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| Book Review | Indiana Magazine of History, 101.2 | The History Cooperative
101.2  
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June, 2005
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Reviews

A Time to Every Purpose
The Four Seasons in American Culture

By Michael Kammen
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Pp. 336. Illustrations, color plates, notes, index. $39.95.)

With every book, it seems, Michael Kammen has edged closer to identifying himself with the art-historical subset of the historical profession. With this lavishly illustrated volume, he has taken the final step in that direction. Although he does examine the work of essayists and thinkers caught up in American nature imagery (such as Henry David Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, Hal Borland, and Donald Grant Mitchell, a.k.a. "Ik Marvel"), the book is most appealing on the basis of Kammen's assemblage of actual pictures showing the iconography of seasonal change. These run the gamut from Fanny Palmer's several series of popular nineteenth-century prints for Currier & Ives, including The Four Seasons of Life, to high art painting, to relatively obscure modern works by James McGarrell and Lisa Zwerling. The styles vary, too, from the homely naturalism of Currier & Ives, who see the seasons as the creeping infirmities of mankind, to Jasper Johns, for whom Summer (1986–1987) is a witty collage of images from sources ranging from the Mona Lisa to the American flag. . . .
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