Book Notes

(from the California HISTORIAN)

The American West: The Invention of a Myth
By David Hamilton Murdoch
(University of Nevada Press, Reno, NV, 2001,
148 pages, paperback, $19.95)

Reviewed by Ruth E. Sutter
Independent Scholar, San Francisc

If the author of this book was following the mid-19th-century advice to young men to “go west,” he got lost. He assumes in his Preface that it is whatever is “west of the Mississippi.” It takes only a glance at a map to see that this area is not an entity. However, in his “west” something called a “frontier experience” somehow turned into an idea which somehow turned into an image which now has the force of myth. His very good question is how this happened.

Briefly, once the idea of “the west” captured their imaginations, a few people in entertainment industries, including publishing, found a way of making money and a few politicians found a way of advancing their careers by riding images of the west into people’s minds.

Murdoch is especially interested in western movies and has been so since his childhood, he tells us. Readers can see the child-become-professor (he teaches at the University of Leeds) illustrating his lectures with film clips and slides. These would give the lectures entertainment value. But the lectures lose that value on a printed page when a writer gets lost on his way to the dictionary, as Murdoch does with the word “concatenation,” which he evidently fell in love with somewhere but still misspells and misuses. Murdoch could also learn from a trail guide to American history. Introducing business activity after World War I, he says “an economic boom...lasted for nearly twenty years.” I cannot imagine how he escaped the stock market crash and the first eight years of the Great Depression, especially in view of the fact that a lot of people tried to escape the tribulations of these years by going to the movies.

The publishers may have intended for the book to be used as a supplementary textbook in the increasingly popular courses on the American west in colleges and universities. It would have helped, however, to hand it first to a copy editor. Murdoch attempts a smooth and sometimes humorous writing style, but he is also able to write “American’s” when he means Americans.

Students and other readers would best be served by being sent directly to the sources of the ideas Murdoch conveys.