Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 36 (2010) 224e242238

Charles S. Aiken, William Faulkner and the Southern Landscape: AGeography of Faulkner's Mississippi. Athens, University of GeorgiaPress, 2009, xiii þ 283 pages, US$34.95 hardcover.

I have never been much of a reader of Faulkner. I just alwaysfound his sentences far too long. However, I hold great respectfor the man and for his work. Having grown up in the South, Ihave a deep appreciation for Faulkner's perspective on thecomplex society and landscapes that he saw around him. Asa geographer who lives in Mississippi, I find Charles Aiken's newbook a great study in culturalehistorical geography and a mostinteresting look at the life and work of Faulkner by a culturalgeographer who was born in the heart of Faulkner country innorth Mississippi.

How the landscapes, places, and people in Faulkner's fictioncompare with the real landscapes, places, and people that sur-rounded the writer in north Mississippi is the subject of Aiken'sbook. Aiken, whose productive career has spanned four decadesexamining the cultural andhistorical geographyof the South, is fromandhas generations of family roots inHarmontown,Mississippi, justa fewmiles fromOxford, hometown ofWilliam Faulkner. Oxford, inLafayette County, MS is home of the University of Mississippi (Ole'Miss) and generally also thought to be the inspiration for fictionalJefferson, MS and Yoknapatawpa County, the setting for so much ofFaulkner's fiction. By examining Faulkner's stories e his characters,places, societies, and landscapes e within a context of the physicaland culturalehistorical geography of the real places that seem tohave inspired most of his work, Aiken offers valuable insights intothe intersection of art and life in the South.

As Faulkner's stories begin with European encroachment intoNative American lands of north Mississippi and reach through tothe end of the New South era (he died in 1962), Aiken's cultur-alehistorical geography generally proceeds chronologically acrossthe same time period, examining Faulkner's work historically, withchapters on the ‘Old South’, the ‘Civil War’, the ‘New South’, and‘Toward the Modern South’, concluding with a look at ‘Faulkner'sGeographic Legacy’.

Following an introduction, a chapter explains how specificallyFaulkner used local geography for inspiration (‘Geographical Factinto Fiction’). In the remaining ten chapters, Aiken provides anexcellent culturalehistorical geography of the South in which heexplains the significance of numerous fictional places and peoplein Faulkner's work by comparing them to their actual counter-parts and illustrating what Faulkner probably meant with them.Addressing the detailed geography and cultural history ofFaulkner's world, he explains, for example, how the geographicaldistribution of soil types helps explain the geographical distri-bution of social and cultural groups e and how this wassomething Faulkner understood well and used in his work. Aikenuses his expertise of the region and specific places in it to showthe many complex ways that Faulkner used and was inspired bythe local geography in the development of his fictional places ashe told and retold the complexities of the non-fictional world thatsurrounded him.

Aiken offers a thorough comparison of the landscapes, histories,people, and places of Oxford, MS and Lafayette County withFaulkner's famous Jefferson, MS and Yoknapatawpha County. Byproviding a thorough culturalehistorical geography for context,Aiken is able to show specifically how, and oftenwhy, Faulkner usedlocal geography, culture, and historical lore as inspiration for hiswork. He even reaches back to explain how Faulkner's historicalfictionwas related to not only the actual local geography but also tothe ways that local peoples told and retold their own history,following David Lowenthal's Possessed by the Past: the HeritageCrusade and the Spoils of History (Free Press, 1996). This thorough

contextualization of Faulkner's work within both time and placeprovides an enlightening perspective on the content and scope ofwhat his body of work represents.

Faulkner's stories and fictional places are seen by some as storiesand places that represent the South in general; for them,Yoknapatawpha is the entirety of the South, so to speak. As Aikenclearly explains, Faulkner's stories were inspired by and aboutspecific places and people and larger cultural and social patterns.The conclusion that Faulkner made no attempts to conceal theidentity of the places and people he wrote about also underscoresthe point that Faulkner was specifically writing about just thoseactual places and people. Good art inspires broader lessons, just assome of the cultural and social patterns in Faulkner's world werepatterns characteristic throughout the region.

Occasionally while reading this book, I foundmyself confused asto whether the text described real people and places in historicalMississippi or Faulkner's characters and places. One of the greatestdrawbacks to the book, from my perspective, is inherent in itsnature, as a comparative study inevitably shifts attention back andforth. Readers who are less familiar with the work of Faulkner willlikely suffer most from this distraction. The depth and detail ofAiken's comparisons may also contribute to this but not so that itdetracts from the volume.

Overall, William Faulkner and the Southern Landscape does twothings well. It is simultaneously an excellent culturalehistoricalgeography of Mississippi and the South and perhaps the mostgrounded literary analysis of the work of Faulkner yet published.Aiken clearly shows that a better understanding and interpretationof art and literature can come from a familiarity with the culture,history, and geography that inspired them. Aiken's background andthorough understanding of the region, evidenced in his otherscholarship, notably The Cotton Plantation South Since the Civil War(Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), provides this. The mostintriguing aspect of Aiken's book for me is simply how much Ilearned about Faulkner, about the physical and culturalehistoricalgeography of north Mississippi, the role of the real world ininspiring arts, and the role of arts in inspiring perspective on thereal world.

William Faulkner and the Southern Landscape will be of interestto a broad variety of readers, from the cultural geographer to theFaulkner scholar to the general interest reader. It will make anexcellent course companion for a variety of courses and disciplinesand a gift for people who enjoy good books. I recommend it highly.

J.O. Joby BassThe University of Southern Mississippi, USA

doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2010.02.016

Louise Nelson Dyble, Paying the Toll: Local Power, Regional Politics,and the Golden Gate Bridge. Philadelphia, University of PennsylvaniaPress, 2009, vi þ 294 pages, $39.95 hardcover.

San Francisco's Golden Gate is a natural feature that has beenrevered as a two-way door enabling penetration of the farWest andexpansion of American imperial ambition in the Pacific, as GrayBrechin related in Imperial San Francisco (University of CaliforniaPress, 1999). Yet in terms of aesthetics, for centuries the mile-widepassage did not live up to its historical significance. When viewedfrom the Pacific Ocean it was a mundane, scrubby, fog-shrouded setof headlands, an ordinary landscape characteristic of NorthernCalifornia e nothing special. When the Golden Gate Bridge wasconstructed in 1937, the magnificence of the surroundings

Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 36 (2010) 224e242 239

was venerated andmadewhole, and a trulymonumental landscapewas produced. Such is the boosterish narrative of the Golden GateBridge, one of the signature edifices of modernity whose silhouetteis adored worldwide.

In Paying the Toll: Local Power, Regional Politics, and the GoldenGate Bridge, urban historian Louis Nelson Dyble lays bare thepolitics, scandal, corruption, and arrogance that mask what shecalls the bridge's ‘mythic proportions’ and ‘heroic beauty’. Dyble'swork is not a deconstruction of the bridge itself, but rather anintriguing exposé of the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway, andTransportation District (‘District’ henceforth) e a special agencywith significant autonomy, independence, decision-makingpower, and a lack of outside accountability. The district effec-tively controls transportation access from San Francisco to MarinCounty, the North Bay suburbs, and all of the Northern CaliforniaCoast. Dyble describes how the District had bearing on thehistorical geography and spatial evolution of the Bay Area,particularly in broader debates about regional planning and railtransit in the latter twentieth century.

Foremost in her exposé is a narrative of how the District wasan institutional barrier to the creation of comprehensive regionalplanning in the Bay Area. During the boom which followed theSecond World War ‘business-oriented progressives’ led by thelikes of Kaiser and Bechtel sought to depoliticize planning bycreating a far-reaching transportation authority directed bya board of private citizens and on which no local elected officialswould serve. It would be staffed by professional engineers andplanners and led by an independent director. Like the Districtwhose power it sought to usurp, the Golden Gate Authority wouldbe financially independent by controlling all regional bridge tolls,and have little outside accountability. The proposed organizationwould coordinate dozens of fragmented local jurisdictions, andaccommodate new growth in the Bay Area. Officials of the Districthad a pivotal role in blocking this powerful regional governmentand Dyble provides a solid political synopsis showing how. Theresult: today the Bay Area is left with an impotent set of advisorycouncils and a concoction of single-purpose special districts thatmake addressing regional problems in the Bay Area nearlyimpossible.

Dyble also elucidates how the District was instrumental indefeating the extension of Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) to MarinCounty. Contrary to popular misconceptions in Bay Areatransportation lore, it was not racism, nor not-in-my-backyardsentiments that blocked BART's northward expansion, but the factthat BART threatened the autonomy of the bridge district and,specifically, that toll revenue collected by the district would beshared with BART. Moreover, the bridge's engineering staff wasprofoundly anti-rail transit and pro-automobile, and this stifled allattempts to construct rail on the bridge, despite the bridge's havingbeen originally constructed to support rail. Shamefully, the samebridgeofficials that argued that thebridge couldnot support rail alsopromoted constructing a second-level on the bridgee formore cars.

The crux of Dyble's study is that special districts tend to ‘runamok,’ as she describes in the title of the introduction, and arecharacterized by intransigent bureaucratic inertia, territoriality,and fragmentation that aggravate the suburb-versus-city conun-drum and regional environmental problems. This work is anexcellent study making that case, and would be an invaluableaddition to any upper-level urban history course or graduateseminar that focuses on postwar public policy, transportation, orland use. It is a must read for any student of the Bay Area, but thebook has relevance beyond the Bay Area in that it is not so mucha local transportation history, but sheds light on the nature andproblems with special districts and how they affect the trajectory ofurbanization.

For example, while the District defeated regional planning andrapid transit, it also choked off some of the growth it was meant tospur. The parochial politics of the District meant new bridges andrail were not built northward, the bridge became saturated withtraffic, very expensive to operate, and a substantial bottleneck tonorthward growth-shunting sprawl further afield rather thanenabling development in a denser, transit-oriented developmentpattern. Today supposedly ‘green’ Marin County has an averagevehicle miles travelled of 24 miles per day, well above the Bay Areaaverage of 18miles per day, and far above the 9.5miles travelled perday by drivers in the city of San Francisco.

Dyble's narrative of the bridge district's history is colourful andintriguing and includes biographies of corrupt, bungling, andincompetent figures (in one instance a bridge director purchaseda fleet of Cadillacs). But it is sometimes a bit overly detailed anduseful only to a hardcore Bay Area scholar. Dyble also offers nosuggestions of how to overcome political fragmentation,and perhaps that is not the task of the work, but implied in herargument is that special districts should be folded into a morecoordinated regional entity with teeth.

An interesting aside to the book is Dyble's personal account ofstonewalling by district officials. When she first approached thedistrict to access archives, she was told a history of the bridge wasalreadywritten and available in the gift shop. It took a year finally toget access to the district'sfiles andwhen she assembled thematerialfor the book she came out with a significant work that challengesthe lack of transparency that characterizes many bureaucracies. Hertelling of this experience is useful for any emerging scholar seekingto unravel the intricacy of public policy debates. It can be anuncomfortable, awkward, suspect, and thankless task, but Dyble'sbook shows the benefits when one prevails.

Jason HendersonSan Francisco State University, USA

doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2010.02.017

Bernard Finn and Daqing Yang (Eds), Communications Under theSeas: The Evolving Cable Network and its Implications. Cambridge,MA, MIT Press, 2009, x þ 303 pages, US$40 hardcover.

From its title alone, one imagines that this book is aboutcontemporary telecommunications, facilitated by the web ofundersea fibre-optic cables that permit e-mail, Web sites, photos,video clips, and other internet communications to be truly globalphenomena. Instead, the book is historical, arising from a 2002symposium at MIT. The volume joins a dozen others in the DibnerInstitute Studies in the History of Science and Technology.

The volume's twelve chapters are organized into four sections.The first section, ‘The Technological Challenge,’ begins with a brief,six-page introduction by Finn and Yang, who highlight the historicalfocus of the volume. Their brief chapter is one of only two to containmapse in this case telegraph cables in 1875 and telephone cables in1975. Finn then documents the ‘technical stagnation’ of submarinetelegraphy for the entire century from 1845 to 1950. Little, if any,research and development took place, being hindered by manyfactors, including entrepreneurial exuberance, monopoly andcorporate ineptness. It was not until the 1950s that any technolo-gical progress began, and we enjoy the benefits of that flood ofinnovation today. Winkler's chapter, which covers challengers tocables from 1918 to 1988, comes closest to the contemporaryperiod. The telegraph evolved into the telephone, where wirelesstechnologies were most useful. Military and governmental secrecy,