Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Butler, Robert Olen - Cynthia McCown (review date 11 December 1993)

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Cynthia McCown (review date 11 December 1993)

SOURCE: McCown, Cynthia. Review of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, by Robert Olen Butler. America 169, no. 19 (11 December 1993): 18-19.

[In the following review, McCown notes the whimsical and romantic nature of the stories in A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain and asserts that the collection “celebrates courage and dignity.”]

Olen Butler's Pulitzer Prize-winning short-story saga of the American Vietnam experience is not set in Vietnam nor is it about war. Instead, this sometimes whimsical, often moving collection presents the first-person narratives of those who came away—Vietnamese from North and South now living in the United States—and offers tales of heroism not in corporeal battle but in the spiritual struggle for faith and hope in the face of betrayal and impossibility.

A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain is Butler's seventh work of fiction...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Madison Smartt Bell (review date 23 February 1992)
   2. Richard Eder (review date 29 March 1992)
   3. Kathleen Gilgore (review date 4 September 1992)
   4. Cynthia McCown (review date 11 December 1993)
   5. Josephine Hart (review date 16 January 1994)
   6. Robert Olen Butler and Missouri Review (interview date February 1994)
   7. Julia Glass (review date 6 February 1994)
   8. Robert Olen Butler and Michael Sartisky (interview date spring 1994)
   9. Mark Ford (review date 12 May 1994)
   10. Helen Heritage August (review date August 1994)
   11. Lorrie Smith (essay date spring 1995)
   12. Jonathan Penner (review date 10 November 1996)
   13. Barbara C. Ewell (review date 17 May 1997)
   14. Susan Balée (review date summer 1997)
   15. Peter Stanford (review date 17 August 1997)
   16. Susie Linfield (review date 25 January 1998)
   17. Thomas Bonner (review date 20 June 1998)
   18. Ron Charles (review date 6 January 2000)
   19. Kit Reed (review date 16 January 2000)
   20. Jonathan Levi (review date 23 January 2000)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright

1. Moliere