216 Western American Literature Here we meet Gracie Evers, awoman whose longing for autonomy inwhite America seems to prompt stereotypical “Indian” behavior; a woman who throughout her life seemsto put her daughter Lucie second to the various men who live in her house. We meet Gracie’ssister and cohort, spinster auntAuney, a survivoroffour marriageswho “told no tales and didn’t hit.”Butwe also meet great aunt Lizzie, a stern yet lovingwoman who gives Lucie, when she is sent to stay on the farm, alternative ways of living in the world—ways rooted in the earth, in religiosity, in history and myth, and in Cherokee values. Bell isnot merelyconcerned with personal discovery; she isalso concerned with the revaluation of cultural identity. Aswe hear these women’svoices and conversations, weglimpsewhatitmeans tobe an Indian in aparticular time and place—what itmeans to be told bythe Department ofInterior thatyou maynot sell or dispose of“said allotment,”yetthat this allotment maybe “revoked at the pleasure of the court”;what it means to hear tales ofawarrior, such as Quanah Parker. We learn to see the literal world metaphorically and to hear the metaphoric word literally. She does all this by calling our attention to the very act ofstorytelling. Chapter titles such as “Raisingvoices,”“In the hour ofthewolf ... ,” “Traveling back . . . and “Nu la . . . hurry”serve as visual markers and audio clues into its enigmatic power; intrachapter sections further our aware ness by juxtaposing subjective renderings of the present against seemingly objective recountings of the past. In the end, we, like Lucie, find the collective meaning ofthe stories in the old composition book in which Gracie haswritten the story of her life, and in its preamble in which she has left Lucie a great gift: “another storie,”should Lucie need it, of“plainworking peoplejestgitting byin this wurld out much to be proud a cep a loving and a helping one anuther in a hard times.” Faces in theMoon promises the reader a glimpse into the stories ofwonder and protection of all childhoods, such as dying mothers who promise to watch their children from the moon. And ifwe listen very carefully, it also shareswith us the voices of women belonging to a very particular, and very special, people—voices of women who tell stories both reflective and constructive of cultural and personal significance. COLLEEN M. TREMONTE MSU—-JamesMadison College Earthly Words: Essays on Contemporary American Nature and Environmental Writers. Edited byJohn Cooley. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994. 270 pages, $42.50/$18.95.) In the last decade, several excellent nature anthologies have been pub lished, including This Incomperable Lande compiled by Thomas Lyon, and The Reviews 217 NortonBookofNatureWritingedited byRobertFinchandJohn Elder. Now,editor John Cooley’sEarthly Wordspresents a nature anthologyofa different stripe—a fascinating collection of essays whose subject is not nature, but the men and women who write about it. The volume is divided into eight sections, each preceded by a brief bio graphical sketch ofthewritersunder discussion: EdwardAbbey,Wendell Berry, Annie Dillard, Joseph Wood Krutch, Aldo Leopold, Barry Lopez, Peter Matthiessen,John McPhee, and GarySnyder. Eclectic in their approaches, the book’s thirteen essays range from the intensely personal to the formally aca demic. There is a refreshing range of voices here not normally heard in the increasingly theoretical field of ecocriticism, such as poet Diane Wakoski’s thoughtful essay on Abbey, placing him in the “inhumanist” tradition of Whitman and Jeffers. Equally engaging are the selections in which nature writers discuss each other, such asBerry’sdefense ofAbbey’sradical individual ism in “A Few Words in Favor of Edward Abbey,” or Abbey’s own homage to Krutch which precedes his interview, “Mr. Krutch.”Readers with specific inter ests in western literature will find the essays on Snyder useful—particularly Ed Folsom’s“GarySnyder’sDescent toTurtle Island,”focusingon the poet’smulti faceted use ofhistory. Although most have been published elsewhere, the collection’sessays take on renewed interestwhen read together. Commonalities present themselves in these diverse discussions, leading readers to a greater understanding of both individual writers and major themes in American nature writing. Patrick D. Murphy’sfine discussion ofthe spiritual elements ofSnyder and Berry’spoetry, for example, becomes even richer whenjuxtaposed withJames I. McClintock’s excellent and far...