Neumann, Mark. On the Rim: Looking for the Grand Canyon. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
Mark Neumann’s book is the result of ten years’ study of the Grand Canyon: ten years of camping trips, conversations with tourists, park officials and workers, and ten years of listening to and watching how a range of people make sense of the Grand Canyon. The author sets out to examine “the significance of the Grand Canyon as an American icon and its cultural and historical production” and “as contemporary cultural theater dramatizing collective and individual pursuits for the meaning of nature, family, self, and freedom” (10). Neumann thus argues for a reading of the Grand Canyon as a complex text of layered narratives and images, continually added to since the late nineteenth century by successive generations of scientists, government surveyors, artists, journalists, and tourists. — Blake, Angela. Review of On the Rim: Looking for the Grand Canyon, by Mark Neumann. H-Net Reviews, April 2000. http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=4001.