"REGENERATIVE POWER OF DEATH"

James Vance Marshall, Walkabout, with an Introduction by Lee Siegel (New York: New York Review Books, 1959, 2012) (from the backcover: "On the surface Walkabout is an adventure story, but darker themes lie beneath. Peter's innocent friendship with the boy met in the desert throws into relief Mary's half-adult anxieties, and the book as a whole raises questions about what is lost--and may be saved--when different worlds meet. And in reading Marshall's extraordinary evocations of the beautiful yet forbidding landscape of the Australian desert, perhaps the most striking presence of all in this small, perfect book, we realize that this tale--a deep yet disturbing story in the spirit of Adalbert Stifter's Rock Crystal and Richard Hughes's A High Wind in Jamaica--is also a reckoning with the mysteriously regenerative powers of death.").