| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 32.3

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| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 32.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Something in the Soil: Legacies and Reckonings in the New West. By Patricia Nelson Limerick. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000. 384 pp. Notes, index. $27.95.)

     Patricia Limerick is a natural at the essay business. 1

     The sixteen pieces collected in this book represent her thinking and writing from the decade of the 1990s. They range from journal articles with full scholarly apparatus to book introductions and shorter pieces for broader readerships. Readers of the Western Historical Quarterly will be familiar with many of Limerick's ideas and interpretations. We have all read her work and found ourselves provoked--sometimes to annoyance, but far more often to serious thought and reconsideration of our own views and understandings of the American West. 2

     Given this common experience, I want to focus my attention on Limerick as writer rather than proponent of a "Limerick thesis," as persuader rather than footnoter. 3

     If William Blake could see a world in a grain of sand, Limerick has the gift to find history in the small experiences of everyday life. She uses stories, anecdotes, and parables to introduce challenging ideas. She has great skill at finding ways to entice readers into her subject. The hook may be a bad old television show, a clipping headlined "Velcro: The Final Frontier," or a book from 1869 with the title Our New West. The essayist's skill is to take a solid historical fact or an everyday experience and twirl it around so that it catches light in new ways. . . .

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