Books in Brief
The Oregon Trail: An American Saga by David Dary (Knopf, 414 pp., $35). In the mid-nineteenth century, the Oregon Trail was one of the principal overland routes from the Missouri River to the Pacific coast. Certainly it was the most famous. Thousands of pioneers in covered wagons followed the trail west. And now, following in the footsteps of Francis Parkman, David Dary has written a comprehensive account of that strange, American story.
The author of nine previous books on the American West, Dary begins his latest by discussing the earliest exploration of the territory that became Oregon and explaining the process by which Oregon became part of the United States, wrenched away from Great Britain.
But the crux of his book is the years of peak travel, from the 1840s to the 1860s, when there was an influx of emigrants on the trail seeking to escape the Civil War. Dary uses diaries, journals, memoirs, and letters written by the emigrants to convey a sense of life on the trail. His narrative is replete with anecdotes and vignettes of the pioneers' experience.
A theme of the book is the relations between the pioneers and the Indians. Although at times things were amicable, there was always underlying tension, which erupted into open hostilities in the 1860s.
With the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, the Oregon Trail fell into disuse. But Dary extends his narrative into the twentieth century, chronicling efforts to commemorate the Oregon Trail. He also mentions various Hollywood depictions of the trail. Richly illustrated, the book is suffused with the lore of the American West.
--Graeme Voyer
India in Mind edited by Pankaj Mishra (Vintage, 332 pp., $14). More than a collection of writings about India, this volume is an anthology of reactions from outsiders to the strange reality that is the Indian subcontinent.
The contributors are mostly English and American, but they include Continental Europeans, Mexicans, and expatriated Indians. The native Indian editor, Pankaj Mishra, has not included any of his compatriots, since his aim is to show the many ways that Westerners have attempted to "understand India through their own cultural and intellectual inheritance."
Admitting that his anthology tells us "as much about the traveler as the world he describes," Mishra identifies the world's mental picture of India with "a variety of assumptions and prejudices whose history goes back to Herodotus, to the earliest images of India in the West."
This is an India, therefore, very much in the minds of its describers. These range from the obscenely self-absorbed, such as Allen Ginsberg, to the idealistic, such as Herman Hesse, to the philosophically disgusted, such as Pier Paolo Pasolini, to practitioners of travel journalism, such as Robyn Davidson and Paul Theroux. Although Mishra might have thinned out some of the selections, on the whole they form a compelling story, ranging over two centuries, about the various ways Westerners have looked at India as either an answer to or a confirmation of their most haunting fears.
Were this all, though, one might consider this volume primarily of Western interest. But the best of Mishra's selections do more than react to India from a Western perspective. The contributions of Mark Twain and André Malraux reveal the Westerner learning to appreciate that there are mysteries at the bottom of this great civilization, even if he cannot understand them. In viewing a foreign land as alien as India is to the European, such a traveler's sight evolves with what he sees; this seems the meaning of taking "India in mind."
--Daniel Sullivan