Choice 评论
Open Spaces, City Places is a gathering of gestures, the signature moves that 14 accomplished writers carved from their work and dropped in the collection plate following a public program sponsored by the Tucson Public Library and the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1987. It is an invaluable sampler of writerly attitudes at the end of the 20th century toward the enduring contradictions of "regional" literatures. "The dilemma facing modern Southwestern writers," Temple observes in her thoughtful introduction, is that "their very presence in the region helps populate it; their writing about its open spaces draws others to the Southwest, where newcomers love the desert to death by building homes and paving roads." Thus elegy, as Larry McMurtry noted in In a Narrow Grave (1968), continues to be the dominant mode in writing about the Southwest. Here, whether tinged with the imperialist nostalgia of newcomers or the righteous indignation of natives, the losses and gains are measured. General and academic audiences.