Washington Books

This is a wonderful book that I love giving as a gift but I can't find it anywhere any more. Please reprint it!

Fresh and original, "Inscriptions of a Nation" fills a hole in history and travel books. This slim volume contains the inscriptions on Washington, D.C.'s major monuments and memorials. The author, Clint Ensign, prefaces each featured memorial with a brief synopsis of the monument and why it or the person it commemorates is significant to our history. However, the book's main purpose is to present the inscriptions on these memorials.

By truly reading and understanding these passages, the purposes of the memorials become even clearer. Usually, a tourist doesn't have time to appreciate the wisdom and strength of Abraham Lincoln's words when confronted by his massive memorial, but careful study of the quotations leads to understanding that a monument is more than a massive statue, but rather a tribute to an idea.

Ensign admits this is not a comprehensive work, but the prominent monuments as of 1994 are featured here. This book sorely needs to be updated and put back in print.

There's an old saying: "It is always impolite to criticize your hosts; it is militarily stupid to criticize your allies." No kidding. Which is why, in 1942, when the Americans took up residence in Britain, a seven-page long pamphlet was distributed, essentially to help the Yanks understand their British "cousins."

Little did they know that those seven pages, some six decades later, would be read aloud on bus routes in London as amusing historical relics for the entertainment of passengers.

Short, sweet, and hysterically funny to the modern ear, this books gives a very good view of how Americans saw the British people, both during WW2 and even now, by comparing how we saw them then to how we see them today. The book goes into everything, using clear language and astonishing detail for all its length: sports, weights and measures, monetary units, rationing. Some of the instructions bring home the fact that America was itself a drastically different place sixty years ago; some of it brings into stark relief that by the time the US entered the war, Britain had been involved for over two years already.

But perhaps what makes it so funny now is the language itself, since phrases have changed so drastically in the last sixty years, something quite ironically stated in the first few pages: "The British have phrases and colloquialisms of their own that may sound funny to you. You can make just as many boners in their eyes...."

Indeed.

This eight page typescript contains an enormous amount of information. And, over 60 years later, it contains a great deal of entertainment for my British friends. It's fun to share with friends in this country as well.

"You will naturally be interested in getting to know your opposite number, the British soldier, the `Tommy' you have heard and read about. You can understand that two actions on your part will slow up the friendship - swiping his girl, and not appreciating what his army has been up against. Yes, and rubbing it in that you are better paid than he is."

On courage: "Don't be misled by the British tendency to be soft- spoken and polite. If they need to be, they can be plenty tough. The English language didn't spread across the oceans and over the mountains and jungles and swamps of the world because these people were panty-waists."

On servicewomen: "Now you understand why British soldiers respect the women in uniform. They have won the right to utmost respect. When you see a girl in khaki . . . with a bit of ribbon on her tunic - remember she didn't get it for knitting more socks than anyone else in Ipswich."

"Let this be your slogan: It is always impolite to criticize your hosts. it is militarily stupid to criticize your allies."

The advice about not criticizing your hosts is great advice for any traveler, military or civilian. I found the pamphlet an interesting bit of cultural and military history.

I am happy with my rad ther purchase. it got to me in a timely manner and the book was flawless until about 2 wks in2 class when i began to use the hilitr.

Mr. Washington,whom I know personally as Charles, did any staff member who works in a radiation oncology department, or any student who wants to work in radiation oncology, a great service by revising and updating his three books and combining them into one. As a therapist learning dosimetry this has been an awfully good reference book. I gave my brand new copy as a graduation present to a recently graduated radiologic technologist student who wants to become a radiation therapist. I can't tell you how much he appreciated it.

When I was a small boy growing up in the slums of Lesotho, I lived under the assumption that I would follow my father and work in the mines in South Africa. It was what our family had always done, and I would continue the tradition. If you had told me back then that I would grow up to invest in wastewater treatment, I would have said "Who are you? You're crazy! Get out out of my custard!" because you would have been standing in my custard. But I would have been wrong. After I ran away from home to Copenhagen, an old friend contacted me because he had heard I was broke. He gave me this book. Marino and Boland changed my life. I went from a scared little Besotho runaway to a plump and powerful player in just one year of investing smartly in wastewater treatment. If it hadn't been for this book, I might of had to resort to selling off my body parts for food money. Thank you Marino and Boland. I love you. I will do anything you want. You can have all my money. You can live in my house. You can have my firstborn child. I thank you.

When I was a small boy growing up in the slums of Lesotho, I lived under the assumption that I would follow my father and work in the mines in South Africa. It was what our family had always done, and I would continue the tradition. If you had told me back then that I would grow up to invest in wastewater treatment, I would have said "Who are you? You're crazy! Get out out of my custard!" because you would have been standing in my custard. But I would have been wrong. After I ran away from home to Copenhagen, an old friend contacted me because he had heard I was broke. He gave me this book. Marino and Boland changed my life. I went from a scared little Besotho runaway to a plump and powerful player in just one year of investing smartly in wastewater treatment. If it hadn't been for this book, I might of had to resort to selling off my body parts for food money. Thank you Marino and Boland. I love you. I will do anything you want. You can have all my money. You can live in my house. You can have my firstborn child. I thank you.

This is a great book as it captures what life was like in the early 1980's in Canada's north. I happened to meet this very intersting lady when she spent a few days in Holman NWT in 1980, and have been able to get a copy of the book recently from Amazon.

I know a lot of the people in the book because of my time spent living in the north, and also traveling in the north.

It's worth getting!

This is a beautiful book filled with scores of stunning black and white photographs chronicaling Ulli Steltzer's travels through the Canadian Arctic. The photographs capture the everyday lives of the Inuit, showing us how past and present are at work in their lives, how these people who just decades before had lived in varying degrees of independence from "modern civilization" are struggling to adapt while retaining a sense of their traditions. While to book consists largely of photographs, included are numerous first-person statements (not exclusively by Inuit) discussing the losses, triumphs and struggles that the Inuit have endured.

Jerome Washington gives you a human outlook on societies "inhuman" population. It is a good read. If you have family in the penal system, on either side of the bars, you will have a different outlook on what they endure.

Jerome Washington tells the stories that other sources have left out, or undetailed. Prison is a society, not just a group of people from the 'real' society. His own story is remarkable, giving him the unique ability to relate his observations to the reader. Washington strays from his own story as much as possible by examining the life of others confined to the same cage. Perhaps the pain of the recollection is the driving force of the reluctance to spill his own guts. He avoids it untill the end when he just can't hold back any further. Like all real quality writing, the author uses the language of the characters. The eerie result he may have intended has been achieved. The situations are scary, and the hope is bleek. The inmates are wild, hungry, and dangerous, and the prison employees are just as trapped - just as viscous: "They were angry that I was walking out of their prison alive ... and took false comfort in the hope that if I didn't return to prison, I would surely send my young to grow old behind their walls." Just as in other stories of prisoners or patients who believe the 'system' is corrupt, the reader must exercise his/her duty to examine the reality and the haze - and question what is perception, what is real, what is made up, and if the point of view is tainted by paranoia... why? You, the reader, will be a floating eye through a prison, through another world - with foreign rules, sanctions, and truths. And being seperated from the setting, although right there in the thick of it, you are safe from the prison's disease which spreads from animal to animal, through cage to cage, all the way to the to zookeeper.

This is a collection of poetry salvaged from the walls of the barracks on Angel Island, where Chinese immigrants were detained between 1910 and 1940. Poems are in both English and Chinese. In addition to the poems, the editors provide an introduction to early Chinese immigration, and there are several pages of quotes from various immigrants, on various subjects such as the voyage to America and their impressions of Westerners. The poetry speaks for itself -- poems of desperation, despair, homesickness, and anger. This is a wonderful collection.

No immigrant population has ever been treated as shabbily and violently as the Chinese, who began arriving in large numbers during the California Gold Rush and who were recruited in even larger numbers to build transcontinental railroads, build levees in California, and to supplant African-American cotton pickers in Mississippi. The Chinese were brutalized, excluded, mocked, and TAXED! In 1852, a Foreign Miner's Tax, which accounted for more than half of the tax revenue collected in California between 1850 and 1870, was imposed on Chinese miners. Parallel fears fueled the antagonism against the Chinese: first, that they were unassimilable; second, that they would pollute the bloodlines of the Great Race, the Anglo-Saxon stock, which would seem to imply a measure of assimilation, or else outbreed "us". Laws were passed to exclude Chinese women, and then, in 1882, to exclude all immigration from China. Laws continued to severely curtail Chinese immigration until the 1960s, but exclusion was never 100% effective. The principal loohole was the acknowledged human right of Chinese-Americans to bring their wives and children to "Gold Mountain." The officials charged with overseeing this trickle of migration were invariably convinced that most of it was fraudulent; they were fierce and self-righteous in ferreting out the "paper sons," those illegal immigrants of yesteryear.

From 1910 to 1940, all immigrants arriving in California from China - including many who were en route to Mexico or Cuba - were quarantined in wooden barracks on the hidden side of Angel Island in San Francisco Bay, north of Alcatraz. About 175,000 Chinese, men, women and children, spent from three days to three years in detention on Angel Island, and quite a few of them ended up being shipped home. This book tells the story of that immigration in thirty pages of general history and through interviews with thirty-nine elderly survivors of the Island experience. Pictures of the detention station and its operations are also included, and suggest the bleak, crowded, disrespectful conditions that prevailed.

In 1940, the barracks on Angel Island were closed and abandoned. The buildings remained in disrepair until 1970, by which time Angel Island was a state park. Then the buildings were slated for demolition, but during an inspection, a park ranger, Alexander Weiss, noticed that the walls of the wooden buildings were covered with Chinese characters, carved or inscribed. He notified scholars at San Francisco State University, the inscriptions were photographed and translated, it was confirmed that they were chiefly poems composed in inmates during detention, and the Asian American community of San Francisco bagan to lobby for preservation of the historical site, equivalent to Ellis Island in the memory of European American immigrant descendents.

The station is now a major tourist attraction of the Bay Area, and easily one of the most interesting, to which thousands of visitors travel by ferry. The calligraphic inscriptions are visible, and translations are readily available. Unlike the stereoptype of "coolie" immigrants, the Chinese who cut these characters in the walls were literate representatives of a great civilization, however penniless and friendless they may have been when they arrived in the Land of the Free, only to be imprisoned.

The bulk of this touching book is composed of selected poems, in Chinese and in English translation, from the walls of the Island. Some express desolation:

"Living on Island, away from home elicits a hundred feelings.
My chest is filled with a sadness I cannot bear to explain.
Night and day, I sit passively and listlessly.
Fortunately, I have a novel as my companion."

Some are angry:

"Sadly, I listen to insects and angry surf.
The laws pile layer upon layer; how can I dissipate my hatred?
Drifting in as a traveler, I met with thsi calamity.
It's more miserable than owning only a flute
in the marketplace of Wu."

A few are vengeful:

"I have 10,000 hopes that the revolutionary armies
will complete their victory,
And help make the mining enterprises successful
in the ancestral land.
They will build many battleships and come
to the U.S. territory,
Vowing never to stop till the white men
are completely annihilated."

Of course the battleships never came. Instead there were waves of industrious and civil immigrants, and then further waves of industrial wares which we in America have come to depend on. Have the Chinese terrorized America? Stolen American jobs? Degraded American racial purity? Here in San Francisco, it seems obvious that the Chinese have been among the most valuable and assimilable immigrant populations ever. Their crime rate and public assistance rate are extremely low, and their employment rate is unmatched by any European American group. They've excelled in our public schools, raising the standards of performance for "white" students by their example of seriousness. They exceed the averages of European Americans in education, income, and marital stability. Their consumption of illegal drugs is far lower than that of white suburbanites. They are a major component of the thriving multi-culturalism that makes San Francisco the most desirable place to live in all the United States, as proven by housing prices.

America was built by immigrants, and then rebuilt again and again by later waves of immigrants, each time a richer and stronger culture. Those who blame problems on recent immigrants are wrong; they themselves are the problem.

Second in the girls devotional series developed by Linda Washington and Julie Chen, "It's Me, Leslie," brings us the journal of a young girl trying to come into her own as a believer in Christ.

Genuine and engaging, Washington pulls the reader into the life of Leslie, a lively 11 year old, by peaking into her journal.

Likely in the first in the series, "Just Plain Mel," Chen has amusing sketches and doodling of everything from the "old church mother" (I've got one just like her in my church too!) to dialogue bubbles, ice cream and scratched out portions of entries Leslie must've reconsidered.

There is nothing stuffy about "It's Me, Leslie," and you can be confident that this is not just kid-friendly, but hip to what your preteens are going through. It's fresh, challenging, sometimes goofy, while retaining the innocence and purity of youth. The book always points the reader toward Jesus.

Issues such as materialism, unfriendly churches, self-confidence, gossip, spurring others on to "love and good deeds" are all discussed in this highly creative approach. Bible-centered, verses are printed before each entry area for the reader to think about when responding to the things going on in Leslie's life.

It is well-written, with a focused, stream-of-consciousness tone not found elsewhere.

I fully recommend "It's Me, Leslie," by Linda Washington. Inquisitive and curious preteen girls will love this, and beg for more. Try it in small groups, with a Bible in hand.

Anthony Trendl

I bought this devotional for my nine-year-old. She really loves the format. It is handwriting font with lots of doodles (looks like the Amelia books).The subjects are right where she's at too: Gossip, Do clothes make the Christian?, mean girls, sharing your faith with others.

There is spce for her to journal her thoughts on each subject. I would highly recommend this book as both a devotional for a girl and a beginner's journal.

James Lavadour's collection of Landscape pieces in this book are, well just tremendous, the finish of the paper complements the works upon it. I had never seen his work prior to coming across a series landscape at the Heard Museum in Phoenix,Arizona. It stopped me in my tracks, rather knocked the wind out of me so to speak. The light the expanse, the sanctity of The Land just grabs you by the throat in his pieces. The Book pretty much captures that in this collection as best as may be in the smaller scale of things.
Yeah I ought to read this book as well, and I will as well, as for the present i am still looking, and looking. Wow.

A long time ago in Pendleton, I saw James Lavadour drag boxes and boxes of REALLY crappy paintings into my high school class. Yet his face was alight with enthusiam for the work he was doing and I can see now that his vision was providing him with the momentum he needed to reach the point he has. He spoke of sitting in the foothills all day long painting. A couple years later I saw a painting of his, it was dark and mysterious and a tiny trickle of water in it appeared to actually move. I still long for that painting today. His work now is so luminous and beautiful that you find yourself transfixed and caught in the emotional content. I have always looked up to him as an artist, that this is what you can do with your talent if you are willing to work hard and seriously involve yourself with the subject.

Absolutly the best book of one the finest "artists" in recent American history. Ken Cory's work, best described as "Play Disguised" has a wonderful childlike quaility to it. Written by friends and family after his passing it chronicles his life and work with great anecdotes my favorite being the "John Colt" letter to his teacher from abroad as a teen. Excellently published with lots of wonderful drawings and photos of his work, shop and home. This book belongs on every artist's shelf! It needs to be in print for ever! A hardcover would be welcome as well. Get it NOW!

An underappreciated text about an underappreciated artist. For anyone who's convinced inventiveness has packed its bags and left the country, this is the book that will change your mind. This is a comprehensive yet readable book about the Northwest artist Ken Cory's delightfully funky, perverse, and beautifully crafted jewelry - truly little gems that most of the art world knows little about. Mitchell does a fine job of giving Cory his due credit, and putting his life and work in a context that is entirely relavent to what we think we already know about jewelry and art and craft. Extensive photos and a beautiful publication from top to bottom. Check out Mitchell's Summer 03 article in Metalsmith magazine on another diamond in the rough, Don Tompkins.