| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Hal K. Rothman. Devil's Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth-Century American West. (Development of Western Resources.) Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. 1998. Pp. xi, 434. $34.95.

Whoever hears anymore of Carlsbad Caverns, New Mexico? It used to be one of the premier tourist sites in the West, but that was at least twenty years ago, by which time destinations such as Aspen, Colorado and Jackson Hole, Wyoming were changing the whole logic of tourism into what Hal K. Rothman terms "entertainment tourism," which "swallowed the previous forms, integrating them into a mass market form that in itself was authentic to people who had never experienced any other kind" (p. 339). It would be inaccurate to say that Rothman's intricately researched, wonderfully detailed, and profoundly disturbing new book is a lament for places such as Carlsbad Carverns. It is not. Like most people who study tourism, Rothman does not like it. Yet, such is the nature of his narrative, whereby one form of tourism is fated to be engorged by another, larger, and more national one, just as corporations swallow the projects of regions or individuals, that it is tempting at century's end to lament the sheer modesty or unpretentiousness of Carlsbad. If it is difficult to maintain that something of the bedrock of the mythical West remains visible there, at least there are fewer of the enormous cultural and economic transformations that, according to Rothman's argument, have made the myth banal while reducing the area to the status of a colony for various governmental and especially corporate interests. In this book, the whole of the American West aspires to the condition of Las Vegas. . . .

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