Men Down West

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Lincoln's beautifully written, intensely personal narrative is an autobiographical memoir, a probing meditation on masculinity and a cultural analysis of the myths of the American West. Born on the Texas prairie in 1941, he grew up in Alliance, Neb., a windswept flatlands town racially polarized between white pioneers' descendants and Sioux Indians. His father, Eldon, a stubborn, terribly shy alcoholic who worked his whole life sacking beans in an elevator, died in 1992, divorced and bitter. His death caused the author, himself divorced, to draw closer to his two brothers while forging his own definition of fatherhood. Lincoln's wife had run away seven years into their marriage, leaving him, at age 30, to raise their infant daughter, Rachel, by himself. He learned to grow from loss, to express tenderness; in this poignant odyssey, he rejects the frontier ethos of rugged individualism and macho loner heroism, which, writ large in American culture, leads to what he considers as endemic male abuses: arrogance, violence, self-pity, rootlessness. Raised on redneck prejudice against Indians handed down by his Scotch-English-German forbears, Lincoln, who teaches contemporary English and Native American literatures at UCLA, befriended a Sioux, his "adopted brother," while growing up. He forcefully gauges the devastating impact of racism, alcoholism, malnutrition and unemployment on Native Americans. (Feb.)