Oregon Books

Mr. Jackson did excellent research for this book. I have numerous ancestors mentioned in the book and even had a picture of one that I had never seen before. Anyone interested in the history of the Western Mt, Idaho and Eastern WA area, will need to read this book. I hope that the Author publishes more material from his research.

From the book, I found out that the Metis of the Pacific Northwest formed many communities in that area. My great-grandparents were born in Walla Walla, WA. and we were told that they were French- Canadian and "Black Irish". I read that in Walla Walla, is where they founded communities and that they hid there ancestry and called themselves French-Canadian. So, on reading this, I found out that the missing part to my full heritage was actually a mixture of French and Native American Indian. I owe a great gratitude to Mr. Jackson. Thank-you!!! Sean

I purchased this book just after it went on sale and I can tell you that it is very informative and very well thought out. I do not live in Bend, but am planning on a visit there in the near future. After reading Mrs. McCage's book, I will not have to ask anyone where to find places to visit. It appears she is very knowledgeable in her research concerning the book and she also has an adorable son that accompanied her on this project. Thank you Amazon for supplying this material. Mr. David Trail, Lewisville, Tx

This is a book for people who are worried about traveling or settling in Bend, Oregon, with kids. Fear no more. McCage has collected information about enough child-friendly activities in Bend to keep any family happy. This handsome and appropriately priced small volume has advice on the outdoors, arts and education, entertainment, and annual events, as well as offering tips on kid-approved dining and snacking. It also features black and white photographs of the area as well as cute pictures of her young son Joseph enjoying ice cream and playing in the Sun Mountain Fun Center.

An excellent and must have reference book, clement greenberg's selection of artists are important to all of the kinds of art that came about in the 20th century

This is a very beautiful book, showing many wonderful works of art, but only a relatively small number of them have achieved the recognition they deserve. Greenberg was always controversial during his lifetime. He lived to see the widespread acceptance in the 1950s of his endorsements during the '40s of Pollock and the rest of abstract expressionism, but his admiration for the color-field painters of the '60s was always a minority taste, with many more artlovers during that period favoring pop art and its ramifications--op, kinetic art, minimal, etc. (I say this upon the basis of having covered the art scene for Time magazine in the '60s, having continued to write about art since, and having come to the conclusion since receiving my doctorate in art history that pop was essentially a reaction back against abstract expressionism, while color-field painting and the modernist abstraction which carries on its tradition in the present are the true continuance of the avant-garde.) Since the '60s, the greater popularity of the descendants of pop & its ramifications has made it increasingly difficult for the art that Greenberg admired to receive the recognition it deserves, especially the art made by the younger artists, but majority taste has been wrong many times in the past, and this is particularly true in the present, when critical judgments in general are so often considered less important than how well a work of art is doing in the marketplace. I like to think this situation will improve in the future, but in the meantime, the reader will be able to see in this book what really good & truly avant-garde art looks like.

I had such a good time reading this book. The tales remind me so very much of a former pastor of mine. It was a delight!

Very easy to read short stories from an ordained pastor, who has experience of many years of teaching as well as out in the field missionary work. His story telling is unparalleled, funny but always with a solid Christian based message.

I have personally known Dr. Gordy for a number of years and have had the blessing of receiving his powerful preaching and seeing his positive witness in Christian service. You can be sure,the stories he tells in this book, as humerous and unbelieveable as they sound, are true.

This is a wonderful book. Here's what Booklist said in a starred review.

An ace at the new weirdness defined by the anthology Feeling Very Strange (2006), What uses it to be creepy, polemical, and funny, all at once or in various blendings. These 17 stories progress from grim to laugh-out-loud ludicrous without ever derogating their common subject, love, though they do depict it as fairly insane. The opening stories, "Finger Talk" and "Babies," feature women in abusive relationships they don't want to change; that one is trapped in a gorilla suit and the other is, unbeknownst to hubby, carrying sextuplets leavens their dire circumstances some, but enough? "The Cost of Doing Business" is about a professional victim, whose clients must be able to afford her subsequent hospitalizations and quite adequate comfort between jobs. Things lighten up through the predicaments of a man who masturbated for science when 18 and at 49 discovers he has thousands of offspring, a man who realizes that work doesn't proliferate during vacation without cause, a nauseating senior who expects familial love although he intends to live forever, and others, until at last there is the hermit researcher's tale, from which we learn, through a vale of our own tears of laughter, why there are always hermits. Love is why, of course. Crazy!

Ray Olson ~ Booklist starred review

A "slim volume," Kate Wilhelm calls this in the introduction, but you could have fooled me. Its 195 pages are packed with stories that range from touching to unsettling, haunting to quirky; seventeen stories that keep you not only entertained, but thinking. What's narratives drive ahead, make you continue to read and guess. They are disturbing, funny, and very very brave.

This is actually two writings in one.
The first, "A Day with the Cow Column", is an abbreviated but classical description of a typical day along the emigrant trail with cattle in 1843, by Jesse Applegate. A must read for insight into trail life.
The second writing is a reminesce by Jesse's nephew Jesse A. Applegate some sixty plus years later. Young Jesse was only six and a half years old when undertaking this 1843 pilgrimage and his recollections are persuasive and touching. He recalls such occurrences as to geographical places they visited; descriptions and experiences with Indians; "buffalo chip" collecting; dogs chasing antelope; river fordings; crossing the prairies and sage plains; buffalo; games and mischief of young boys; etc.
Also included are his recollections of the perilous floating of the Columbia River where he lost a brother and cousin to drownings; the first year in Oregon with frugal provisions; the blazing of the Applegate Cutoff to allow emigrants a more efficient means of entering Oregon; etc.
An absorbing read.

This book is a personal reminiscence of the first organized wagon train to follow the Oregon Trail. The author recalls his experiences as a young boy in 1843, traveling west with his family. I found this to be extremely informative and filled with personal anecdotes. Jesse Applegate's story is told from a boy's perspective and is wonderfully expressive. You will read about adventures and activities that usually don't make it into standard histories. Most memorable was the evocation of the hardship and suffering of these early pioneers. When these people reached the Oregon Territory there were no stores - they lived hand-to-mouth for a long time. But I also found Jesse's happy memories of his interaction with Native Peoples to be very enlightening, again from a boy's perspective as he explored the nearby woods and hills. All in all, a wonderful account, full of surprising and unique memories and events.

Stafford's poetry is beautiful and concise. His pacifism, appreciation of nature, and interest in eastern mysticism presage many of the major movements of the late fifties through early seventies.

Yet Stafford's voice lacks the selfishness which would sometimes blight these later movements. Instead of struggling egoistically against an unjust war, Stafford represents an innocent-minded struggle against war of any kind, but grounded in the work-ethic of depression era America.

(Aside: Kim Stafford's introduction to her father's work is every bit as interesting as the main text.)

Oregon's poet laureate William Stafford unassumingly answered the phone, "Bill" and wrote lovingly wrote of mother, father, a moment in his life. Simple, but not simplistic, his poetry draws deep from the well of the everyday. This collection includes the poem Stafford wrote the day he died. How typical of this extraordinary, ordinary man to keep on giving to the end!

Guides to city restaurants and shops are a dime a dozen. How many Web sites were propped up in the late 1990s, purportedly to answer just this simple question: where is a good place to eat/shop? About a trillion dollars worth. And yet, in 2004, the answers are not to be found online but instead in this simple, elegant guide, eat.shop.portland. Not only can you read this purse-sized treasure from cover to cover (like a day and night on the town!), you can trust it as a barometer of cool. Unlike some travel writer's 12-hour synopsis of a town that they just parachuted in on, Wellman dishes out a hip-yet sensible guide to the real Portland that is as well-designed as it is well-written.

eat.shop.portland should be required reading for anyone about to entertain guests from out-of-town or in from the suburbs.

eat.shop.portland is a true treasure trove of what Portland has to offer. If you're looking for authentic portland-style restaurants and shops, this is the book to own. I've been here seven years and there are places in it I have never heard of ... but can't wait to try. In my opinion every Portlander should have a copy of eat.shop.portland with them at all times.

The pleasure of memoirs is that for all that they allow a circumscribed vision of things they tend to offer coherent narratives of the past, and let you know "what it was like." This famous memoir by Celeste Albaret, Proust's housekeeper for ten years while he was writing his masterpeice, gives us thus a better and more complete view of the writer during his most productive years than could be imagined otherwise. Albaret was not a writer herself--the memoir was composed by others who shaped her oral reminiscences--but this work is beautifully shaped, and flows wonderfully. Almost all the major questions anyone would have about Proust--how he wrote, what he was like, who the bases were for the characters in his novel, and what his relations with his family were like--are answered in due course, and though Albaret retains her biases (she refuses to give much credence to his affairs with his chauffeur and others, for example) she is still as honest as can be. It's clear that she considered knowing and working for Proust the great event of her life, and she feels bound to tell as much as what she saw as she can.

If you're a writer, you can't help but feel curious about the habits of other writers -- particularly the great ones, the writers you admire. How and when did they work? How did they accomplish their masterpieces? Of course, a cross-section of famous writers only demonstrates that there is no one way of working. Hemingway got up at dawn and wrote until lunch or so. Kafka had supper late in the evening and then began to write after ten or eleven o'clock, when everyone else was going to bed. Evidently day is as good as night, if you have talent and the will to write.

One of the more unusual schedules had to be that of Marcel Proust. Unlike Kafka, who wrote at night even though he had to get up in the morning to go to the insurance firm where he worked, Proust was a man of independent means and was thus able to maintain as irregular a schedule as he liked. Or rather, his schedule was highly regularized, it just wasn't exactly "normal." Typically, Proust woke up around four in the afternoon -- if he even really slept that much, which is an open question. Upon awakening, he would "smoke," which was his term for a fumigation process meant to relieve his asthma. Afterward he would drink one or sometimes two cups of cafe au lait prepared according to very stringent requirements. Sometimes he would eat a croissant, sometimes not. If he were staying home for the evening, as he often did in the years he was writing A la Recherche du temps perdu, he might begin work right after this "breakfast." If he was going out, he might not return until the middle of the night. Arriving home at, say, three in the morning, he might spend a few hours telling his chambermaid all about his evening -- and then, at perhaps six in the morning, after having been up all night, he would begin to write. What's more, he always wrote in bed. It really gives new meaning, when you consider this, to the famous opening line of his masterwork: "Longtemps je me suis couche de bonne heure." For a long time I went to bed early -- this was written by a man lying in bed after having been up all night.

The chambermaid who was Proust's nocturnal confidante during the last decade of his life -- precisely when he was writing his masterwork -- outlived him by more than sixty years. (Proust died in 1922, Ms. Albaret in 1984). For the bulk of those years, she maintained a strict silence about her former employer, honoring Proust's own sense of privacy. But finally, late in life, she felt the need to set the record straight and thus agreed to be interviewed for this "as told to" memoir. This is fortunate for fans of Proust, and for fans of literature in general, for her memoir is as intimate a portrait as you can find of any writer. It is the kind of view you produce of a person whom you love, respect, admire, but also serve in the most minute and detailed capacities. You can practically smell Proust's underwear in this book -- which is not to say that it's a lurid tell-all, because it isn't. Ms. Albaret seemed only too content to keep Proust's underwear perfectly clean.

Too clean, some critics have said. And it is true that Ms. Albaret flatly denies Proust's homosexuality. She admits he went to a certain male brothel, but only -- in her view -- to gather information for his book. Otherwise, if he had any trysts during her decade with him, she didn't see them, or didn't want to. But then again, so what? Do you really have to look for stains in the man's underwear? In comparison to all the vanguard writers who were absolute jerks, it comes as something of a relief to read of a writer who comes off as a sweet, generous, nostalgic, insightful man.

Not that Proust didn't have his eccentricities, because certainly he did: his nocturnal schedule, abstemious diet, the cork walls lining his bedroom to prevent noise, the curtains closed to keep out the sunlight. It can almost be harrowing to read of Ms. Albaret's indoctrination into Proust's neurotic universe, and yet at the same time you can recognize that this controlled climate was necessary to enable Proust to recreate the splendid universe of memories in his book. Ms. Albaret says it best herself:

"Now I realize M. Proust's whole object, his whole great sacrifice for his work, was to set himself outside time in order to rediscover it. When there is no more time, there is silence. He needed that silence in order to hear only the voices he wanted to hear, the voices that are in his books. I didn't think about that at the time. But now when I'm alone at night and can't sleep, I seem to see him as he surely must have been in his room after I had left him -- alone too, but in his own night, working at his notebooks when, outside, the sun had long been up."

And perhaps that is also the truest thing anyone can really say of a writer's schedule. Hemingway's dawn, Kafka's evening, Proust's night -- what they all have in common is their own internal rhythm, a private sequence of sun and moon. It was Proust's thesis that writing could recover time lost in reality, and yet the unspoken irony is that in reality you also lose time just in order to write.

Edwina Parkhurst has a guilty secret, one that she has lied, contrived, and connived to keep hidden. Knowing full well that what she does is denounced as a terrible sin, preached against in pulpits, seen as Satan's handiwork by the God-fearing people in her world, and especially by the family she loves and has supported for years, Edwina continues her sinful ways. She has no choice if she is to keep a roof over her family's heads, food on the table, and garments suitable to their station.

I had never read any other works by this author but I bought the book because of the wonderful outline given by another reviewer and because I am a sucker for "spinster" stories.

What a wonderful find this book was for me. The characters are absolutely likeable, loveable and believable. Edwina is willing to run the risk of total shame and ruin if anyone finds out how she is earning the money necessary to keep her family clothed, housed and fed. At the time this story takes place her activity was indeed considered sinful, especially for a woman. The hero, Talmadge Jones, comes into the story in such a way that we can feel sympathy and empathy for him before we condemn him for the way he earns his living. These two must survive situations which are (at least for me) almost too over-the-top. Could she really have come from her sheltered background and endured all the physical hardships associated with their plight? Then I remind myself, this is fiction, anything is possible in fiction. I highly recommend this book. It is absorbing, tender, and sweet. It also shows a heroine who must take drastic action seldom depicted in the usual western historical novel.

Now for the bad news. This book is very poorly edited. It contains a large number of instances where I had to read, then re-read sentences and passages to correct them in my head in order to make the story make sense. I am greatly surprised that it was allowed to go into print like this. And that is too bad, it really did slow me down when I was reading and got very irritating at times.

Please don't reject the book because of the editing flaws. If you know about the problem going in, you can know it won't get better and make whatever mental adjustments you need to in order to enjoy this wonderful story. And it is just that, a wonderful story. I wish I could find more written by this author.