THE FIFTH HORSEMAN IS RIDING

Remember the Silent Majority? Listen to these grass-roots, down-home essays in praise of America, the Common Man, and the natural life. The author ""visited New York once and thought I was in a foreign country."" As far as he's concerned, ""Los Angeles, Florida, and New York seem to attract phonies; they collect them from other parts of the United States and mix them into a goulash of recycled personalities and distorted values."" No fool he, he's staying up there in northern Wisconsin with the trout, the muskellunge, the Canada goose. But when he analyzes the politics of cities, he often sounds like a hick and a damn fool: he hates ""lawyers"" and ""the system,"" yet suggests that the answer to urban sprawl (""ulcer gulch"") is a federal fiat to redistribute the populace over the heartland. Closer to home, when van Goetham fingers the U.S. Department of Agriculture's collusion with dairy agribusiness for pollution of his native Wisconsin's wildlife, he's a very shrewd man. (Pace, Walter Hickel.) This is a lovely pastoral portrait of Wisconsin, its lakes, rivers, forests, dairy farms and cornfields, villages, and small cities -- and a valuable self-portrait of the conscience of an ""Interior American.