Instead of being the usual kind of jokesmith book or concatenation of tall tales, _Folk Laughter on the American Frontier_ by Mody C. Boatright (Macmillan, New York, 1949) goes into the human and social significances of humor. Of boastings, anecdotal exaggerations, hide-and-hair metaphors, stump and pulpit parables, tenderfoot baitings, and the like there is plenty, but thought plays upon them and arranges them into patterns of social history. Mary Austin (1868-1934) is an interpreter of nature, which for her includes naturally placed human beings as much as naturally placed antelopes and cacti. She wrote _The American Rhythm_ on the theory that authentic poetry expresses the rhythms of that patch of earth to which the poet is rooted. Rhythm is experience passed into the subconscious and is "distinct from our intellectual perception of it." Before they can make true poetry, English-speaking Americans will be in accord with "the run of wind in tall grass" as were the Pueblo Indians when Europeans discovered them. But Mary Austin's primary importance is not as a theorist. Her spiritual depth is greater than her intellectual. She is a translator of nature through concrete observations. She interprets through character sketches, folk tales, novels. "Anybody can write facts about a country," she said. She infuses fact with understanding and imagination. In _Lost Borders_, _The Land of Little Rain_, _The Land of Journey's Ending_, and _The Flock_ the land itself often seems to speak, but often she gets in its way. She sees "with an eye made quiet by the power of harmony." _Earth Horizons_, a stubborn book, is Mary Austin's inner autobiography. _The Beloved House_, by T. M. Pearce (Caxton, Caldwell, Idaho, 1940), is an understanding biography. Joseph Wood Krutch of Columbia University spent a year in Arizona, near Tucson. Instead of talking about his _The Desert Year_ (Sloane, New York, 1952), I quote a representative paragraph: In New England the struggle for existence is visibly the struggle of plant with plant, each battling his neighbor for sunlight and for the spot of ground which, so far as moisture and nourishment are concerned, would support them all. Here, the contest is not so much of plant against plant as of plant against inanimate nature. The limiting factor is not the neighbor but water; and I wonder if this is, perhaps, one of the things which makes this country seem to enjoy a kind of peace one does not find elsewhere. The struggle of living thing against living thing can be distressing in a way that a mere battle with the elements is not. If some great clump of cactus dies this summer it will be because the cactus has grown beyond the capacity of its roots to get water, not because one green fellow creature has bested it in some limb-to-limb struggle. In my more familiar East the crowding of the countryside seems almost to parallel the crowding of the cities. Out here there is, even in nature, no congestion.