A Quarterly of Criticism and Review i^^^^^^^^fcEjfc $15

Duffy's instructive A World Under Sentence,ECW) James Fenimore Cooper to bear onJohn Richardson's regionalism. IreneGammel's Sexualizing Power in Naturalism(UCalgary P) brings solid close commentaryto a reading of Grove and Dreiser;informed by a theory of the sexuality ofnaturalism, this critic writes in a particularlyilluminating way about A Search forAmerica. In On Coasts of Eternity(Oolichan), J.R. (Tim) Struthers bringstogether the first booklength collection ofessays on the work of Jack Hodgins. And inA Celebration of Canada's Arts 1930-1970(Canadian Scholars' Press), GlenCarruthers and Gordana Lazarevich assemblea series of cross-disciplinary essays onthe arts: especially on music, literature,broadcast policy, and the corporate worldof the 1930s and postwar decades.In works of general prose, where onemight anticipate unbounded range, 1996saw yet another desire to map the pastmore than to hazard plans for the future, atleast in the few dozen books that I had theopportunity to read. Whether dealing withart, local history, Native identities, ecosystems,women's lives, class, or other subjects,writers seemed to be trying to find order inthe present by trying to prevent anythingelse from going wrong. Some works werefrankly recuperative, such as BrianMaracle's Back on the Rez: Finding the WayHome (Viking), a well-written recovery ofthe writer's Iroquois post, and (in itsexpression of a desire for the longhouse) apersonal reassertion of the power of communitythat it might be possible to experienceif community territory can ever itselfbe reestablished or reclaimed. Lily Chow'sSojourners in the North (Caitlin), though itbadly needs further editing, reclaimsanother forgotten or suppressed history;gathering available records, the bookreestablishes the presence of Chinese settlersin northern British Columbia—whatis now needed is an extended analysis of theimportance of their contributions to theculture at large. In a way, works such asRichard and Sydney Cannings' BritishColumbia: A Natural History (Greystone/Douglas & Mclntyre) also claim to locate acommunity territory—or, by bringing scientistand photographer together to focuson the intricately related world of land,water, animal, and vegetation—they recallthe necessity of the community of nature toecological survival.Personal encounters with the world donot always prove so engaging. Pierre ElliottTrudeau's essays, collected in Against theCurrent (M&S) continue to make politicallyarresting reading. But, oddly,Kristjana Gunnars' Reading Marcel Proust(Red Deer College P) and Marie-ClaireBlais's American Notebooks (Talon) arelikely more interesting for the student ofother books by Gunnars and Biais than forwhat they say here. Joan Murray'sConfessions of a Curator (Dundurn), bycontrast, has some fascinating, forthrightthings to say about foreign condescensionand the taste that once shaped Canadiancultural institutions; and John HerdThompson's essay on Canada and culturalsovereignty, in S.J. Randall and H.W.Konrad's Nafta in Transition (U Calgary P),offers some cautionary models of currenteconomic and political trends. Neitherattention nor inattention, of course, guaranteesobjectivity. Allen Sapp's autobiographicalessay in / Heard the Drums(Stoddart), which contextualizes the 75paintings reproduced here, somewhatplaintively asks if he is looked at because heis a painter or because he is an Indian.Robert Lanning, in The National Album(Carleton UP), traces—largely through statisticalanalysis—the relation between the"collective biography" (the biographicaldictionary, for example, or a book such asLisa Hobbs Birnie's Western Lights[Raincoast], a collection of brief, somewhatimpressionistic lives of fourteen contempo-193