Oregon Books

I picked this collection up while returning to my home in another Oregon river valley, after two years away on a contract. reading it first brought home to me the preciousness of place, the the wisdom of this writer. I recommend it.

As a Douglas County transplant and an English teacher, I relished both Heilman's depictions of life and livelihoods as well as recognized his elevation of the spirit and humanity of this portion of the globe.

One may compare the witty short-takes of Robert Fulghum's "Kindergarten" series and Norman McClean's "River" collection to that of Heilman's "Over-stories".

This collection of writings is refreshingly simple backwoods as well as elevated highbrow. It is both for and about life, as one man has experienced it, told in such a way as to be universal in its appeal and understanding.

I use these stories in my classes to bring the world my students live in within the walls of academia. If nothing else, then to show them that it is possible to enjoy and recognize the beauty of something even when you feel you are surrounded by nothing at all.

We live near Tacoma and have a motorhome that doesn't fit in many of the state and federal campgrounds in the Northwest. This newest Church book is very good at helping to find the right places for our rig. In a month, using their advice, we found three wonderful RV campgrounds that we didn't know about. One is next to a first class trout river and another is at an entrance to Mt. Rainier National Park. Maybe the best part is that this book is helping us re-discover where we can go without using a lot of fuel! This is a great book for those that have never been to the Northwest as well as those that live there. Buy it! You'll like it!

I have traveled extensively throughout the Pacific Northwest and much of the U.S. This year travel will be limited to the Pacific Northwest. As a "native" Washingtonian and lifelong camper I've been looking for a new guidebook that combines travel info with the latest on campgrounds. There are new parks and new travel ideas - enough to generate enthusiasm and travel plans! Each listing has large icon keys that make it easy to find suitable camping spots, ie 50 amps, big rigs, activities and more. The book covers Washington, Oregon and British Columbia with everything from weekend to multi-week trip planning possibilities. Thank you to the authors for a great guidebook.

Thomas E. Kennedy has written yet another brilliant novel. Ostensibly , A Passion in the Desert is about a college creative writing teacher , Fred Twomey , a name perfectly suggestive of dichotomy , struggling with normal mezzo del cammin issues: marital fidelity , alcohol dependence , a senescent mother , an alienated teenage son. Kennedy's novel , a feast of language like all of his oeuvre , is , in fact , questioning the idea of paternity. He's a Joycean running with the concept proposed in the National Library scene by Stephen Dedalus viz., paternity might be legal fiction. Like Joyce , Kennedy is not afraid to take us through the muddy terrain of his protagonist's consciousness. And if there's a father , there must be a son. Kennedy gives us a '' nullius filius'' to correspond with a father deaf to a son's pater ,ait , and until the penultimate scene , a terrifying Ithaca , if you will , in a tour de force second person narrative. A Passion in the Desert is powerful storytelling. A veritable masterpiece.

After reading Kenney's Copenhagen Quartet, I couldn't imagine where he would go next to mine his seemingly endless supply of fascinating characters and stories. But "A Passion in the Desert," shows no fall-off from the brilliance of the Copenhagen Quartet. This book is, by turns, creepy, funny, amazingly insightful, and as personal as it gets within the ruminations of a character's mind, in this case, one Fred Twomey. And the great trick of Kennedy's writing is that no matter how surreal or fantastical his plots sometimes become, it always seems that they could happen to us. Everything remains plausible and personal. "A Passion in the Desert" is to be savored. Read the newspaper on the train or on a bus, but save Kennedy's latest for your armchair, with a chilled martini on a table next to you. And then begin reading and you'll know you are in the hands of legitimate master storyteller. Kennedy's work is as good as it gets.

This is the best PNW plant and animal identification book on the market (and I have lot of such i.d. books). Lots of really good color pictures and detailed b/w's. Informative text on life history/cycles. Good index and well-organized. Great for helping children get going on school projects (the Latin names are there, but the text is plain English, flows well, and provides information that interests ordinary persons of all ages who enjoy the out-of-doors). Would make a nice gift for someone new to the area or otherwise interested in the topic.

I fell in love with wild plants at the tender age of 11 when I went to camp with my 5th grade class. We did plant identification and I became intrigued by all the wonderful plants in the NW. WHen I got home I poured through my mom's copy of this book. I had been seeing it on our coffee table since I was like a tot! I fell in love with plants. This book has beautiful color pics of all kinds of wonderful plants and animals. It's awesome!

Sandine skillfully weaves several personal anecdotes into this narrative of the economic and social history of the Coos Bay region of southwest coastal Oregon. There are brief accounts of his having lived in North Bend, contiguous with Coos Bay, in the early 1950s, with later constrasting descriptions of the present-day distressed region as of early 2002. But the real subject of the book is the bigger picture of the rapid development by distant extractive industries of a west coast lumber port, with its subsequent boom-and-bust economy, and the implications for similar localities seeking job-creating ventures and increased payrolls by attracting remotely-based multinational interests. The author provides a detailed description of how prosperity for this one locality, so dependent on the exploitation and shipping of forest products, was only intermittently sustained. Today, Coos Bay is a city that has yet to come to terms with the implications of its own unstable dependence on short-term "job-creating" ventures.

The book is particularly admirable for its all-encompassing point of view, where the author steps back to visualize the regional socio-economic history of southwest Oregon in the context of the national or global economy. While the tone is somber, the argument is disciplined and suggests a sense of wonder at the severity of the many changes endured by this gritty working community. This reader agrees with the author that the fascinating history of the Coos Bay/North Bend area presents a rich vein for historians and economists.

This is a thoughtful and compelling local history that should have a broad appeal, even for those with an interest in labour and industry studies, or in the forest resources of the Pacific Northwest. It particularizes the geography of industrial work, and serves as a timely warning that industrial location is seldom permanent and is always subject to downsizing. Indeed, in resource extraction industries, plant shutdowns are likely eventualities for all localities embraced by corporate globalization. In fact, one of the more interesting themes in Sandine's study is that in a retrospective sense every one of the major players in Coos Bay's history--from shrewd and calculating pioneer lumber and shipping merchants such as Asa Mead Simpson to multinational lumber product enterprises such as Georgia-Pacific--were always conceptualizing their immediate future in hemispheric or global terms while acquiring and managing what was originally a public domain as a resource to be privately abused. Yet at the local level there was seldom any effort to understand the long-term implications of this form of transnational capitalism.

In its final chapters the book considers the historic absence of local interest group linkage and the deference and unassertiveness on the part of local development councils. It mentions occasional efforts at joint forest management, and a few of the largely ineffective campaigns to ameliorate the social impacts of structural changes in the industry. As Sandine relates, only recently has there been a real awareness that "world trade" on the local level simply means "the foreclosure of economic choice." The text is well-served by photos, bibliographical footnotes (many revealing sources that are unusual and reflect the author's ample range of background reading), an extensive bibliography, and a useful index.

Plundertown was my summer vacation book, and should be on everyone's wish list, especially those concerned about the environment, globalization, West Coast history, and a tale that has the dark drama of a well-written expose. The author has skillfully woven personal, political, socio-cultural, historical, and economic threads into a very engaging, compact narrative that starts with vividly recallled childhood memories of growing up in Coos Bay, then takes the reader on a wide-ranging epic journey that expands out to San Francisco and other urban centers of industry and finance, back in time when native peoples lived in harmony with nature and the forest, and forward to the time when nature had been exploited by buisness barons, and left barren for future generations. Chapters are short, densely packed with well-researched information, and provide a vivid and convincing saga of the human and environmental wounds that occur when business colonizes and exploits for economic gain. Because the tale is very local and personally felt by the author, the reader is able to live through a sequence of events that is being repeated in our time, in many parts of the world. The costs of globalization and economic exploitation become very real, not just abstract political rhetoric.
Highly recommended.

It's a wonderful book and it's so well organized I can't believe it... delighted that my May Day toast is part of it. Gary Snyder

Portland's lively left-of-center history is brought back to life in 'Red Guide'
The Oregonian
June 17, 2007

By John Terry




Interesting, the things found in the closets of Portland's radical past:

The founder of the exclusive Catlin Gabel School was accused of being a communist.

Two Tuskegee Airmen of World War II fame were from Portland; 12 in all were from Oregon.

The principal of Kenton Elementary School allied herself with social reformer Jane Addams, played host to muckraker Upton Sinclair and hobnobbed with Eleanor Roosevelt at the White House.

All this and much more thanks to the closet-cleaning work of intrepid Portland radical Michael Munk, whose new book, "The Portland Red Guide, Sites and Stories of our Radical Past," is new from Portland State University's Ooligan Press.

Munk is a native of Prague, Czechoslovakia, whose family fled the Nazis and came to Portland in 1939. He's a graduate of Lincoln High School and Reed College, has a master's degree from the University of Oregon and doctorate from New York University. For 25 years Munk taught political science at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, Chicago's Roosevelt University and Rutgers before retiring in Portland.

Munk -- Internet moniker "lastmarx" -- freely admits he's about as far to the political left as one can get without straying into the lunatic fringe. He's also an engaging personality with a delicious sense of irony evident throughout "Red Guide."

The book is divided into six political eras from the 19th century to the present, each entry in each section numbered and cross-referenced to maps and photographs.

Here is where radical writer John Reed grew up unfettered by Portland's upper-upper crust. There is where the Marine Workers Industrial Union headquartered during the 1934 Maritime Strike. Here is where Dr. Marie Equi in 1918 railed against war and was rewarded with three years in San Quentin.

Much of Munk's material understandably deals with the social, labor and political conflicts that roiled local waters throughout the city's history, events old-guard conservatives would just as soon see black-lined from its history. It also memorializes many who added richly to the city's fabric and heritage -- racial minorities, social reformers, religious leaders.

Ruth Catlin opened Miss Catlin's School for Girls in 1911 on Northwest Irving Street. She dedicated it to the "independence and freedom of action for women" and drew students "largely from Portland's wealthy elite," Munk says. She turned the school over to a board of directors in 1928 to become Catlin Gabel School.

The late 1930s found her on the infamous Portland Police Red Squad's list of communist sympathizers because she was active in a group "devoted to defending the elected Spanish government against a fascist invasion," says Munk.

Brothers Robert (Ruby) and Carl Deiz, graduates of Franklin High School, were Portland's contribution to the Tuskegee Airmen. Robert flew 93 missions with the segregated 332nd Fighter Group in Europe and was featured on a 1943 War Bond poster, "one of few depicting a black person," Munk says. Another Tuskegee airman, Charles Duke, was the first African American member of the Portland Police Department.

Grace De Graff, Kenton Elementary principal, was among the founders of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, organized to urge women worldwide to "refuse to do the work men cannot do because they are busy murdering other men."

Munk quotes a De Graff niece as recalling her thinking "what the Russians were doing was a desirable state of affairs," but also "Aaron Frank (of the department store Meier & Frank) was the nicest man" for helping out needy Kenton families.

You can reach John Terry, a retired copy editor for The Oregonian and member of the Oregon Geographic Names Board, at terryjohnf@cs.com

the book sent to be was new and it was a teacher's edition so i had all the answers to the questions and the steps outlined

This book is an excellent companion for basic review of algebra concepts. Young people may find it useful, but older adults will also find it useful for a good review if returning to school. This book goes over the basic algebra concepts. It gets more difficult in the future with other books, but if you are looking to review the concepts, you won't go wrong here. Best if used in a basic algebra review course. Good luck

It is funny and it is as well written as any mystery I have read. If he keeps this up he will join an elite group of top writers such as Parker, Woods, Hillerman. Dudley Hafner

It's one of truisms of the newspaper business that every reporter has an unfinished novel sitting in his bottom desk drawer. Fortunately for lovers of good storytelling, the late Vince Kohler finished his--and three more besides. "Rainy North Woods" is the introductory volume in his series of Eldon Larkin mysteries.

Eldon Larkin isn't your typical mystery novel hero. He's a reporter for a small daily newspaper on the Oregon Coast, "The South Coast Sun," and he dreams more about finding a girlfriend and a car he can rely on than unraveling a big mystery. But when you have a circus elephant stomping a hapless Vietnamese immigrant to death, sightings of Bigfoot and UFOs, and an old-timer of an editor obsessed with "good copy!" what's a reporter going to do? Call the Enquirer? Not on your life!

This is literate, witty, humorous story-telling at its best, capturing the true flavor of the craziness that often seeps into these "Rainy North Woods." I'm grateful Vince Kohler gave us this wonderful book, and three more...and just sorry he left us too soon.

Look up a copy. You won't be disappointed!

This entire book is online at http://www.winfinity.com/beachwalla/rebels/rebels.htm

Check it out!

This classic book in labor history combines the highest level of historical research with riveting story-telling. It is dramatic, poetic, honest - and indispensable in understanding the wild history of the I.W.W. in the Pacific Northwest.

The entire text is available free online at ...

This classic book in labor history combines the highest level of historical research with riveting story-telling. It is dramatic, poetic, honest — and indispensable in understanding the wild history of the I.W.W. in the Pacific Northwest.

Detailed and thorough, full of entertaining anecdotes andtranscriptions of correspondence; covers major political figures aswell as tribespeople.

This book was wonderful. I love hearing about the history of my tribe (Siletz). Also, the author included information about my great-great-great grandfather Charlie Depoe. I learned about my own family from this book. I cried to see a picture of my ancestor for the first time ever. I thank you E.A. Schwartz for putting together such a comprehensive piece of what is essentially a very important, yet small piece of history for many American Indians. I waited patiently for years for this story to be told. Now I can pass this piece of history on to my children and all of their children. Thank you.