Reviews 253 $105,000 in royalties between 1869-1881) ;and concludes with a fond and full account of Twain’ssuccessful courtship of Livy at Elmira amidst hiswhirlwind Lyceum lecture tours of the eastern states. The Making of Mark Twain, with its helpful though selective annotated guide to further reading in Twain’s life, joins Everett Emerson’s work as an important addition to Twain studies. RICHARD H. CRACROFT Brigham Young University The Experimental Fictions of Ambrose Bierce: Structuring the Ineffable. By Cathy N. Davidson. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984. 166 pages, $15.95.) This dazzling book places Bierce squarely at the center of a dynamic tradition now engaging the attention of an increasing number of critical thinkers. Its twin supports are, on the one hand, Bierce’s contemporary, Charles Sanders Peirce, the most original of the pragmatists; and, on the other, post-modernist fiction, much of it emanating from Central and South America. Two aspects of Peirce’swork are relevant to Davidson’sstudy. One is empha sized by such disparate figures as Thomas Kuhn, Richard Rorty, and Stanley Fish: the uncertain status of “truth.” Instead of existing in an unchanging ideal world, it emerges through the investigations of a community of seekers whose consensus is subject not only to ongoing development and revision, but even to radical and abrupt shifts. The other aspect is Peirce’s theory of semiotics. Non-verbal signs in Bierce’s stories, as Davidson shows, are fre quently a better gauge to a character and his actions than the conventional and arbitrary words on which he himself relies. The recent appearance of Carlos Fuentes’ stunning new novel, The Old Gringo, based on the closing days of the life of Ambrose Bierce, whose dis appearance in Mexico Davidson calls “one of the most indeterminate texts of American literary history,” is a striking index of the other phenomenon she notes. In a lengthy appendix, she expands on an aperçu of Brigid Brophy’s: his extraordinary influence on contemporary metafiction, now being hailed by critics who are ignorant of its ancestry. The authors Davidson deals with who have drawn directly from Bierce’swork are Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, and Akira Kurosawa. Within this complex framework, she analyzes the language, the process, and the dialectic of perception in a number of Bierce stories, demonstrating how they contrast subverbal gestures with articulated language, how they reveal epiphanies which often precede death, and how they portray the con flict and confusion that arise when characters view the same event from clashing perspectives. Among her analyses of specific tales is a masterful read ing of “Chickamauga,” Bierce’schilling evocation of the horrors ofwar as seen by a deaf-mute child, whose handicaps are a metaphor for the circumscribed 254 Western American Literature human condition. But ultimately, according to Davidson, Bierce’s stories call every perspective into question, demonstrating the disastrous consequences of the limited vision shared by all the children of Adam. Gathering the Desert. By Gary Paul Nabhan. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1985. 209 pages, $19.95.) At a time when most readers cannot comprehend scientific publications and most scientists cannot write English, this book comes as a relief. It is this year’s winner of the John Burroughs Medal for outstanding achievement in nature writing. Gathering the Desert results from the author’s work in ethnobotany and argues that the largely discarded botanical knowledge of earlier desert inhabitants is of value both for the present and the future. Nabhan focuses on the Sonoran desert and teaches his lessons with chap ters on 12 plants (palms, greasewood, chiles, mesquite, etc.) The book is packed with curiosities: creosote surviving nuclear bombs, bitter squash finally finding a possible use in modern agribusiness as a pest control device, devil’s claw becoming a domesticated part of the Indian garden because of the American appetite for baskets. But it isnot simply a collection of tidbits about botanical oddities. The essays question the modern contempt for native sources of food, fiber and medicine and illustrate the intricate relationships that form between man and beast and plants and insects. The title constitutes a kind of complicated challenge to the reader, since Nabhan describes...