Douglas Cazaux Sackman, Wild Men: Ishi and Kroeber in the Wilderness of Modern America (Book Review‪)‬

Douglas Cazaux Sackman, Wild Men: Ishi and Kroeber in the Wilderness of Modern America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, 365 pp. Alice Kehoe concludes a review of two books about Ishi with the words, "Ishi seems to have become a genre," and Orin Starn refers to it as "the new cult of Ishi" (Kehoe 2004, Starn 2004:61). Theodora Kroeber's 1961 book, Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian In North America (1961), introduced this American Indian man to the U.S. and the world's reading public. That work has sold about a million copies; it was excerpted in Reader's Digest, was followed by a version for school children, and inspired several films, both feature and documentary. Ishi became an icon in murals celebrating California diversity, as well as an emblem for radical Indians in the 1960s. But once it was realized, in 1998, that when Ishi died in 1915 his body had been autopsied and his brain removed and pickled in formaldehyde and sent--somewhere--the stakes grew higher and the writing more voluminous. Richard Burrill produced two new books "rediscovering" Ishi and two of Alfred Kroeber's sons, Karl and Clifton, put together an interestingly balanced collection of papers, Ishi in Three Centuries (2003).