them,dwindled, sometimes snuffedout alto gether.Small towns and countryareas generally relinquished independence and control of their lives to distant cities, corporations, and orga nizations whose interestsoften diverged from their own. Increasingly, workers were forced to bargain unequally with ever-strongeremploy ers. Every rising industry, moreover, exacted horrendous tolls fromnature? land eroded andwasted, waters polluted, forestsand prairies denuded, wildlife annihilated, life-sustaining ecological patterns foreveroverturned. People, likeother beings, increasinglybecame subject todiscipline by the sometimes-cruel "ironhand of the market." Even therailroads themselves ? over-capitalized and over-built, grown fatand conservative from their own successes ? like the steamboats before them fellprey to market forcesand thecompetitionfrommotor vehicles and faded intothebackground after World War I.The authors conclude by evoking the ironic contradiction inherent in the railroad revolu tion,as inall powerful technologies, including today's: "everytraincarried cargoes ofprogress and poverty, triumph and failure" (p. 201). Some of thisbook's contentswill likelybe familiar to serious students of railroad and western history, but the compelling narra tive and stunning illustrationswill appeal to all readers. Schwantes and Ronda are to be congratulated forhaving given general readers and scholars alike this thoughtful and beauti ful reminder that not all truly revolutionary technologies are current ones, that in their century railroads worked amagic everybit as transformativeof lifeand economy as today's computers. Perhaps there is something in that forall of us to learn. Richard J. Orsi California State University,East Bay Purchase back issues of the OregonHistorical Quarterly 503.306.5230 museumstore @ohs.org 132 OHQ vol. 110, no. 1 DARINGTO LOOK:DOROTHEA LANGE'SPHOTOGRAPHS AND REPORTS FROMTHE FIELD by AnneWhiston Spirn University of Chicago Press, Illinois, 2008. Photographs, notes, index. 359 pages. $40.00 cloth. Imaginative and beautifully produced, Anne Whiston Spirn's book is a delightful hybrid: a newly published primary source, a photog raphy book with a fine introduction by the author, an apologia forLange against her often snobbish critics.Professor of landscape archi tectureand planning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Spirn developed the ingenious plan to publish a sampling of one year of Lange's work, 1939, including nearly two hundred photographs alongside Lange's original captions. Iwish Lange were alive to see this,because shewas frustratedby the fact that her work was almost always published without these captions and therefore without the context shewanted to emphasize. The book will be of particular interest to readers of this journal, because in 1939,Lange made a several-month photographic trip into Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. These pho tographs have rarelybeen published, in part because theycontain fewerofhermasterpieces than those made elsewhere. But what was ordinary inLange's photography is stilloften superb.Moreover, Daring toLook emphasizes Lange's environmental consciousness and landscape photography. Unfortunately, this promising line of analysis isnot pursued far enough; Ihope Spirnwill develop it in future publications. This photography was made for the Farm Security Administration (FSA), a New Deal haven of progressives within the conserva tiveDepartment of Agriculture. Lange had been photographing farmworkers since 1935, a project that marked an ironic turn in the life of this deeply urban portrait photographer. By 1939, she had become not only amaster of documentary photography but also an expert on theagriculturaldepression and theexploita tion and miserable poverty of sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and migrant farmworkers. Scholars of photography or of the Pacific Northwest will find particularly useful Spirn's meticulous correlation of the captions with thephotographs they explicate. Lange denied that images "spoke forthemselves" and insisted thatwords could enrich images. She disliked the iconization of her photographs, ripping themout of theircontext.Central to thevisual respect she paid her subjects was her sense that they should not become mere symbols of injustice or suffering,that they should never lose their individuality. Many of her captions provided brief narratives of her subjects' lives and of the economic structures that con strained them.Reading these captions as they sit side by sidewith the photographs allows a fuller understanding of Lange's project, her expertise, and her politics thanhas previously been easily available. Spirn presents twobrief sections on Lange's California and North Carolina photography and a longer section on herwork in thePacific Northwest. In each, we see the natural and the built environments aswell as their inhabitants. Lange...