Savage Pilgrims: On the Road to Santa Fe - Hardcover

Shukman tells us what he did on his summer vacation in the wilds of New Mexico. Shukman (Travels with My Trombone, 1993, etc.) closes his loosely connected trilogy of books on travels in Latin America with this report of a sojourn in Spain's northernmost outpost in the New World. The writing is competent, but the adventures Shukman reports are a bit humdrum, and playing the daffy foreign tourist in cowboy bars and having dreams of being given secret names by mysterious Indians are clich‚s of the southwestern travel genre. As he wanders by bus from Alamogordo to Taos, from Socorro to Las Vegas, he nurses memories of lost love, engages in a tryst with an Italian tourist, goes trout fishing with a well-connected movie producer, and visits with the Buddhist sage and writer Natalie Goldberg--episodes that are all meaningful to the author, of course, but that are not rendered with enough force or novelty to make the narrative especially meaningful to others. Many Southwesterners will feel, too, that Shukman hasn't quite got the details right (New Mexicans don't say ``youse'' for the second person, to note one small example). As befits a British traveler in the region, Shukman often invokes the spirit of D.H. Lawrence, whom he pegs as ``an uneasy sick man with an eye to his public image.'' Shukman writes well and easily about his life on familiar ground--his memories of the hippie ethos of early 1970s England are a hoot--and as the book progresses he clearly becomes more assured about his observations and has more interesting things to say about being ``on the road in America.'' Ultimately, he emerges as a sympathetic and likable character. Still, readers familiar with New Mexico won't learn anything new here, and those who are unfamiliar with the area won't likely follow Shukman's idiosyncratic route across the Land of Enchantment. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Shukman (Travels with My Trombone, LJ 4/15/93) embodies a combination of talents often considered unique to the English: he is an intrepid traveler, astute observer, and literate writer. Ever ready for the chance encounter, Shukman has his share of them in New Mexico, where he wanders?sometimes in search of self, other times in search of something simpler. He encounters an Indian shaman, traveling salesmen, and his share of peculiar people as he explores Taos, Santa Fe, and the back country. He has taken his title from D.H. Lawrence's "Savage Pilgrimage," which ended in New Mexico in 1922, when Lawrence concluded his search for a "powerful, pre-civilized culture." Near the end, Shukman muses, "It hadn't occurred to me before, but now I saw a simple design behind the traveling I had done over the years...unwittingly, I had been making a journey right across the Latin world." Traveling with Shukman is as mind-expanding as a moon walk. His is a seamless journey of gentle discoveries. Recommended for public libraries.?Janet N. Ross, Sparks Branch Lib., Nev.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.