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LETTERS
To the Editor:
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In her review of my book, The Fishermen's Frontier: People and Salmon in Southeast Alaska (Winter 2008), Carmel Finley uses my words nearly verbatim and without attribution. She notes, for example, that the salmon fishery in Southeast Alaska "is ecologically healthy, if not necessarily economically sound," more than echoing my own statement that the fishery is "ecologically healthy — if not economically sound" (p. 4). She says that I explore "the deep connections between salmon and humans — an intimacy fostered largely through work," just as I claim to explore "the deep interconnections that exist in reality between humans and the natural world, an intimacy that is fostered largely through work" (p. 8). She says, again without using quotation marks, that I ask the question, "is there anything intrinsically valuable in the continued existence of local, small-boat fishing cultures," just as I indeed do ask, in my own words, if there "is anything intrinsically valuable in the continued existence of local, small-boat fishing cultures" (p. 9). About Native conservation, Dr. Finley says "the goals were not ecological but social and cultural, since abundant resources guaranteed the prosperity of the clan and prestige of the clan leader," just as I say "their goals were not 'ecological' in nature, but rather social and cultural: abundant resources ... guaranteed the prosperity of the clan and the prestige of the clan leader" (p. 37). She claims that "It was Euro-Americans who, vested in the ideas of property and ownership, created an open access fishery...." I say that "Euro-Americans — so vested in the notion of property and ownership — would promote the legal concept of an 'open-access' fishery" (p. 39). These all appear in the first half of her review — and there are more. Dr. Finley clearly is not guilty of felonious academic crimes. She is not passing off my arguments as her own nor is she writing original research. It is, after all, just a book review. But she is claiming my words as her own, and she's doing so in a scholarly journal where authors should know better.
DAVID ARNOLD
Richland, Washington |
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To the Editor:
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I was a newspaper reporter for many more years than I have been an academic. The review of David Arnold's The Fisherman's Frontier was, in fact, perhaps the fifth or sixth book review I have written. And when I sat down to write it, later than I should have, on deadline, I treated it as if I was writing a news story, rather than an academic document. I did not even think of it as an academic document. I thought of it as producing 500 words under deadline and I freely used Arnold's words, as if we had had an interview and I had written notes. This was clearly in error, but I was not thinking about the differences in both the content and audience of the piece; I was just on deadline and I wrote what I thought would clearly describe the content of the book. If I had thought about it in a scholarly context, I would have done it differently, but I did not think about the norms of that context. This has been the first time where there was a blurring of my old and new identities, and I have learned an important lesson for the future, for which I thank David Arnold.
CARMEL FINLEY
Corvallis, Oregon |
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To the Editor:
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Thanks for publishing Michael Munk's interesting and well researched essay on the meeting of John Reed and Louise Bryant (Fall 2008). He did excellent work at digging out so many new details and filling in a more complete picture of that famous (for some of us) meeting and the contours of their relationship. It always amazes me, after forty years as a historian, that there is always more material to be found by a diligent scholar, though obviously some of the sources in which Munk worked were not open in the early 1970s, when I was doing the research for Romantic Revolutionary: A Biography of John Reed (Knopf, 1975). One funny thing in the essay is Munk's notion that I, as Historical Consultant on the film Reds, had to sign off on Warren Beatty's many inventions. The amount of fiction involved in Reds, as in (to be fair) any history film, is enormous. If I had to sign off on every invented fact in that film I would have had a terminal case of writer's cramp. Yet my studies of historical film over the years have brought me into more sympathy with Reds. In 1983, I published an essay in Reviews in American History that was rather critical of the film's portrait of Reed. But in my recent book, History on Film / Film on History (Pearson-Longman, 2006), I revisit Reds in a chapter on biographical films and give it much higher grades this time for its portrait of Jack and Louise and their world. Alas, the meeting of the two is not as accurate as the one Munk gives in his essay, but in their quick and mutual attraction, I think it is at least true to the spirit of those two fascinating historical figures.
ROBERT ROSENSTONE
Pacific Palisades, California |
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To the Editor:
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In her [Winter 2008] review of my Seven Months to Oregon, Linda Crew perceptively notes that I seemed intent on providing "the most thorough documentation possible of everything written before, during, and after a particular crossing of the plains..." But her focus on using this to support why she found my book unappealing to read obscures the possibility that its very comprehensiveness may represent a valuable resource for scholars to compare different accounts of a particular trip: writings by men vs. ones by women on the one hand, and reminiscences vs. diaries and letters written during the trip on the other hand. |
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She is actually reviewing two books in tandem, for contrast and comparison. The second book is Best of Covered Wagon Women by Kenneth L. Holmes. In this review, Holmes wins the comparison, hands down. Summing up his work, Mrs. Crew writes: "Holmes supplies just enough background to give each diarist the proper context and then, with a bare minimum of footnotes, judiciously steps back and lets these women give us their eyewitness accounts in their own words." |
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As a long-time admirer of Holmes's work, I agree with this assessment, but doing some comparison of my own, I note that in his introduction to Celinda Hines's diary in volume 6 of his earlier Covered Wagon Women series, Holmes prepares the reader with "... Celinda describes vividly her father's death (he drowned in the Snake River...)." I find nothing wrong with this, but when I state in my own introduction that "Obadiah drowned while attempting to cross the Snake River," the reviewer criticizes that I "deny the reader any such sense of page-turning eagerness." In comparing the approaches of two different authors in the same review, might it be better to use a single standard? |
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It's probably for the best that the reviewer did not point out that Holmes was a widely respected historian, in contrast to my openly confessed amateur status in the field, because then there would have been the awkward matter of Holmes's multiple errors regarding the Hines family, which I correct in my book. |
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Finally, while the reviewer dismisses the Hines journey as "not historically noteworthy," historian Michael McKenzie, in a review of Seven Months to Oregon that appeared elsewhere, reminds readers that Gustavus Hines and younger brother Harvey played important roles in the early history of Oregon. Thus, this book dealing with the migration of these men and their families to Oregon may provide useful background for readers interested in that period.
HAROLD J. PETERS
Santa Clara, California |
CORRECTIONS
The caption on page 602 of the Winter 2008 (109:4) issue of OHQ erroneously states that A.B. Hammond was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey; Hammond was born in St. Leonard's, New Brunswick, Canada. In the same issue, the acknowledgement on page 619 should have thanked John Robinson, not John Robertson. The editor regrets the errors.
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