| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Exploring Lewis and Clark: Reflections on Men and Wilderness. By Thomas P. Slaughter. (New York: Knopf, 2003. xviii, 231 pp. $24.00, ISBN 0-375-40078-8.)

Exploring Lewis and Clark is an intriguing, albeit sometimes baffling and even irritating, examination of the expedition of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark using the explorers' journals as both perspective and point of departure. As have some other works on the expedition, Thomas P. Slaughter's deals with the explorers and their exploration nonchronologically. What separates Slaughter's work from other nonchronological approaches such as Albert Furtwangler's Acts of Discovery (1993) or James Ronda's Finding the West (2001) is an inherent lack of objectivity on the part of the author. This is a book that seems to have been written with pre-invented conclusions, into which events of the journey of exploration are shoehorned to make the point that "neither the journals nor the explorers are what they seem" (p. xviii). But the author then proceeds to tell us what the journals are, as viewed through his own particular lenses. Hence, the book is not really about the Lewis and Clark expedition, nor is it really about the Lewis and Clark journals. What it is about is one person's interpretation of Lewis's and Clark's interpretation of their journey, presented with all the self-indulgence, moral rectitude, and intellectual certitude of the postmodernist scholar.

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