Reviews

Envisioning a possible future (and attacking present folly), Le Guin reinvents a ``primitive'' past. The autobiography of a woman of the Kesh, living in the Napa Valley in a distant post-Industrial age, occupies 100 pages. The rest of the book (and a cassette) provide documentation of Kesh spiritual and material culture, from kinship and language to arts and philosophy. Dancing their oneness with nature, valuing cooperation over competition, the Kesh survive contact with the hieratic, war-making, death-dealing Condors, who are a lot like us. If it's hard to believe in a people who use computers and electricity but plow with oxen and see wealth as giving, that's part of the point. The narrative is interrupted by poems, tales, and ``data,'' which demand patient pondering--something Le Guin's many admirers are certain to provide. However, the considerable pleasures of this book are not the pleasures of the novel. Patrica Dooley, formerly with English Dept., Drexel Univ., Philadelphia