Review of Mavericks on the Border: The Early Southwest in Historical Fiction and Film (Hardcover)

Wish I'd reviewed this one right after I read it, shortly after I bought the book from Amazon last year.

The author passed away on July 3rd, 2003, just a few days ago.

I enjoyed the book, written by a civilized man with a great insights into American literature, popular culture, and the human condition historically and at large.

Some chapters of the above book, such as the ones on THE WILD BUNCH and GERONIMO, are exclusively on movies. The chapters on books include:

William Faulkner's Ike McCaslin in GO DOWN, MOSES.

L. D. Clark's A BRIGHT TRAGIC THING: A TALE OF CIVIL WAR IN TEXAS, about the Great Hanging in Gainesville, Texas in 1862.

Gore Vidal's BILLY THE KID.

Jan Candia Coleman's I, PEARL HART, based upon a true story and perhaps the most interesting essay here. "About female self-assertion in a cruel, male dominated world."

Montserrat Fontes's DREAMS OF THE CENTAUR.

David Morrell's LAST REVEILLE, another fine essay that made me think I might want to read the book after all.

Mariana Azuela's LOS DE ABADJO, "a classic about the Mexican Revolution which features a band of mavericks who drift into and along with the Revolution without any clear sense of purpose."

Other essays are entitled: "The Feminizing of Freedom and Fulfillment: Como Agua Para Chocolate," "Mirrors, Dreams, and Memory: Gringo Viejo," and "Crossing Into Fascism in Bisbee 17."

Doublas Canfield earned a bachelor's degree magna cum laude from the University of Notre Dame in 1963, master's degrees from Yale and the Johns Hopkins Universities in 1964 and 1966, respectively, and a Ph.D. from the University of Florida in 1969, where he was a United States Steel Foundation Fellow and where he earned election to Phi Beta Kappa. He taught at UCLA before coming to the University of Arizona in 1974, where he became Regents Professor in 1994.

Besides the book above, Canfield was the author of several scholarly books and articles in the two fields of Restoration and early eighteenth-century British literature (particularly the drama) and comparative literature and culture of the Southwest borderlands. In the spring of 2001, he was invited to Italy, to the University of Florence to lecture in this latter field and to the University of Tuscia to lecture in the former, where a series of translations of Restoration comedies into Italian has begun in his honor.

An expert on the Restoration, he was a Renaissance Man in every sense of the word.He won several fellowships for his scholarship, the most recent from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2000-2001. He was also the winner of several teaching awards, including 1993 Arizona Professor of the Year. He was especially proud of his service to the University of Arizona as chairman of President Manuel Pacheco's Task Force on Undergraduate Education in 1991-1992.

According to Rick Wallach, president of the Cormac McCarthy Society, Canfield was also a third degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do and a national referee with AYSO. He coached his sons in several sports from the early 1970s until the mid-1990s, and co-coached and refereed a soccer team with his son Colin as recently as the fall 2002. His other hobbies were hunting and writing poetry, of which he has two books published. He has also authored a poetic drama on John Charles Fremont.

Rick Wallach, in a tribute to him at the McCarthy Society from which much of this review is garnered, said, "All of us who knew Doug were aware of his passionate commitment to social justice, and his favorite course to teach was "The Ideology of Human Rights," His last wish was for world peace with justice. . ."

"Doug's wonderful long essay on Cormac McCarthy's Suttree, which he read at the Society's annual conference in Tucson last year, will be published sometime in the (we hope) near future..."



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