SUPERIOR: PORTRAIT OF A LIVING LAKE.

Photographs by Charles Steinhacker '59; text compiled by Arno Karlen;foreword by Senator Caylord Nelson.New York: Harper & Row, 1970. 118 pp.$25.00.

Charles Steinhacker is Artist in Residence at Wesleyan University, a title most aptly bestowed upon this noted photographer, for his work provides unassailable evidence that man and camera together can create art of a high order. Earlier books for the Sierra Club, portfolios of our national parks and of natural treasures in this country and Canada, and his work for National Geographic and other magazines have established Steinhacker as one of America's finest nature photographers; and now Superior, a large and handsome book, will add greatly to that reputation.

Simply as a pictorial and narrative delineation of the largest and wildest of the Great Lakes — and as a beautifully printed book — Superior is magnificently successful. Seventy photographs in full color, sweeping across two 10 x 14 pages in some cases, are accompanied by a running text compiled by Arno Karlen from the journals, diaries, and other writings of travelers to the Lake Superior region, from the French voyageurs and missionaries of the mid-1600's to the famous naturalists John Bigsby and Louis Agassiz 200 years later. Pictures and text could hardly be better combined.

But the purpose, at least the higher purpose, of Superior is not to be a beautiful and readable book. It seeks to serve the cause of conservation, underscored in the sub-title "portrait of a living lake" and in the foreword by Senator Nelson. Unlike Erie, virtually dead, Michigan and Ontario, on their way to the same heartbreaking condition, and Huron, endangered only slightly less, Superior is the last of the Great Lakes retaining a large measure of its purity and natural beauty. A giant in size, fed by 200 rivers, it boasts a 2500-mile coastline of forests, rocky precipices, dunes, and beaches; deep and wild, it rampages like the ocean in severe storms. It is one of America's priceless natural wonders. But put no hindrance in the way of despoiling man, and he will doom this living giant to the fate of its four companion lakes.

What will be lost is captured in the sensitive, stunning photographs by Charles Steinhacker. And viewing such beauty, both wild and gentle, the reader must wonder: how can man, whatever his material needs, begin to think of destroying all this? If art can serve the cause of sanity and conservation, Superior certainly will. We should all be grateful to those who labored to bring this volume into being.