cover image Mount Rushmore: An Icon Reconsidered

Mount Rushmore: An Icon Reconsidered

Jesse Larner. Thunder's Mouth Press, $24.95 (390pp) ISBN 978-1-56025-346-4

A graduate of the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, Jesse Larner is a translator in Manhattan. In Mount Rushmore: An Icon Reconsidered, he leaps into a full-frontal assault on the four-headed monument, calling it ""a work of deliberately racist iconography, designed and engineered by a member of the Ku Klux Klan,"" perched on land appropriated from Native Americans. The 1920s tourist attraction sent Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint sprawling all over the presidents in the tongue-in-cheek thriller North by Northwest, but none of this wit or enjoyment is for Larner, who alternates between serious-minded first-person travel narrative and livid political invective. (Apr.)