PLACING NATURE: CULTURE AND LANDSCAPE ECOLOGY

cultural landscapes on the margins-hers the endangered pre-Columbian landscape of the Santa Clara Pueblo, his the adapted urban landscape of American Chinatowns. Next, a quantum leap, conceptually speaking: sharing with several of her co-contributors a disdain for visual assessment!visual preference research, Catherine M. Howett questions the very foundations of western notions of visual aesthetics upon which this sort of research is routinely based. Denis Cosgrove argues for truth in advertising after exploring the "tension between visual and textual truth" (p. 100), as expressed in a pair of Renaissance urban landscape paintings. Dolores Hayden (along with many of the more progressive contemporary scholars of American planning history) doubts that we really understand who built "vernacular" America when we privilege builder-occupants or give short shrift to ordinary inner-city urban landscapes. Anthony D. King supplies a thoughtful essay which carefully examines the meaning(s) of some of the terms bandied about in the several essays, including vision/visual, ethnicity, culture, and landscape. And finally, J.B. Jackson points out how the superficially diverse architecture of American dwellings often masks nearly universal aspects of interior arrangement. Ever the gentle optimist, he also discusses the "autovernacular landscape" (p. 152), in which cars bring people together. Though he would not have intended it to be such, this is a delightfully heretical attitude in light of the popular tendency to vilify automobile culture in America. Following these ten essays are six more under the section heading of "Commentaries and Future Directions." The authors of the essays in this latter section get to pick and choose their targets from the first ten; some, including David Lowenthai,Jay Appleton, and Robert B. Rile> stay fairly broad in their critique and essentially locus on future directions; others, including Wilbur Zelinsky, Dell Upton, and Richard Walker, take issue with particular authors and their viewpoints. Walker’s essay is an especially provocative and trenchant piece of critical analysis, concluding with a devilishly pithy diatribe against postmodernist "posturing" and "false dualisms" (pp. 172173). On the one hand, this editorial technique is enlivening and entertaining, offering as it does counterpoint, analysis of previous arguments, and the occasional witty riposte. On the other hand, the format’s shortcomings are immediately apparent: who gets the last word (and why)? The commentary format begins discussion, and the reader can’t help but want more. Furthermore, why are some of the first ten authors virtually ignored while others enjoy considerable dissection at the hands of the commentators? All these questions have more to do with structure or style than with substance; this is a very substantial collection, containing a great deal of thoughtful and important writing from a truly diverse set of authors. For best effect, this reviewer advises reading the collection in its entirety, for the sake of discovering the sometimes furtive connections between the individual "Landscape Studies" and the commentaries applicable to them. Understanding Ordinary Landscapes is essential reading and no doubt will, like Meinig’s aforementioned book, Michael Conzen’s The Making of the American Landscape (1990), and the several volumes of Jackson’s essays, become a long-term invaluable resource for students of the American cultural landscape. Michael Martin is Assistant ProJ~ssot of Landscape Architecture at Iowa State University in Ames.