A City at the End of the World by V. B. Price

Abstract

158 Western American Literature “China Books Begins”and the homophobic black humour of “Arse Longa, Vita Brevis: Jokes about AIDS.” In “Poetry & Painting,” poet Bill Berkson declares that “art and social behavior could be seen as extending from one another and talked about in the same terms.”Some selections in “Deeds”—the metaphorical fruit of the tree—explore potentially self-destructive actions, such as drug use in Blair Fuller’s “A New Ocean,” and Peter Coyote’s “Sleeping Where I Fall.” Others relate adventures such as Russ Riviere’s “The 20-Breath Snake,” David Harris’s “My Best Friend,”John Haines’s “Mudding Up,” Leo Braudy’s “Renew­ ing the Edge.” Still others explore creative activity: Christopher Alexander’s “The Perfection of Imperfection,” Hildegarde Flanner’s “Bamboo: An Honest Love Affair,” Gary Soto’s “The Savings Book,” Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s “A Re­ port on a Happening in North Beach San Francisco,” and Lindsey Shere’s “Violet Candies.” Readers should not expect definitive West Coast characteris­ tics to emerge from this eclectic group of essays. ROBERTA SHARP California State Polytechnic University, Pomona ty at the End of the World. By V. B. Price. Photographs by Kirk Gittings. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992. 171 pages, $19.95.) V. B. Price places Albuquerque at the end of the world for two obvious reasons. Set in a unique landscape, it is isolated physically from other urban centers and psychically from the mainstream imagination; it is the center of apocalyptic nuclear research. But the city also has problems endemic to mod­ em America: “the collapse of many rural cultures and economies” and threats to “the cultural integrity of midsized cities, such as Tucson, Memphis, Tulsa, Colorado Springs, and Amarillo.” Much of the book is devoted to the means of (belatedly) preserving historic buildings and open spaces, in which Albuquerque has managed to do better than most cities, though not as well as it should have. The major problem, as Price sees it, is for cities to “preserve their authenticity—their sense of place— without trivializing it into a commodity.” (He means Santa Fe, of course.) But those who love Albuquerque know that, except for having the usual problems, the city is nothing like the others he names. For one thing, you can see all of it at once, rising from the Rio Grande to the Sandia Mountains to the east. (You could probably see it from the Sandias to the West Mesa volcanos if you weren’t doing 80 down the four-lane slope of Interstate 40.) For another, the city was multicultural long before the term existed, beginning (perhaps) with the Spanish mingling with the Rio Grande pueblos in the sixteenth century. Kirk Gittings’ black and white photographs are striking and well-chosen, but they are no substitute for maps (preferably topographical) of the city and Reviews 159 region, which would help to illustrate Price’s points about geography and demography. But this is a minor flaw in a book that comes from, and touches, the heart as well as the mind. The city and the landscape have compelled my imagination for more than fifty years. Price not only tells me what I already feel; he gives me more of what I need to know to feel more clearly. ^RCSBERT MURRAY DAVIS University of Oklahoma ^^Fruit Fields in My Blood: Okie Migrants in the West. By Toby F. Sonneman. Photo­ graphs by Rick Steigmeyer. (Moscow: University of Idaho Press, 1992. 212 pages, $45.00/$24.95.) “My hope,” Sonneman writes, “is that this book can, through the percep­ tions and reflections of Okie migrants, challenge old assumptions and make us look at migrant agricultural workers with a fresh eye.”If nothing else, FruitFields does just that. Sonneman, who herself did migrant farm work for fifteen years after college—apparently for its romantic appeal(?)—draws a rich and alluring portrait of dignified lives. Her exclusive emphasis on Anglo pickers is a peculiar contrast to the contemporary image of the migrant Mexican, and I couldn’t help suspecting that this image was the one she most wanted to challenge. The only mention of Mexican farmworkers in FruitFields is to point out that they cost...