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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. Pp. 265, acknowledgments, introduction, photographs, map, bibliography. $39.95 cloth, $19.95 paper) Regionalist writing in the twenty-first-century American academy is fraught with perils and responsibilities, particularly with respect to the American West. If not engaged in combative "New West" revisionism or charmed by the secret language and salon radicalism of cultural studies, one might be assailed from the left as parochial at best, racist and chauvinistic at worst. If not bent on the aggressive, assimilating nation building of beef-eating oil barons with guns, one might be branded by the right as an un-American wimp, a Balkanizing anarchist unable to think hard thoughts and see big pictures. Worldviews and the American West appropriately acknowledges the perilous lures of fashion and ideological purity, yet ignores them ultimately to work from the inside out and the bottom up, to represent responsibly the messy plurality of ways in which diverse inhabitants of what's called the American West view their particular places. The volume's subtitle, The Life of the Place Itself, culled from an essay by contributor Kim Stafford, echoes the notion of cultural geographer Yi-Fu Tuan that the spaces we inhabit are transformed into places by the complex ways in which we live in and think about them. And as the editors astutely observe in their Introduction, competing notions of place frequently contend within the same space: Our goal has not been to reconcile these sometimes inharmonious worldviews, but to try to get inside them through their outward expressions and to represent them accurately and fairly. (4) Such wisdom recalls Walt Whitman's recognition that America is more paradox than paradise: "Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself." The conceptual rigor and poetic sensibility suffusing every essay in this anthology, however, are tributes to Barre Toelken, whose teaching, writing, mentoring, friendship, insight, clarity, and eloquence have inspired many students and colleagues, especially those who have worked, like Toelken, in the American West. Fourteen interrelated yet provocatively unruly contributions are subdivided into such categories as Song, Objects, Narrative, and Groups. We encounter the hymns, ballads, holy cards, grave-markers, playthings, postcards, legends, trickster tales, personal experience stories, speech, pranks, belief systems, and cultural landscapes of missionaries, farmers, cowboys, miners, loggers, women, children, Anglo-Americans, Mormons, Mexican-Americans, Coquelles, Tlingits, Upper Skagits, Wascos, Irish, Italians, Poles, Scandinavians and more. While the transcription, translation, and annotation of a Tlingit narrative by Nora Marks Dauenhauer and Richard Dauenhauer painstakingly illuminate a single performance, other essays consider broad patterns across time and space. …