NONFICTION - July 21, 1991

DUSK ON THE CAMPO: A Journey in Patagonia by Sara Mansfield Taber (Henry Holt: $19.95; 258 pp.). Most people, it’s safe to say, never had heard of Patagonia until Paul Theroux and Bruce Chatwin wrote about it. Sara Mansfield Taber doesn’t mention their volumes in her own book on the barren sheep-ranching land of southern Argentina . . . and it’s just as well, for “Dusk on the Campo” is neither as involving nor as amusing as the earlier works. Taber lived in Patagonia for a number of years, first to study whales and then to study its people, and those facts intimate the book’s major weaknesses: As a two-time resident, Taber’s prose can be sentimental, and as a sometime scholar, it can be stiff. (Occasionally it’s both, as in “butchery that is swift and artful is a coin in the armoire of a campo man’s self-respect.”) But the book does have its strengths--the sections in which the Patagonians themselves talk about their lives.