Volume 25, Number 4 · March 23, 1978
Ah, Wilderness!
By Diane Johnson
The Last Cowboy
by Jane Kramer
Harper and Row, 148 pp., $8.95
Coming into the Country
by John McPhee
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 438 pp., $10.95
'Americans,' wrote Tocqueville once, 'are insensible to the wonders of nature,' and only bent on subduing it. Now, it seems, whatever our intentions to nature itself, we cannot get enough of reading about its wonders. The new abundance of wilderness literature in America,[*] which seems to exceed what can be accounted for by transitory romanticism, reflects, I take it, both the disappearance of our frontiers and our dawning sense of their primal significance to us. As I write this (in February), John McPhee's richly detailed account of Alaska is the best-selling book of nonfiction in a number of Eastern cities, something usually reserved for works on sex or self-improvement; this suggests that the new American feeling about wilderness springs from some similar deep source of anxiety and hope. In the matter of Alaska, some of the interest may also arise from responsible citizenship, since we are on the point of having to decide what to do with this vast state. Alaska, like a late baby to elderly parents, is a matter both for surprise and obsessive solicitude, a last frontier which provides an occasion for reviewing the mistakes that have blighted other, older frontiers, like the one described by Jane Kramer in her book on the Texas Panhandle.
Review, 4103 words
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