Choice Review

Cenkl (Plymouth State Univ.) adds to the publisher's exemplary "American Land and Life" series on environmental sensibilities and writing focused on the US landscape. Central to the series is the understanding that landscapes exist only in the gaze of viewers, and that places and regions in the US are constituted culturally by the peoples, whether local inhabitants or tourists from elsewhere, whose realities are linked to those very landscapes. The author here has captured how New Hampshire's White Mountains exhibited multiple overlapping realities in the 19th century, from inhospitable wilderness to romantic pastoral scene to natural resource region to exurban playground, variously a landscape to be preserved and one to be inhabited, worked, or consumed. In this sense, the book presents a metageographical account of intellectual discovery of and fascination with the White Mountains that ranges widely from direct experience with the mountains as an economic landscape to be worked, to a culturally constructed engagement with them through staged viewsheds. Cenkl offers a model for interpreting places and regions through writings about them, and his book should interest scholars of US landscape as much as people simply fond of the White Mountains. Summing Up: Recommended. Most levels/libraries. J. S. Wood University of Southern Maine