| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land. By Conevery Bolton Valencius. (New York: Basic Books, 2002. viii, 388 pp. $30.00, ISBN 0-465-08986-0.)

Fin-de-siècle foibles aside, Frederick Jackson Turner was right about one thing: fresh approaches to America's past often come through "lighting out for the territories." As the insights of the new western history verge on familiarity, Conevery Bolton Valencius has introduced still another fresh perspective on our "original" American place, this one forged through a new intermingling of the histories of science, medicine, and the environment. As Valencius employs it, Turner's old saw reveals a startling strangeness. Along Valencius's frontier, evolving histories of land and human flesh, set side by side, reveal an intense, heretofore unrecognized dependence on one another. Imagined and re-created through virtually the same metaphors and fraught with similar peril and transformation, their intertwined stories, eloquently told, yield a reconstruction of the frontier settlers' world that is unrivaled in depth and perspicacity.

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