Beyond Geography; The Western Spirit Against the Wilderness

New York, N.Y.: The Viking Press, 1980. Presumed First Edition, First printing. Hardcover. Very good/Good. xviii, 329, [3] pages. Occasional footnotes. Small chips to dust jacket edges. Includes Extracts, Preface, and Acknowledgments. Part One covers Loomings; Part Two covers Rites of Passage; Part Three covers Haunts. Also contains Notes on Sources, and an Index. Frederick W. Turner (sometimes Frederick Turner), born in Chicago in 1937,[1] is an American writer of history, including an acclaimed biography of the naturalist John Muir, and historical novels. He has published a revised and annotated edition of Geronimo's 1906 autobiography. Turner received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1976 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1981. Beyond Geography is a brilliant reconstruction of the "spiritual history" that led up to the European domination and decimation of aboriginal cultures--native American tribes, Caribbean tribes, the Mayans--as rich in mythic life as the Western culture was barren. Author Frederick Turner contends that it was the progressive decay of Christianity from a living mythology into a historically oriented state religion that created a spiritual vacuum in the West, resulting in a terrific restlessness and energy that eventually manifested itself in explorations, conquest, and conversion. This book works on several levels--as historical narrative, as a psychological interpretation, and as a spiritual odyssey. It has those full dimensions that only great writers produce. Derived from a Kirkus review: A promising history of the European devastation of the New World--a lively reworking of material. Turner's premise is that the assault on the human and natural environment of the Americas led by Columbus, Cortes, Buffalo Bill, et al. was symptomatic of a diseased spiritual condition. Ever since biblical days Western man's alienation from nature had been growing progressively deeper, and by the time the great voyages of discovery began Christianity's mythical reserves were largely exhausted, and so the invaders, for all their titanic entrepreneurial energies, were moral zombies: dead to the beauty around them, desperately driven to fill up their own emptiness with the wealth of the Indies. Turner makes sense, but he oversimplifies. He tries to blame Christianity for all our ecological woes. Granting a certain insensitivity to nature and fear of wilderness in Judeo-Christian thought, what about the destructive effects of nationalism, imperialism, capitalism ? If everything he says is true, what can white Americans now do? Nevertheless it is a provocative work.