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Outside magazine, January 2000

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BUY THIS BOOK

On the Rez, by Ian Frazier (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $25). It takes Frazier ten short pages at the start of this book to address and dispense with a raft of stereotypes of the American Indian—martyred ecological hero, New Age sweat-lodge guru, perennial welfare drain. Not that Frazier doesn't indulge his own Native American fantasies: He sports a ponytail inspired by 1970s American Indian Movement leaders and mocks his own middle-class modernity with questions like, "Would Crazy Horse have spent this much to remodel a kitchen?" But his affinity for the Oglala Sioux of South Dakota's Pine Ridge Reservation is a lucky one for readers. Through years of extended visits there, Frazier offers an unromantic but enormously affectionate portrait of Pine Ridge, one enhanced by his ability to see past its junkyard bleakness to the "actual America, the original version that was here before and will still be here after we're gone." Frazier met his first Oglala friend, Le War Lance, on a New York City street and devoted a chapter of his marvelous 1989 book Great Plains to Le's exploits. Some of the greatest moments in On the Rez involve Le and his brother Floyd John watching TV westerns in a New York apartment as they pick out their Pine Ridge neighbors ("That guy who just got shot off the roof—I forget his name...") or revolve around them cruising Pine Ridge in Frazier's truck in search of spare car parts or propane. Or beer: Frazier does not shy away from the reservation's problems with alcohol, suicide, and violence. But unlike many journalists, he sees beyond them. True, Pine Ridge may be the poorest place per capita in the country, but Frazier reminds us that its historically small band of Oglala Sioux have given us an incredible number of heroes per capita, too—from chiefs Crazy Horse and Red Cloud to holy man Nicholas Black Elk. And not one of them a stereotype.

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Yukon Alone: The World's Toughest Adventure Race, by John Balzar (Henry Holt, $25). The best advice Los Angeles Times reporter John Balzar got when he arrived in Fairbanks to cover the Yukon Quest International Sled Dog Race was from a race volunteer: "Before you start telling everyone what they can do to help you, why don't you ask what you can do for them?" And so Balzar made himself useful, first as a vet tech (read "errand boy") in the 1997 Quest and then as press liaison in 1998. His reward was unprecedented access to an event like none other on earth. Colder and darker than the Iditarod, the Quest is mushed through two weeks of 17-hour nights, over 1,023 miles of frozen rivers and buckled ice snaking from Whitehorse to Fairbanks. Although Balzar didn't compete, his quasi-participatory roles allowed him to closely follow the 1998 race's 38 entrants, from rookie Aliy Zirkle, who watches one of her dogs die, to veteran Bruce Lee, who barely beats a French-Canadian upstart. Including maps and lists of standings for each race leg, Balzar builds a framework to profile boisterous frontier racers and explore the lure behind this "ordeal of perpetual motion, cold, the sleepless thousand-yard stare, the rank smell of the trail, the stomach adrift from too much coffee and boiled moose meat."

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Gobi: Tracking the Desert, by John Man (Yale University Press, $25). If any corner of the earth can compete with the Yukon for sheer inhospitableness, it's the Gobi Desert, where temperatures range from 40 below zero to 145 above. Drawing few travelers and closed to outsiders for half a century, this southern swath of Mongolia—with its shifting sands, wild camels, desert bears, and scattered herdsmen's gers, or yurts—retains the exoticism it did when Indiana Jones prototype Roy Chapman Andrews unearthed a trove of dinosaur bones here in the 1920s. And so, when British journalist Man discovered that there was no serious book on the Gobi in English, he traveled by truck across its untracked expanse and wrote one himself. He is suitably amazed by the Gobi's Singing Sands and Flaming Cliffs, its "cloud shadows purple as bruises," its snow leopards stealthy as "twenty daggers clad in velvet." Man's energetic natural history is enlivened by healthy cross-cultural exchanges, such as the following, which occurs after a vexing truck breakdown: Man announces that "we're in the shit," whereupon his Mongolian guide, Erdene, marvels, "Always the shit... Is this the same shit as the shit of the bull? Is this bullshit?"

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The Peter Matthiessen Reader: Nonfiction 1959-1991, edited and with an introduction by McKay Jenkins (Vintage Original, $14). "No writer of his time has logged more miles, in more remote places, than Peter Matthiessen,"writes University of Delaware literature professor Jenkins."But lost in the romantic image is the recognition of a remarkable literary voice, characterized mostly by a deep mourning for the natural magic the world has lost."Jenkins's selections in this paperback original bear out Matthiessen's towering stature as a writer on contemporary environmental and geographical exploration. The book begins with an excerpt from 1959's Wildlife in America, which the 29-year-old writer researched by crisscrossing the country in a Ford convertible, and concludes with takes from the 1991 edition of In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, the mature Matthiessen's angry investigation of the prosecution of Indian activist Leonard Peltier for the 1975 shooting of two FBI agents. Between these are strung brilliant passages from classics such as 1978's The Snow Leopard and calls to arms such as 1969's Sal Si Puedes, about migrant farm labor reformer Cesar Chavez. Through all his works, observes Jenkins, Matthiessen "remains steadfast but heartbroken when confronted by our inexorable drive to subdue wilderness, assimilate native peoples, and wring the mystery from life." His 1981 account of black rhino poaching in Sand Rivers provides just one instance of brave mourning: "The triumphant voice of man moved onwards, leaving behind in the African silence the dead weight of the carcass, the end-product of millions of browsing, sun-filled mornings, as the dependent calf emerges from the thicket and stands by dumbly to await the lion."—ELIZABETH HIGHTOWER

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