《书目》(Booklist)书评

Hillerman briefly deserts his popular Navajo mysteries to edit this collection of western fact and fiction, much of it "odds and ends" from the personal library of Jack Rittenhouse, "book lover, author, reviewer, publisher . . . editor . . . and, for the past four decades, operator of his own antiquarian book dealership." Rittenhouse, a Michigander who reviewed books and collected library fines in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in the 1930s, has been documenting western history since World War II. He and Hillerman are both members of the Westerners, a group with corrals "in most places west of the 100th meridian" at whose meetings members trade western myths and memories. The Best of the West's nonfiction sources run from 500 B.C. to the late nineteenth century; fictional selections by Harte, Crane, Scarborough, Davis, Stegner, and Norris are included (with apologies for omitting Doig, McMurtry, Zollinger, Calvin, Harjo, and Didion). Hillerman's subject groupings (e.g., explorers, settlers, Navajos, Hispanics, cowboys, miners, women, travel, and the military) make sense, and his juxtapositions encourage a thoughtful response. ~--Mary Carroll