Book review: Yolanda Youngs, Framing Nature: The Creation of an American Icon at the Grand Canyon Framing Nature: The Creation of an American Icon at the Grand Canyon. By YoungsYolanda. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. 2024. xxi + 361 pp. $35 paperback. ISBN: 9781496202185.

An excerpt from the book "Framing Nature: The Creation of an American Icon at the Grand Canyon."

Framing nature: The creation of an American icon at the grand canyon

Framing Nature: The Creation of an American Icon at the Grand Canyon by Yolonda Youngs (review)

FRAMING NATURE: The Creation of an American Icon in the Grand Canyon

Framing Nature: The Creation of an American Icon at the Grand Canyon by Yolonda Youngs (review)

Reviewed by: Pain Woman Takes Your Keys and Other Essays from a Nervous System by Sonya Huber Erica Trabold Sonya Huber. Pain Woman Takes Your Keys and Other Essays from a Nervous System. University of Nebraska Press, 2017. If Sonya Huber's Pain Woman Takes Your Keys was a word cloud, those billowing masses of most-used terms, the central and most prominent element drawing the reader's eye toward its center would be the bold letters P-A-I-N. Besides the minor articles a, an, and the, no other word appears more often or more consistently in the twenty-eight essays that comprise this collection. Pain functions as the book's theme, holding at the center and reaching the outer limits of the personal essay form. Huber's near constant repetition of the word "pain" invites the reader into a richly individual and often indescribable landscape—that of chronic pain—a territory the reader may have never encountered described so carefully or forcefully in literature. Huber writes of being diagnosed with both an autoimmune condition and rheumatoid arthritis at age thirty-eight. The diagnosis that names the pain taking up permanent residence in Huber's "glowing skeleton" serves as a springboard for a project attuned to a much deeper and nuanced exploration of pain itself. For Huber, living with chronic pain makes each day—and this remains an understatement—difficult. Add to that difficulty the fact that chronic pain, especially pain experienced by women, is so often distrusted, disbelieved, or dismissed, and Huber has tapped into an idea unending in its complexity. Precisely because her topic, her pain, is ever-morphing and in a constant state of flux, its edges shifting and nearly unknowable—the essay, a form without rules, boundaries, limits, or ends becomes the subject's most worthy and perfect vessel. Six sections of approximately five essays divide Pain Woman Takes Your Keys into small and specific manifestations of pain's effects. In the book's opening section, "Pain Bows in Greeting," Huber introduces pain as a concept by the things it "wants," and in the second essay, "Pain as Lava Lamp," attempts the book's first metaphorical description of the sensation the narrator experiences every day: "It wasn't the whack of an anvil or the burn of a scraped knee. This pain sat warmly on the surface of my hands up to the elbows like evil, pink evening gloves, with a sort of swimming cap clenched on my head, with blue plastic flowers at the base of the neck, and a nauseating blur in the eyes." In the essays that follow, Huber recasts her pain in images. She does this out of necessity. "In fact, if I don't feed it a metaphor on a daily basis," she writes, "my pain devours me." In the book's third act, Huber writes of the various "Side Projects and Secret Identities" pain has allowed her to create. In the following section titled, "My Machines," she pays homage to the physical objects that help her navigate "Pain Woman's" worst days, and in "Bitchiness as Treatment Protocol," an intensely-human method of coping with an invisible condition. The collection would not be complete without an intimate view of Huber's home life, an aspect of pain studied in the book's penultimate section, "Intimate Moments with the Three of Us," or a lyric [End Page 39] exploration of one woman's connectedness to the universe at large. It is in this final section, "Measuring the Sky," that Huber's voice truly soars. "Pain is not a Jesus that wants anything from me. It doesn't scold or wag its finger, doesn't judge, and doesn't give a shit how its human handles itself. It just is, like the Grand Canyon, not as a concept or a postcard but the square inches that together find themselves forming a crater without specific consciousness of their outline," she writes in the essay "Between One and Ten Thousand." The voice here, Huber has noted pages earlier, sounds much different than that of "Pain Woman," an alternate identity who keeps pace writing, working, and creating art—even in the grips of...

340 Western American Literature Nelson’s tough-minded examination of life as it is in the West as it is will not suit the palates of those who prefer life as they wish it had been in the West that never was. Those with more adventurous tastes will find it heady stuff indeed. JAMES K. FOLSOM The University of Colorado, Boulder National Parks: The American Experience. By Alfred Runte. (Lincoln: Uni­ versity of Nebraska Press, 1979. xiv 4- 240 pages, $16.50.) There are ample ironies and intelligent insights even in Runte’s title, for the many conflicts over land use he discusses, coupled with several styles of popular historical consciousness, can certainly be defined as “the American experience.” The parks embody the myth that we are a “wondrous” people in a “wondrous” land (“scenic nationalism”), yet they also embody the cultural conflict between belief in “the sanctity of private property” and the conviction “that no individual had the right to own a national monument.” The tensions between these oppositions are further complicated by the shifts in the argument of what a “park” is or ought to be, and one of Runte’s central stories is to trace the national park idea at several cultural levels as it moves from a nineteenth-century preoccupation with “panorama” to the 1960s’ conception of “ecosystem.” The chronological narration of how our national parks emerged as cul­ tural entities allows Runte to discuss the criss-crossed (or maybe cross-eyed) function of visualization as a mass mediation in national life. Runte’s contri­ bution to the literature of land, eye, and expansionism is to detail concretely what happened to land and how metaphorical and ideological representations acted as historical forces in the creation of both real estate and a geo-centered cultural identity self-consciously and (later) pridefully different from Eur­ ope’s. Runte’s first three chapters link the rise of mass media to the operations of an iconography of landscape ideologically inseparable from the rise of “scenic nationalism.” By mid-century, we recall, the United States acquired the Rockies, Texas, the Southwest, California, and the Pacific slope, an awe­ somely compressed expansion and one making the East “the audience to frontier events.” In the pages of the New York Tribune Greeley intoned typologically that the redwoods were big “when David danced before the ark,” and in 1865 Bierstadt sold his canvas “The Rocky Mountains” (1863: 6/ x 10') for $25,000 (a record for an American painter) and of course saw his works and those of other artists mass-duplicated as prints, newspaper and Reviews 341 magazine illustrations, and engravings. With the additional publicity of the Washburn Yellowstone articles in Scribner’s, the Hayden Survey of the Yel­ lowstone in the early 1870s, and with the Northern Pacific Railroad’srecogni­ tion that it “would be the sole beneficiary of the tourist traffic” to the northern Rockies, the time for the national park idea was fully coincidental with the materialism and economic structure of the Gilded Age, with the full swelling of “scenic” or “cultural nationalism,” the notion of the rustic “resort,” and with the “concept of useless scenery.” Runte’s remaining chapters frequently use the case study method. The need to preserve Mt. Rainier below timberline, for example, was argued by an elderly John Muir, who saw early on that an icy summit could take care of itself but that the flora and fauna of the lower slopes were in clear and present danger of becoming a wipeout of black stumps. Differences, confron­ tations, and ruptures of all sorts Runte locates finally in two competing economies of meaning — on the one hand, one investing the land with moral values, a surrogate cultural historicism (the Grand Canyon is equal to a European cathedral), and a nationalist sublime (a “suspended” or “primitive America” existing as a “classroom”) ; and on the other, an opposed economy realizing the land’s commodity exchange and use values, its potential as deferred or future payoff, and a nationalist resource much like a bank. Yet another topic this book approaches is the American (but by now global) conversion of directly lived life into a spectacle, which is the domi­ nant...

New Scholarship

Theodore Roosevelt is an American icon, his face carved in granite alongside those of Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln on Mt. Rushmore. He is the only American awarded both the Medal of Honor and Nobel Peace Prize. As president, he pushed through a stubborn Congress to breakup corporate monopolies strangling the economy, impose health standards on the food and drug industries, and conserve America’s natural heritage, including the Grand Canyon and Redwood forest. He was a brilliant diplomat who ended a war between Japan and Russia, and prevented a war between Germany and France. He engineered independence for the province of Panama from Columbia, then signed a treaty with the new country that entitled the United States to build, run, and defend a Panama canal. He crusaded for progressive reforms as a New York assemblyman, U.S. civil service commissioner, New York City police commissioner, and New York governor. He led scientific expeditions across East Africa’s savanna and Brazil’s rainforest. During the war with Spain, he raised a cavalry regiment and led his Rough Riders to a decisive victory at San Juan Heights. As a Dakota rancher during the frontier’s twilight, he squared off with outlaws and renegade Indians. He was a prolific writer, authoring 38 books and hundreds of essays. Roosevelt was among the most charismatic presidents. Yet, although most Americans adored him, most Wall Street moguls and political bosses hated him for his reforms. He was complex, simultaneously peacemaker and warmonger, progressive and conservative, Machiavellian and Kantian, avid hunter and nature lover. Roosevelt accomplished all that he did because he mastered the art of American power. His motto “speak softly and carry a big stick” exemplified how he asserted power to defend or enhance American interests. Time after time he bested such titans as J.P. Morgan or Kaiser Wilhelm at the game of power. Although he is the subject of dozens of books, this is the first to comprehensively explore just how Roosevelt understood, massed, and wielded power to pursue his vision for an America as the world’s most prosperous, just, and influential nation.