’s show, Web site, and magazine consistently deal with moral dilemmas of the modern age, exploring how one ought to behave in a world that is endlessly painful and difficult. Poverty, unemployment, stressful work conditions, and other modern material ills serve as the backdrop, then, for the moral predicaments of modern existence: autonomy, marriage, obligation, sexuality, friendship. Suffering, for Illouz, is ‘‘a cultural category in its own right, as a text rich in meanings’’ (111). Enter Oprah, who offers ‘‘powerful symbolic tools and rituals to alleviate’’ the uncertainties of modern life. Both the show and the Oprah Web site are tools of communication for those struggling with the suffering of 454 The Journal of American Culture  Volume 27, Number 4  December 2004 everyday life. ‘‘In that sense, Oprah’s texts offer themselves as cultural strategies to cope with chaos and meaninglessness’’ (116). However, Illouz argues, Oprah’s promotion of ‘‘self-help’’ is also the most difficult aspect of her enterprise. While Illouz beautifully defends Oprah against the charges of eroding the public sphere, voyeurism, and the commodification of sentiments, Illouz suggests that Oprah refuses to let any forms of suffering transform into anything other than a positive value, an uplifting experience, an opportunity to rewrite the life narrative. Pain must be recycled into transformation, a move that Illouz sees as a ‘‘resounding moral failure of Oprah Winfrey,’’ a failure to truly live up to Oprah’s own intentions (233). As impressive as it is, the text has its difficulties. Most notably, Illouz eschews a gender analysis, a surprising and disappointing move. Illouz does note that Oprah’s empire ‘‘directly and unapologetically addresses women’s lives inside the home, the daily tasks performed for and within the family, and aims at bestowing glory on these tasks’’ (63). But despite her demolishing the standard criticisms of Oprah (by arguing, for example, that Oprah’s is not a freak show but a site where ordinary people struggle with the moral dilemmas of everyday life), Illouz fails to point out that the criticisms themselves are typically informed by a worldview that has contempt for the femininity and domesticity that Oprah exalts. Moreover, as accessible and jargon-free as her writing is, it certainly cannot be considered economical. The level of detail involved may tire the patience of even the most devoted Oprah fan and theorist. Even for those with a keen appreciation for Oprah herself or the talk show genre, Illouz’s writing and research sometimes suffer from an embarrassment of riches; the level of detail is so vast that at times the larger point becomes obscured. For readers, there is a lot of slogging, but when the long sections of detail open up to Illouz’s persuasive and well-researched key points, it makes the slogging feel worthwhile. Even for those whose interest is not specifically in talk shows or even the medium of television, this text may be of great value. The text provides a marvelous model for rich cultural interpretation while remaining critical of the subject. The subtitle of the book is ‘‘An Essay on Popular Culture,’’ and in a way, Illouz’s general commentary about the direction of cultural studies and the uses of popular culture is really where the true merit of this text lies. For example, Illouz is critical of the concepts of ideology and resistance, or what she calls the ‘‘power-resistance paradigm,’’ a paradigm that, she argues, threatens ‘‘to paralyze the field [of cultural studies] in a mechanistic and dichotomous view of meaning’’ (121). Her argument is that ideology (and its reverse, resistance) is an impoverished concept, inadequate to understand cultural action, and reducing important differences among cultural artifacts to different modalities of disciplining and disciplined bodies. As with her previous book, Consuming the Romantic Utopia, Illouz’s treatment of the material is wholly original. Although the work is highly accessible, Glamour of Misery is squarely aimed both at scholars of popular culture and their critics. This book could be extremely useful and insightful for anyone working on American popular culture; for those who are interested in Oprah and ‘‘feminine’’ media forms, it is a mustread. —Sabine Hikel York University Painting the Dark Side: Art and the Gothic Imagination in Nineteenth-CenturyAmerican Art Sarah Burns. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. In Painting the Dark Side, Sarah Burns argues that the canonical narrative of nineteenth-century American art describes a quest for a national visual identity, while at the same time, a number of Book Reviews artists unmasked a ‘‘darker side’’ of the narrative in which anxiety, fear, superstition, and madness ruled. This book presents a thoughtful, rigorous examination of the ‘‘dark side’’ in nineteenthcentury American art. Burns claims that an exploration of the dark world lurking beneath the surface of nineteenth-century art actually allows us to understand the mainstream more fully. Thus, she explores the work of eight artists in biographical and historical, social, and cultural terms to reveal broader cultural anxieties about social, political, and economic instability in a rapidly changing, industrializing society. Burns traces the personal demons and artistic anxieties in the art of four artists working in antebellum America (Thomas Cole, David Gilmour Blythe, Washington Allston, and John Quidor), and of four artists active in postbellum America (William Rimmer, Elihu Vedder, Thomas Eakins, and Albert Pinkham Ryder). Each chapter is dedicated to a single artist and contains expansive but detailed explorations of how local anxieties prove symptomatic of larger societal insecurities. The nineteenth-century society that Burns describes was one that prized enlightenment, industrialization, imperialism, hard work, self-help, science, order, and progress, and sought to establish a stable and balanced society in which everyone had a well-defined place and a clear set of proscribed and prescribed behaviors. Fissures caused by rapid industrialization, slavery, immigration, and urban poverty, however, generated fears of societal chaos and disorder. Painting the Dark Side explores how the particular fears of eight artists—plagued by self-doubt, torn between their public personae and private selves, caught between the rational and irrational world—are indicators of larger social and cultural anxieties. Burns explores how fears of Jacksonian democracy, downward social mobility, poverty and anarchy in the modern city, fear of violent slave uprisings, terrors of internecine struggle, brutal clashes among the immigrant under classes, a clamor for women’s rights, and even suspect scientific practices were viewed as symptoms of a wider social malaise that, left unchecked, could lead to chaos. 455 In chapter one, the author analyzes Thomas Cole’s rejection of his modest origins to gain entrée into the elite society of his patrons, and whose antipathy for and fear of mob rule grew as he rose in society. Burns expands this argument to show how the dominant classes increasingly portrayed the rising industrial city as physically and philosophically sullied, a diseased and depressed body politic. In chapter two, Burns argues that David Gilmour Blythe painted Pittsburgh from a ‘‘thug’s eye view’’ to critique self-satisfied middleclass dabblers in social reform. He courted an elite market for his paintings, yet painted in a strange muddy style of ‘‘scrubby lines, sketchy faces, rubbery surfaces, [and] smeary paint’’ that antagonized potential patrons (68). Burns proposes that Blythe’s belligerent and acerbic art, as well as his drunken cynicism, points to larger apprehensions about the volatility of immigrant populations and an antagonistic, bellicose, and often drunken underclass. Chapter three describes how Washington Allston lived a double life of a Southern slaveholder and a cosmopolitan artist embedded in a strongly abolitionist Boston society. Burns’s study of Allston’s individual guilt and fear as a slave owner is expanded to suggest that his fears were indicative of widespread uneasiness in white Southern antebellum society. In chapter four, John Quidor is portrayed as an artist who aspired to acceptance into the artistic mainstream by basing most of his art on the writings of Washington Irving, but who actually earned local fame and a good sum of money by painting New York city fire trucks, and who lived the rough, coarse, drunk, and disorderly life of the working classes. Quidor allows Burns to explore midcentury middle-class fears of societal destabilization wrought by both the working and the dissolute poor, by Irish immigrants, and by African Americans, suggesting that the financial and social instability of the 1850s was overlaid with fears that society might be overrun by the anarchy of an angry underclass. William Rimmer is introduced in chapter five as a highly respected anatomist who grasped for artistic fame, but who was pursued by desperate fears of inherited madness. Rimmer found order 456 The Journal of American Culture  Volume 27, Number 4  December 2004 in the rational remove of scientific drawing but, as Burns argues, Rimmer’s Flight and Pursuit reveals an artist both haunted and hunted by fear itself. In the painting, a single male figure runs from—but can never outrun—either his ghostly Doppelganger or the monstrous shadow that also pursues him. Burns posits that this huge, dark, bifurcated shadow could represent both the individual and collective guilt and fear of the inescapable specter of slavery in postwar society. Chapter six examines the artist Elihu Vedder, who lived in a psychic half-world of visions and dreams and who painted obsessive visions of death in desolate landscapes peopled by terrifying monsters who were almost always female. Burns goes on to suggest that Vedder’s individual pathologies again might suggest postwar guilt and fear, but they also introduce ominous female monsters whose presence may reflect a growing social anxiety toward increasingly strident demands for women’s rights. Chapter seven, devoted to Thomas Eakins, is by far the most complex and intriguing chapter in the book. Indeed, it is the chapter that started Sarah Burns on her quest to explore of the dark side of American art. Like many of the artists in this book, Eakins lived a double life as a scientist; he was well known for his human dissection, and as an artist who was almost pathologically afraid of inheriting his mother’s madness. His scientific work demanded discipline, order, and rational control, while his art and his inner conflicts threatened disorder, loss of control, and emotional chaos. Thus, while Eakins’s The Gross Clinic is most often read today as a homage to Dr. Gross, Burns demonstrates that the highly dramatic composition led nineteenth-century viewers to see what they were convinced were horrific abuses of patients in the ‘‘butchery’’ of surgery, and by association, the unimaginable horrors of vivisection, the desecration of the dead attending dissection, and the questionable acquisition of cadavers. In The Gross Clinic, Eakins consciously presented an image of masculine authority and rational order in Dr. Gross, while his subconscious allowed subliminal fears of mute paralysis and loss of control to infect the painting. Burns further explores the depths of the unconscious mind in chapter eight, in her analysis of Albert Pinkham Ryder. Ryder painted dark, obscure, and literally disintegrating nocturnal landscapes and seascapes that were drawn from dreams, nightmares, and visions. Ryder’s art elicits visions of the conscious overcome by the unconscious and the regression of the mind to its oceanic or amniotic origins. Burns expands this analysis into a larger examination of the history of dream interpretation and the role of the unconscious in late nineteenthcentury thought. She also suggests that just as the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition was marketed as the ‘‘White City’’—rational, clean, ordered, and bright—Ryder’s paintings allude to the obverse, the dark side of the industrial city—its chaotic, disorderly, alien slums. Painting the Dark Side is the most recent of Sarah Burns’s significant contributions to American art history. Burns reinstates biography as integral to the discourse of art history, yet does not forget the importance of exhaustive historical, social, and cultural research. She reveals that nineteenth-century American art and society had a dark side that was more pervasive than previously assumed. And her exploration of both individual and societal anxieties about industrial modernity, instability, disorder, and even madness is an important corrective to the dominant narrative of American art. —Joy Sperling Denison University Probing Popular Culture: On and Off the Internet Marshall Fishwick. New York: Haworth Press, 2004. Fishwick is an electric charge set to explode all aspects of popular culture study and understanding. This ‘‘probe,’’ as he likes to call it, in the footsteps of Marshall McLuhan, is lighted not so much to answer questions as to raise them. Book Reviews ‘‘My goal is simple,’’ Fishwick says. ‘‘To set minds working and tongues wagging. I think of popular culture as a topic of, by, and for the people— hence of concern to everyone.’’ Fishwick therefore opens the door to everyone. His style is sprightly, surprising, learned, wide-ranging, and amusing. There’s a chuckle and surprise leering out of every sentence. The study is not a long and interconnected thesis-driven development, but instead a series of vignettes such as ‘‘Probing a Frenzy,’’ ‘‘To Hack or Not to Hack,’’ ‘‘The Cowboy and World Mythology,’’ ‘‘The Sign of the T: Henry Ford,’’ and ‘‘Thunder from the Pulpit,’’ with many other studies slipped in between. Fishwick is always an informative pleasure to read. This work is ageless coin of the realm, an indispensable treasure for every reader’s bookshelf and mind. —Michael Schoenecke Texas Tech University 2004 Winner of the Cawelti Award Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South Tara McPherson. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Tara McPherson begins Reconstructing Dixie with this observation: ‘‘The South is as much a fiction, a story we tell and are told, as it is fixed geographic space below the Mason-Dixon line’’ (1). This huge, grandly conceived book is an investigation of the multiple stories told and retold about the South using the social constructs of nostalgia, gender, and race. It is fitting, then, that McPherson begins her narrative with a short autobiographical story that locates her as a southern expatriate living in Los Angeles. With this statement of self-disclosure, the author breaks out of 457 the hermetic space of scholarly writing to acknowledge that there is no such thing as the ‘‘objective scholar.’’ McPherson’s story establishes her right to deconstruct and reconstruct the South as an insider who has both the authority to tell a southern story, and is deeply implicated in it. Thus, while McPherson’s book is a complex and multilayered study of the many narratives of the South, it is written from within and is by perforce ‘‘her’’ story. In order to demonstrate how the grand narrative of the mythic South can be both fixed and unfixed, McPherson avoids the ‘‘standard’’ narratives of the South (such as William Faulkner) to introduce a refreshingly eclectic range of stories taken from fiction, film, television, journalism, the tourist industry, the Internet, autobiography, and the field of Southern studies. She examines a number of fixed stories in which the ‘‘Old South’’ and the ‘‘New South’’ are narrated as stories of nostalgia, guilt, and race, in which flat unidimensional characters such as the southern belle, the southern lady, the southern gentleman, and even the ‘‘happy slave’’ are presented as immutable. She explores a number of other stories in which the characters are more ambivalent, unfixed, mutable, and complex. McPherson’s goal is to display the concept of ‘‘lenticular vision’’ (McPherson’s term for a bifurcated vision in which two separate images are superimposed but can only be perceived separately and in opposition), and then to complicate and dislodge these oppositional perceptions by suggesting that nostalgia, gender, and race must be perceived as integral parts of a shared continuum of knowledge and belief. In chapter one, McPherson explores the female narrative of the Old South through the constructs of the southern belle or southern lady, and the southern black female as her inverse. In her analysis of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind and its doubly fictional sequel, Scarlett, McPherson introduces Scarlett O’Hara as the archetypal southern belle, a shapely coquette, whose highly polished beauty and femininity, genteel behavior, and gracious hospitality are set in the center (or on the porch) of a grand plantation house, which in its turn is embedded in the mythic Southern 458 The Journal of American Culture  Volume 27, Number 4  December 2004 land. The southern lady is also characterized as both gracious and fragile, but she is also, like Scarlett, tough and enduring (to rule over plantations when the men are away), and one with the land (to which Scarlett inevitably returns for succor). Mitchell’s plantation is a female and feminized world in which southern gentlemen (the abstracted protectors of white women) are often physically and metaphorically absent. The ties of the southern belle and lady to the plantation (home) and land (place) are thus rendered ‘‘natural,’’ and by extension, real. Mitchell’s (and McPherson’s) description of Mammy is the inverse of Scarlett, her black opposite. In comparison to Scarlett’s shapely form and kittenish character, Mammy’s body is described as huge, old, shapeless, and unsexed, ruined by hard physical labor. She is caricatured as a ‘‘happy slave’’ whose loyalty to and protection of her mistress is absolute and therefore also ‘‘natural.’’ In Scarlett, Mammy (and race) are expunged by Mammy’s death. Scarlett is removed to Ireland where the Irish become virtual white stand-ins for slaves. In chapter two, McPherson presents the story of the Civil War as a masculine narrative of the Old South. In an exquisite sleight of hand, McPherson travels from the passive female space of the plantation to the active masculine space of the Civil War. McPherson demonstrates how Civil War history is a huge moneymaking nostalgia machine at all levels of contemporary society. The war is retold in obsessive detail in thousands of books, magazines, Web sites, re-enactments, and so on, in which the sheer accumulation of military facts and artifacts supports and validates any number of fictional war narratives. McPherson even takes on Ken Burns’s sweeping documentary, The Civil War, arguing that Burns recasts the war as a masculine narrative in which brother fights brother bravely and gallantly, and in which men are tempered by the romanticized (even eroticized) gore of battle, and are eventually led to an emotional reunion. In Burns’s The Civil War, the viewer is bombarded by literally thousands of images (especially photographs) that tell a sprawling story of loss and yearning, bravery and sacrifice. While McPherson applauds Burns’s exhaustive research, she also shows us how his narrative fixes and consolidates a mythic narrative of the war—a place of individual honor and sacrifice, where women function as a background against which men are defined, and in which race (either as a cause of or agent in the war) is virtually erased. McPherson also describes a number of neo-Confederate Web sites where a virtual South is inscribed as politically and culturally independent, and in which southern guilt for its racial past is transformed into anger (as in ‘‘leave us alone’’), and then to absolution as the southern man is reimagined as the injured party. McPherson concludes chapter two with a fascinating analysis of Ross McElwee’s semi-historical, semiautobiographical documentary that tells several overlapping, colliding, and fixed and fluid southern narratives. In chapter three, McPherson describes the more recent construct of the new southern belle as an expanded version of the old belle: a belle with a briefcase. McPherson demonstrates how the new belle is inscribed in the movie Steel Magnolias as both sweet and fragile yet tough and enduring. The ‘‘true belle is a bulldozer . . . disguised as a powder puff,’’ for whom southern discursive space is the beauty parlor where strength is found in sisterhood, and where men are still either cardboard characters or absent altogether. McPherson also examines the new belle as a Fatal Flower (as described by Rosemary Danielle), another modern variant. The more ambivalent ‘‘fatal flower’’ functions positively in a shared community of like women who find strength in common lived experiences. This community also functions to exclude nonsisters and to confine and constrain women’s behavior in a carefully crafted performative femininity. McPherson then shows how this performative construct has been inverted slyly by flamboyant drag queens and critiqued by the lesbian Camp Sister spirit. McPherson raises the issue of race only once in this chapter in the character of Anthony (in the television show Designing Women), an African American male character who is initially the emasculated stock boy to four professional women. 459 Book Reviews In the final chapter of Reconstructing Dixie, McPherson explores constructs of southern home and southern guilt as integral to ‘‘southern feeling.’’ Home serves both as a safe private place and as an emotional sanctuary. McPherson demonstrates how guilt over racism is avoided, evaded, and even erased in the construct of the southern home through an analysis of several short stories, memoirs and autobiographies about and by southern women. In Gayle Graham Yates’s autobiography, for instance, Yates’s private world is her home. It is a safe, comforting space that is the preserve of women, into which issues of race (located in the public world) cannot intrude. Yates removed racism from the private sphere and placed it squarely in the public world of the past, where she reconstructed it as something outside her experience, something that other people did, but not her, and not now. McPherson extends this argument to show how guilt is not only severed from home, but also transformed into nostalgia, and how deflections that excuse behavior because she was only a child, or didn’t know any better, defer and even absolve guilt. Thus, like men, contemporary southern women twist racial guilt into victimhood. McPherson argues that this self-centered, narcissistic guilt serves to elide personal responsibility and any obligation to act. McPherson ends the chapter with an analysis of Katherine Du Pre Lumpkin’s remarkable autobiography (1947) in which McPherson argues that the issue of race in the South must not only be deconstructed (it is neither ‘‘natural’’ nor ‘‘historical’’), but also positively reconstructed as a shared past, present, and future in which black and white and men and women are all full, active participants. McPherson concludes her book with another autobiographical story about lecturing recently at a small southern college, and how the audience was receptive to analysis of gender and class but not of race. This repositioning of the author within the narrative brings McPherson full circle. It gives her permission to advocate progressive change in southern racial transactions. Surprisingly, however, the author fails to see the ‘‘other side’’ of her own ‘‘lenticular lens.’’ McPherson seamlessly interweaves nostalgia, gender, and class in this book, but race appears (in the author’s terms) additively. Thus, while ‘‘race’’ permeates the book, the two principal African American characters—Mammy and Anthony—are removed as fictions in another time or place. There are no real, fully dimensional African American agents in this book, with two wonderful exceptions. The first is McPherson’s analysis of Kara Walker’s smartly cynical black and white silhouettes that invert and redraw both black and white cultural caricatures. The second is a description of Nu South, a clothing company that hijacks the most revered (and aggressive) symbol of the Old South, the Confederate battle flag, and reproduces it on their clothing in red, green, and black, the symbolic colors of the African liberation movement. Nu South literally interweaves the pasts and presents of black and white in the South—as the woof and weft of society, equal and integral, and stronger together than apart. Reconstructing Dixie is an important, broad-ranging, and provocative book, and a fascinating pivoting of the narrative of the South. —Joy Sperling Denison University Refiguring Huckleberry Finn Carl F. Wieck. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004. Dangerous Intimacy: The Untold Story of Mark Twain’s Final Years Karen Lystra. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. American literature might not have begun with Huckleberry Finn, as Ernest Hemingway believed, but in many ways, the wheel of our literature does turn on that particular novel and certainly on the writings of Mark Twain. These 460 The Journal of American Culture  Volume 27, Number 4  December 2004 two works demonstrate just how much Twain obsesses the scholarship of so many of our academics. Refiguring is a personal, lifelong thinking by a non-American on how deeply Twain embodied American culture and spirit. Wieck suggests that Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, in his insistence on freedom, walked in the footsteps of Jefferson and Lincoln and with Jim in those of Frederick Douglass. In instances, Wieck reaches out into the distant hills of significance. For example, he sees deep significance in Twain’s use of the number forty. Forty dollars appears three times in the book, but its implications are, to Wieck, more significant. He notes, for example, that Twain remembered the resonance of the Biblical flood lasting forty days and nights. Even more nearly universal is Wieck’s belief that Huckleberry Finn (the novel) ‘‘. . . can serve as a commentary on how knowledge is acquired, effectively processed and applied, or dangerously restricted.’’ Such conclusions are perhaps outside the usual reading of the work but certainly worthy considering. Dangerous Intimacy centers in on the portion of Twain’s life that is somewhat perplexing and confusing: his last years. There is no doubt that they were years of bitterness, anxiety, gloom, and hopelessness—or were they quite as bitter as we have been led to believe? Unhappy they certainly were. He had lost his beloved wife. His favorite daughter Jean, an epileptic for whom he said he was writing his autobiography, died. Only Clara, somewhat estranged and living her own life, was left, besides the several hangers-on who were taking advantage of his age and trust. But these were not totally bitter days, as Lystra points out. Twain saw some pleasantnesses if not happiness. Lystra sees new subtleties in Twain’s last years. Her inspiration and insights come from the diaries of Jean Clemen’s last four years on earth purchased by the Henry E. Huntington Library in San Marino, California. Lystra says that what she found in the diaries was ‘‘a compassionate, lonely woman in her twenties, frustrated by all the ways that her disease had interfered with her life. Jean’s writing showed her to be a sensitive, kindhearted person,’’ and provided many insights into her father’s behavior in his last years. Lystra ties in Jean’s last years with her father’s last years and the culture, especially medical culture about epilepsy, of the time. This study provides new and intimate details of the Twain family, the culture of the time, and our appreciation of the whole Twain entourage. —Ray B. Browne Bowling Green, Ohio Religion as Entertainment C. K. Robertson, Editor. New York: Peter Lang, 2003. This collection of essays dealing with religion in the United States explores how religion interacts with an entertainment-focused culture. The editor, an episcopal priest and professor of ethics and communications at Georgia State University, has given us an informative account. His main conclusion is that many Americans have left behind the need for a structured spirituality and sought other means of self-fulfillment. Still others are shopping for a place that offers new, nontraditional, and entertaining religion. ‘‘While the traditional worship establishment sits quietly in sedate convention on Sunday mornings,’’ Clark Heindel writes in the book’s final essay, ‘‘Dionysus and his pantheistic host continue to dance the night away every Saturday night’’ (289). The entertainment community provides a safe setting and means of expression for Dionysian rituals. Can rock and roll be both show business and soul business? Many believe it can. In some instances, the traditional crucified Christ has been replaced by the ‘‘Buddy Christ.’’ The old goal of transformation is replaced by affirmation: ‘‘I’m OK, you’re OK.’’ The key word for a new generation: whatever. ‘‘Do your thing.’’ Since this book appeared, a movie (The Passion of The Christ), which centers on the pain and not the mystery of that event, has broken all 461 Book Reviews box-office records. In some ways, is Robertson’s book already dated? Is a return to orthodoxy in the wind? The movie is causing breakaways in several major Protestant denominations, including Robertson’s. This is a real crisis. The first half of the book explores how religion actually plays an ‘‘entertaining’’ role in society, pointing to such things as lay participation, the rise of nontraditional religions, and the attraction of meditation. The second half of the book focuses on how religion is treated in major entertainment media, such as film, music, television, and literature. We are a race of storytellers. From primitive cave paintings to televised spectacles in places like Robert Schuller’s Crystal Cathedral, from Homer to Harry Potter, we want stories that we can imagine and direct in our mind’s eye. Storytellers guide us through life, from the fairy tales of childhood to the obituary at the end. How do we tell the story of Jesus, his resurrection, and ascension? One career that features successful storytelling is that of Billy Graham, the godfather of American televangelism. His Los Angeles Crusade in 1949 (the same year that televangelism was born) catapulted him into national prominence. Since that ‘‘crusade’’ (think of the connotations of that word), he has preached to more than two hundred million people in 185 countries. Hundreds of millions more have been affected by his televised crusade broadcasts, film productions, and webcasts. Graham’s evangelistic films have appeared worldwide through 130 productions in forty languages. He believes in using every modern means of communication available to use to spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ throughout the world. Is this religion as entertainment, or much more? Is Graham chaplain to the nation and counselor to presidents, as well as televangelism’s primogenitor? What shall we say about Pope John Paul II, the first pontiff to adopt televangelistic strategies and outreach? Through the creation of the Vatican Television Center in 1983, Vatican programming includes some 130 live broadcasts annually, plus 4,000 hours of video documenting John Paul II’s historic impact. His meteoric popularity among both Roman Catholics and non-Catholics testifies to the success of the Center and the Pope’s ministry. A crucial question remains. Does the entertainment value go up as the moral value goes down? The rise and fall of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker revealed that the dark side of televangelism’s obsession with money has an Achilles’ heel of abuse and broken trust. And what about Jim Jones in Guyana? A Great Awakening is still echoing electronically in contemporary American life. How much is based on God’s honest truth? How much is show business? Ours are the times that try men’s souls. This book helps to explain why. —Marshall W. Fishwick Virginia Tech The Secret of the Hardy Boys: Leslie McFarlane and the Stratemeyer Syndicate Marilyn S. Greenwald. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004. Few males in America and Canada (and around the world, for that matter) can have grown up without experiencing the joy of reading the adventures of the Hardy boys, supposedly by Franklin W. Dixon. But so secret and secretive were the author, in reality Leslie McFarlane, and the publisher, Stratemeyer, that in many ways, we boys were reading lies—or at least misinformation. Farlane wrote twenty of the first twentyfour books for one hundred dollars each, and thought that he was being well paid. In fact, he signed a contract from the first, and although the Stratemeyer syndicate got rich by exploiting his works, McFarlane never openly regretted his commitment. Later in life, when the Hardy series was being rewritten and brought culturally up to date, he even joined in the enterprise. 462 The Journal of American Culture  Volume 27, Number 4  December 2004 Meanwhile, living in Canada near Toronto, he went on to other more lucrative enterprises, and those perhaps more suitable to his talents. He made movies and worked for the CBC in several capacities. Husband of two wives and father and grandfather of a brood of offspring, McFarlane always remained, as he began, a dedicated writer. Strangely, to most of us at least, he seems always to have been happy with his commitment to becoming a writer regardless of its consequences. In this thorough and exhaustive study, Greenwald explains how and why. Her book is a labor of thoroughness and love that every American male who has red blood in his veins and has ever read a book needs to read to bring back the truth of youth and young America. —Ray B. Browne Bowling Green, Ohio Southern Manhood: Perspectives on Masculinity in the Old South need or desire for intellectual culture in its own right.’’ Cash was not describing the stereotypical Southern Gentleman but instead the men of the South who were half liberated and partially enjoying their superiority over women. Cash was describing a half-formed but fluid culture in which men of all subcultures—poor, half-poor, Indians, slaves, and freedmen—were trying to develop their hegemony and were being forced to give way as women asserted and developed more strongly their place in society. This excellent book describes the various moments in the South before the Civil War, the attitudes held by both men and women, the development of the parallel lines of manhood, and how, though it is still held to one degree or another today, the concept of manhood in the South has come more and more to be nationalized—but not quite. To affirm this attitude, take a trip to the Southern states today and observe the people. —Ray B. Browne Bowling Green, Ohio Craig Thompson Friend and Lorri Glover, Editors. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004. The Wisdom of Crowds Rites of passage into and maintenance of the privileges of adulthood are always rigorous and sometimes bloody, especially in primitive societies. But those rites in more ‘‘civilized’’ cultures, though sometimes more subtle, are nonetheless very real, especially for men in a society where women are increasingly asserting their equality. The strains on manhood were especially strong in the pre-Civil War South. There it was a twoheaded hydra: financial and social. One could be wealthy and not be ‘‘manly’’—that is, ‘‘gentlemanly.’’ One could be socially manly if he could demonstrate, in any of several ways, that he had the right genes. Historian W. J. Cash outlined the southern man as ‘‘intensely individualistic, independent, and resentful of authority.’’ Having social status, he, according to Cash, ‘‘developed no Those of us who study popular culture (the people’s culture) regularly confront the wisdom of crowds. But James Surowiecki goes much further than that. He contends that the many are smarter than the few, and that collective wisdom shapes business, economics, societies and nations. The crowd is often more intelligent than the individual, even if the people are not particularly well informed or rational. He offers us a new tool to navigate our complicated media-directed world, where talking heads fill our screens and magazines, with limited wisdom or insight, and play the game of monkey hear, monkey repeat, monkey see, monkey do. He presents three categories of problems. The first, cognition problems, have or will have James Surowiecki. New York: Doubleday, 2004. Book Reviews definitive solutions. The second, coordination problems, require that a group figure out how to coordinate their behavior with each other. The third is a cooperation problem, in which one must cope with self-interested, distrustful people to work together. There’s a chapter for each of the problems. Later chapters cover the conditions that are necessary for the crowd to act wisely: diversity, independence, and a particular kind of decentralization. All of this helps to explain the author’s viewpoint. The second part of the book deals with case studies and how collective intelligence either flourishes or flounders. Groups need rules to maintain order and coherence; without them, the result might well be trouble. The best way for a group to be smart is for each person in it to think and act as independently as possible. The chapter headings show his determination to deal with many different facets of democratic life. These three are his most successful: Committees, Juries, and Teams: The Columbia Disaster The Company: Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss? Markets: Beauty Contests, Bowling Alleys, and Stock Prices A timely section deals with the CIA and the failure of the American intelligence community to anticipate any of the four major terrorist attacks from 1993 through 2001. We failed to put the right information in the hands of the right people. Bureaucracy led the United States astray. We lacked social networks that allow people to connect and 463 coordinate with each other. The wisdom of the crowd takes decentralization as a given and a good. The preamble of the US Constitution defines one of the goals of that document ‘‘to establish justice’’ and ‘‘promote the general welfare.’’ In Federalist 51, James Madison wrote that there are two requirements of good government: the happiness of the people, and a knowledge of how that happiness can be obtained. He knew that there is an ever-present danger that special interest groups and pork-barrel politics can somehow triumph over the common good. We have seen this in our own day, when CEOs are paid hundreds of millions of dollars while employees lose their jobs and pension plans. Pork provisions continue to be added to Congressional legislation. Our leaders sometimes talk one way, act another. The people are the losers. But Abraham Lincoln knew that they would not prevail. In one of his memorable statements, he said that you can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. The wisdom of the crowd eventually sees through the folly and greed of the few. But it is never all black or white, all good or bad. In a healthy democracy, there must be compromise—which is, as Surowiecki points out, the foundation of the social contract. He ends with this interesting thought: ‘‘The decisions that democracies make may not demonstrate the wisdom of the crowd. The decision to make them democratically does.’’ —Marshall W. Fishwick Virginia Tech