Book Review: Visions of the Land: Science, Literature, and the American Environment from the Era of Exploration to the Age of Ecology

Authors

Gale E. Christianson, Indiana State University

Date of this Version

2004

Comments

Published in Great Plains Quarterly 24:1 (Winter 2004). Copyright © 2004 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

Abstract

Michael A. Bryson has undertaken an ambitious study of the connections between the representation of nature and the practice of science in America. Covering the hundred-and-thirty-year period from the 1840s to the 1960s, the author dissects the work of seven distinguished writers through a diverse array of documents, ranging from technical reports and exploration narratives to essays, utopian fiction, autobiography, and popular scientific literature. The seven whose visions of the land he seeks to capture are Richard Byrd, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Susan Cooper, Rachel Carson, John Charles Fremont, John Wesley Powell, and Loren Eiseley. While the work of the latter three is most directly related to the interests of this journal, Bryson's skillful weaving together of the various skeins has rendered them all of a piece.