| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The New Encyclopedia of the American West. Ed. by Howard R. Lamar. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. xviii, 1,324 pp. $60.00, isbn 0-300-07088-8.)

Any 1,324-page book with three hundred contributors and no plot had better be indispensably useful, finely illustrated, well written, and brilliantly orchestrated, and this volume is those things and more. For anyone interested in the American West, this single book has the same commanding range and authority as the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, in which, according to aficionados, the essentials of accumulated knowledge most closely matched the capacity of a single encyclopedia. While it took the Britannica nearly 150 years from its first edition to attain such heights, it took this encyclopedia of the West just 21 years from its 1977 first edition, then called The Reader's Encyclopedia of the American West. No plot, but what material! The dust jacket boasts of "191 artists and writers, 47 gunslingers and outlaws, 58 Indian tribes and 70 Indian leaders, 61 cities and towns, 67 mountain men and explorers, 43 ghost towns, and 72 forts and missions." The book's coverage and drama well exceed the allure of this list. . . .

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