| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 34.1

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| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 34.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Down by the Lemonade Springs: Essays on Wallace Stegner. By Jackson J. Benson. (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2001. xvi + 174 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. $24.95.)

Sacagawea's Nickname: Essays on the American West By Larry McMurtry. (New York: New York Review of Books, 2001. xiv + 178 pp. Notes. $19.95.)

     All twelve essays published in Larry McMurtry's Sacajawea's Nickname will be familiar to regular readers of the New York Review of Books and all but two of the ten in Jackson Benson's Down by the Lemonade Springs have appeared previously, usually in academic journals from west of the Mississippi. It is useful, nevertheless, to have the essays gathered in this more permanent form, especially since it makes them more accessible to scholars and students. One collection comes from the academy, the other from the desk of a prolific novelist with a passionate interest in the West as place and an avid appetite for reading about it. 1

    Although readers will appreciate McMurtry s essays for their insights on a range of topics (historical more than literary) relating to the West, those essays remain book reviews—reviews with that notable expansiveness permitted by their host, but reviews nonetheless. If the market for short-story collections is smaller than that for novels, the appetite for a collection of reviews is even smaller. Unlike his In a Narrow Grace: Essays on Texas (New York, 1968), McMurtry s new collection is not as likely to produce readings at a single sitting. It is a work of parts more than a whole. 2

     McMurtry's voice and authority are evident, to be sure. The essays are important because they showcase one of the memorable fiction writers from the West commenting on important books about the West. That "Sacagawea's Nickname" is the showcased essay seems appropriate, for the most continuous motif to thread the book is McMurtry's huge pleasure from reading The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition (Lincoln, NE, 1983). Most readers will be coming to the book in college and university libraries primarily because they are interested in the reviewer. Sure to be quoted frequently is his introduction to the book, wherein McMurtry evaluates belle-lettristic writing by western writers. Of his own generation, he says that it has been "rather parsimonious with masterpieces" and thinks that the succeeding generation may be doing better (p. xiii). . . .

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