The Sword of the Republic: The United...

The Sword of the Republic: The United States Army on the Frontier, 1783-1846, Francis Paul Prucha (University of Nebraska: $12.95); Wells, Fargo Detective: A Biography of James B. Hume, Richard Dillon (University of Nevada: $8.95). However vast and faction-filled the American West may have been in the 19th Century, it was not, these authors demonstrate, wild. Taming the Great Frontier were agents of empire--U.S. Army soldiers in Francis Paul Prucha’s lucid and comprehensive study, a bank detective in Richard Dillon’s fast-paced, entertaining narrative. They are celebrated as heroes in these two books--the soldiers for standing up to the British, the Spanish and the Indians, the detective for introducing the science of criminology, and all for providing an alternative to dusty street shoot-outs in which a vagabond militia would dispense “justice” from the barrel of a gun. In their only significant blind spot, the authors become so taken with this promise of a more orderly era that they downplay the libertarian spirit that prevailed at the time, prompting many Americans to crusade against the grand plans of Establishment lawmakers and law enforcers. After the Revolution, if not today, liberty meant ensuring freedom for Americans as well as for members of other national and cultural groups. But the land claims of Indians, Spanish and British soon made this idealism impractical, and George Washington swayed Congress to establish a military force “to awe the Indians . . . and guard us at least from surprises.” The force was tiny--only 684 men--but effective in fending off opponents in Appalachia and the Midwest.

In contrast, Wells, Fargo, the nation’s leading express service in the 19th Century, had to defend a terrain far more rugged, Western and expansive, and so, not surprisingly, it was less successful in meeting the challenge to its power. James Hume became the bank’s star detective through his systematic, if not Holmesian, investigative technique. Hume, however, was better known for his character than for his criminology skills--he became the outlaws’ favorite adversary, often joking that nowhere was his personal standing higher than among residents of San Quentin and Folsom prisons--and so Dillon’s book appropriately emphasizes drama over detail. Also prominent in these pages is the elusive outlaw Black Bart, who robbed 28 stagecoaches with an unloaded rifle, socialized regularly with police detectives and wrote poetry, which, he told one reporter, was his real crime: “Let come what will, I’ll try it on,” he wrote to his pursuers, “My condition can’t be worse / And if there’s money in that box / ‘Tis money in my purse.”

Tumult, Botho Strauss; translated by Michael Hulse (Carcanet: $7.50). This dark novel opens as Bekker returns to the “Institute for News and Information” in defeat: “His shoulders just sag. He is an old man.” Bekker had come to the institute in his youth with “an abundance of fruitful ideas.” He left when the institute’s definition of information turned Orwellian. German playwright Botho Strauss uses Bekker’s failure to maintain independence of mind and heart to bring home his view that even adventurous spirits can no longer trust their passion: “Desire, which was never naked, which always pursued many ends in many veils but aimed to rip these veils to shreds and play a hermetic game, has bit by bit stripped itself of vice and sin, of love and domestic convenience.”

But while Bekker is initially interesting as a determined, Brechtian character, his shoulders slump with the weight of Strauss’ symbolism. Traveling through New York City, Bekker becomes paralyzed with post-Holocaust German guilt; haunted by his heritage, he launches into an argument with a man at a bar, all the time afraid that the “mere undertone of German in everything I uttered would suddenly transport him into a rage.” Yet, while this novel is too grim to be emotionally gratifying, it remains intellectually rewarding as a study of how even the more strong-willed among us can “regain their poise and breath only when they are allowed to plunge into the bracing ether of some ego-hero.”

The Long Approach, Maxine Kumin (Penguin: $7.95). Maxine Kumin writes about people with religious commitment and unwavering faith. Since she has neither, the depth of understanding in these poems is impressive. It should not be surprising, however, for Kumin looks at motivations rather than actions, and so she’s able to empathize with devotion in any form, from the rabbis who burned in the Crusades “pious past the humming extremes of pain” to “Muslim kamikazes”: They too “die cherishing the fond / certitude of a better life beyond.” Kumin may question the benevolence of God (“Who polished, then blighted the apple?”), but she doesn’t dispute our faith, for it imparts meaning to a harsh, random natural order, and she can offer no alternative form of shelter, writing not from a higher spiritual plane but from “a narrow plank given to splinters.”

Kumin tries to show the importance of faith by illustrating the grimness of the alternative; she writes of lambs looking at humans in wonderment and asking, “What are fingers, what’s in a hand?” shortly before they are slaughtered, and then takes another point of view, describing a child listening to the lambs’ songs, learning their “lonely language” while waiting for and idolizing his grandfather: “This is it, this nonappearance. / This is how gods are made.” This is an uneven collection, though, and as with her allusion to the sacrificial lamb, the imagery can be hackneyed; “Video Cuisine,” for instance, juxtaposes a Julia Child cooking show with scenes from an African famine.

NOTEWORTHY: Caught, Jane Schwartz (Ballantine: $3.50). Set in Brooklyn in the 1950s, this well-received first novel depicts the exhilaration, disappointment and worldly awakening of a young girl and a man who join as friends in the rooftop sport of pigeon flying. Darlinghissima: Letters to a Friend, Janet Flanner, edited by Natalia Danesi Murray (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: $10.95). Janet Flanner’s letters to the New Yorker from Paris reflected on European cultural, social and political life; here, the scope is more intimate, forming a portrait of Flanner and her friend, Natalia Murray. Telling the Truth About Jerusalem, Ann Oakley (Blackwell: $9.95). The English feminist writer offers poems on the ideals of women and the realities of domesticity, and essays on motherhood, health care, medicine and the social sciences. Brothers, Chayym Zeldis (Shapolsky Publishing: 56 East 11th St.: $8.95). An old-fashioned novel about the conflict between good and the force for betrayal--the Judas: Born in Bethlehem, parted in infancy, the two brothers do not encounter each other until later in life when one has amassed great power and the other has gone half-mad.