Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West.

• Author: Middlewood, Erin
• Position: Review

Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West by Timothy Egan Alfred A. Knopf. 266 pages. $25.00.

Timothy Egan, Pacific Northwest correspondent for The New York Times, knows he's taken on a tough topic in his third book.

"It may be easier to lasso the wind than find a sustaining story for the American West," he writes in the introduction.

Thank goodness Egan doesn't try. Instead, he shows why making sense of the West is so difficult.

There's something about the way writers portray the region that doesn't quite ring true. Maybe it's because the West is just so damn big. My home is western Washington state, where rain, mountain vistas, and evergreens are defining features. These are the things I think of when I picture my West. But all I have to do is cross the Cascade Mountains into the eastern part of the state, and the climate and topography are completely different.

Like me, Egan is a Westerner. His vision of the West is fascinating because he doesn't try to smooth the rough terrain. Instead, he explores the contours and contradictions of the eleven contiguous states on the sunset end of Texas and the Great Plains.

The publisher seems to think the book should be a travelogue, given the subtitle "Away to the New West." The book has that feel in parts, but more importantly, it unmasks the phony mythology of the West, which settles around the idea that cattle and cowboys are somehow indigenous species.

"I had been around too many county commissioners on rental horses, the culde-sac cowboys mending fences for the cameras with their soft hands," Egan writes. "I had seen enough Senators wearing creased jeans, and ministers blessing snow-making machines. I had heard too many lies about the `Real West,' flimflam and fraud retold as gilded narrative by people whose grandparents took the land by force and have been draining the public trough ever since to keep it locked in a peculiar time warp of history."

Chapters take on copper mining, the cattle industry, and federal management of public lands. Egan uses an account of a fly-fishing trip to Idaho with his brothers to write about dwindling wilderness. A story about a Virgin Mary sighting in Sunnyside, Washington, gives way to a history of Latinos' role in building the West.

Some of the most delightful chapters are about schemes to make the West something it's not. Egan takes us to Lake Havasu City, Arizona, home to London Bridge. "Not a faux, Vegas-style re-creation.... But a 700-foot span of granite that...