| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 32.4

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| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 32.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Worldviews and the American West: The Life of the Place Itself. Edited by Polly Stewart, Steve Siporin, C.W. Sullivan III, and Suzi Jones. (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2000. 257 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography. $39.95, cloth; $19.95, paper.)

This anthology was compiled as a festschrift for the distinguished western folklorist Barre Toelken. The thread that binds the collection together, according to the editors (all former Toelken students), is the concept of worldview, that is, a culture's orientation to the world. A commitment to understanding people and their cultures through their own eyes is a hallmark of Toelken's considerable body of scholarly work. So, each of the essayists, the editors contend, offers a view of some aspect of the American West from the inside out. 1

The bookends of the collection are two personal essays from Barry Lopez and Kim Stafford, each evocative of landscape and sense of place. The essays in between run the gamut from loosely structured personal reminiscences to standard academic analyses. The subjects, too, are widely varied, from "cowboy" Barbie dolls to cowboy songs, from folk saints on the U. S.-Mexican border to silver miners in Idaho, from "tall tale" postcards to Jesse James, to Forest Lawn. . . .

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