WOLVERINE CREATES THE WORLD: Labrador Indian Tales...

WOLVERINE CREATES THE WORLD: Labrador Indian Tales gathered and retold by Lawrence Millman (Capra Press: $12.95; 152 pp.; illustrated, paperback original). Millman complains that Amerindian lore has been sanitized by and for “puritans of all shapes and denominations;” his versions of these tales from the Northeastern forests are often surprisingly ribald. (Wolverine creates the world in a highly unconventional manner.) The unfamiliar but entertaining tales use animal characters--bears, muskrats, caribou, lemmings and, in one instance, a mammoth--to explain how the world came to be as it is.