Oregon Books

I read this book when I was about 12 and I was completely captivated. I could not put it down and even after I finished reading it I kept thinking about the characters and the events. Some 20 years later, I still remember snipets from the book and the only problem is that I cannot find a copy to get my hands on for myself and my four nieces. Get it back in print - people everywhere are being deprived!

It's only loosely based on facts, but still a very good book. When I read it as a hyperactive 6th grader, I couldn't put it down. I wonder what ever happened to those Sager kids...

I couldn't remember the name of the book that so enthralled me in the classroom as a child. I do remember hanging on every single word that was uttered from my teacher's mouth as she took our class through the harrowing adventures of the Sager children. I couldn't wait til class the next day! Now as my book-a-holic daughter scours the shelves for her next great adventure, I come looking for a copy of this incredible tale...and I won't be letting go of it once I find it! A great read for all ages.

I remember being enthralled by this book when I was a kid growing up in India. Its not just an American story in that sense, because it a wonderful story of human courage, heroism and spirit. I highly recommend it to all lovers of adventure stories, adult or children. I recently moved to Oregon and re-read it and it is still incredible.

I too am amazed that there are not thousands of devoted American fans of this amazing book. Get it back in print and into your schools and libraries! Today I found this book at a Second Hand Book Fair in Brisbane, Australia, and have been firmly planted in my chair all night reading it from cover to cover. My only complaint is that it finished - I would love to know what happened to the children after they arrived in Oregon. The writing was simple and to the point - the story extraordinary. As our little girl listens to the story cds, I often quip to my husband that Pa from the Ingalls Wilder books frequently seems rather foolhardy - as a child I thought him magnificent and clever - as an adult and parent I see him taking ridiculous risks with his family's wellbeing and happiness. These people travelling to Oregon in their wagon trains make him look staid and careful. John Sager and his brother and sisters undertake an even more dreadful journey and this book keeps you frantically turning the pages - there are moments of terrible sadness, despair and horror - I cannot begin to imagine how children could survive this - but all the while you are so filled with admiration for their bravery and determination - and the descriptions of their surrounding environments are spellbinding. I am sure adults faced with the same odds would have just laid down and died. If you find a copy of this book read it - you will be captivated. I will never forget John, Louise, Francis, Cathie, Matilda, Lizzie, Independtia, Anna, Walter and Oscar. Incredible!

I love every one of JA Jance's novels.The JP Beaumont and Joanna Brady series are my favorites. I have thoroughly been gripped by every one.

Failure to Appear J.A. Jance does it again in this 11th J.P. Beaumont mystery novel. Unlike most of the previous books, this one starts out, not with a crime, but with a personal mission. Detective Beaumont ("Beau" to his friends and associates) has left his Seattle home area to look for his runaway teenage daughter in an artsy community in Oregon. Of course, as anyone could have expected, violent crime soon intrudes.

For those who are familiar with this series, you can be assured that it is true Jance writing: characters who act like real people; a fast-moving story; plenty of self-deprecating humor; and a sterling protagonist who is all too aware of his not inconsiderable faults.

For those who are not familiar with J.P. Beaumont or Jance's Joanna Brady, who appears in a separate series, you have the pleasure of delightful discovery to look forward to. There are lots of books in this series. I've read 12 so far (and a bunch of the Brady ones, too) and I have yet to be disappointed with any of them.

If you're one who likes to start at the beginning of a series (which I think is not a bad idea with this one, for a number of reasons), the first is "Until Proven Guilty". However, if this isn't important to you, you can't go wrong with this or any of Jance's books, if you're in the mood for a fast-moving mystery novel with a bit more than usual in the way of character development.

My Wife reads these, and loves them! Looks like another all nighter to me!

In "Failure to Appear" lone-wolf Seattle homicide detective J.P. "Beau" Beaumont finds himself a fish out of water surrounded by family in southern Oregon and on the outside of a murder investigation.

Quite often, when a mystery author tries to fit so much of a protagonist's personal life into a book, the plot drags to a halt and the investigation into the crime is treated superficially because the focus is on massive character development. Jance manages to keep things moving at a fast clip and provide a mystery that is as multi-faceted as her lead character's personal difficulties. Beau has a lot to deal with in this book: a daughter who starts out a missing person and winds up pregnant and about to be married, a re-married ex-wife and her husband, a new girlfriend, a murder suspect that awakens painful memories, the siren song of a bottle of MacNaughton's, and a couple police officers out to nail his hide to a wall - not to mention the book's three murder victims or the loved one Beau loses in the course of the investigation.

There are a few nits that could be picked (Oregon vanity plates don't have 8 letters, for instance), but the quality of the rest of the book more than compensates. All in all, a great read.

This was the first Jance book I encountered. I decided to read it because it takes place in the town I live and work in. As much as I enjoyed reading about the places and cities I know well what I really enjoyed was the character of JP Beaumont. He is an ordinary man (a Seattle Cop wih an extraordinarily inherited fortune) who is caught between his work and his family. The characters seem very real and Jance's writing gives them a life and humanity that appeals strongly and makes you really care about them. The story never lets up either and you will find yourself hard pressed to put the book down. I have read every book Jance has written now and she is always on the top of my list of series that I am waiting for the next installment of!

Set in a vivid and dramatic landscape, this memoir tells a story filled with honesty, humor, and courage. Allen observes with a keen eye. She takes on one of the great challenges for a writer, giving us not just the surface of the moments of a relationship but the deep undercurrents, both real and imagined, and succeeds with a grace that seems effortless. Allen's inner journey blends perfectly with the wild spaces, the free spirited horses, and the quirky human world, which is at once familiar, weird, and sobering.

Allen is an engaging guide and companion. We can only hope she shares more of her journey with us.

I was very taken by this wonderful real-life novel. Even if the reality level is relatively high, the author manages to turn it into something that transcends the documentary, the journalistic. By mixing many atfirst sight totally unrelated elements, in the end it turns out to be a novel about spirituality in daily life, or about how to see meaning in it.
The location of the American North-West is much more than just an
impressive backdrop. The scenery in the broadest sense of the word, including the population, is subject and metaphor at the same time.
Penny Allen seems to focus on the "outside" of things, but interprets the "inside". All elements come together towards the very end, not only in a literary way, but in the way things sometimes do, in real life.

I read this book with a lot of pleasure and satisfaction. It is
introspective, but at the same time describes mundane and sometimes gruesome events that happen in the real world. And it's funny, if you share the author's sense of humor.

Memoirs are the current hot genre. Often they depend on one big event for their oomph, or they putter along in a very interior manner. Penny Allen, a radical bohemian filmmaker now living in Paris, caretook a horse ranch in eastern Oregon, which would provide enough gist for most memoirist's mills. Perhaps Allen is lucky, perhaps she draws intense people and events to her, perhaps her filmmaker's gaze sees and frames life as most of us do not--certainly most of us wouldn't have emerged with such an amazing quilt of interlocking stories. Thoreau observed that most people lead lives of quiet desperation, and Allen's time on the high desert proves no exception. She finds these desperate lives and recounts them brilliantly, but after the regular weird folks come the hardcore character actors: the cult of Rajneeshpuram, the Vietnam vet "on patrol," the ghost, and more. With the constitution of a war journalist, she never averts her eyes, and she is willing to tell us exactly what she saw. --Hollis Taylor, Sydney, Australia

Penny Allen's memoir captures its reader softly and earnestly. It is a tale told as if someone were sitting next to you whispering into your ear while life continues to rush along around you. It's the kind of whisper that makes you feel like taking a break from the concentration required, but the story is much too enticing to step away. She writes so descriptively about a unique landscape without ever becoming pedantic and verbose. From a perspective of acute awareness, Ms. Allen details a community, and the environment that contains it, with clear, dynamic precision, expressing far more trust in an often-demanding natural world of forests, rivers and animals than in its equally unpredictable human inhabitants. Within this story she also notes her study of the Rajneesh movement in Oregon. She was likely the most knowledgeable "outsider" of that brief but notorious attempt of a spiritual colony to survive within a culture steeped in tradition and the American way. She presents both sides of the story in balance and fairness. Penny confides in the reader and allows the reader to recognize her insecurity in the challenges of adjusting to a new life in a small community with its own pains of growth and cultural changes. Still, she develops strong, enduring relationships with many of the local personalities in the manner of the code of the West. She gives them an opportunity to show themselves to her. The memoir is worth reading, for the view of a small rural community, for the insight and timeless experiences of the writer and for the reflective incentive it gives the reader.

A GEOGRAPHY OF SAINTS is as strikingly contradictory as the contemporary West. Penny Allen's diary-like account is freewheeling and contemplative, sweet and acerbic, tender and tough. It is a bravely public and intensely personal modern memoir which reveals that even in Paradise - especially in Paradise, perhaps - smugness begets arrogance and arrogance begets abuse. This is not, however, a cynical book. Ultimately, it affirms the cyclical nature of pettiness and largesse, love and loss, life and death, yielding an unsentimental, hard-won awareness that sad endings can be fresh starts.

Jane Kirkpatrick does not abandon her characteristic figures of speech and writing that touches the soul for this nonfiction book. She tells the story of homesteading on Starvation Point, a remote area along the John Day River in Oregon, where life acquires new significance and she realizes her dream of becoming a writer. This book gives evidence that a person's writing comes from his or her life, the experiences and people encountered on the journey of life. Throughout this book one can find the origin of many events and characters in Jane's novels. Her memoir is a well-written story that gives insight into the pursuit of dreams.

This was an excellent book! very good reading and would be appropriate for anyone. Good story and I loving knowing it is all something that happened!

This was the first book By Jane that I read. I was so impressed with her story and her writing that I immediately went out and bought her next trilogy. Upon reading the first of those books which I found as interesting, entertaining and historically accurate that I immediately went and bought every book she has ever written and am waiting for the next one.

This from a reader that doesn't read frilly stuff. It has to have substance and thought and be presented in a way that can keep you awake after a hard day of overtime.

Judy Burnett
Salt Lake City

Not many people would have the courage to take on what Jane and Jerry do, as chronicled in Homestead by Jane Kirkpatrick. Whether it's shooting rattlesnakes or handling dog seizures, surviving a plane crash or navigating a treacherous road, chasing down run away calves or protecting watermelons from the onslaught of deer, the Kirkpatrick's seem to have faced and conquered it all. Such stories usually make for great fiction. The most startling realization, however, is that this story is real.

Jane recalls everything from the beginning, in this memoir of personal struggle and ultimate triumph. To move to an unbroken land and settle into its rhythms, to find a home among the wilds was a dream that she and her husband shared. More often than not, however, it seemed that this dream was as unmanageable as the road they had to travel just to get there. Everything kept going wrong. From broken machinery to tragedies of a larger scale, the Kirkpatricks found that these events kept drawing them closer to one another. For Jane, the call was to "go to the land and write." And write she did; not only this memoir, but nine novels as well. Settling the land was an adventure and a risk neither of them now regret making.

The book was well written with enough action and personal perspective to keep a reader interested. One can not help but feel Jane's concerns as she watches her husband's vehicle slip desperately close to a cliff edge, as she tries to reach out in the best way she knows how while feeling so inadequate. It isn't within herself or her husband that Mrs. Kirkpatrick finds the strength to carry on. That's the kind of strength she only finds in Christ.

Broken into four parts, the book reads quickly and leaves the reader feeling rejuvenated and wondering, "How on earth did these two manage to do this?" Homestead is a book that challenges while it encourages. It challenges the reader to grasp every day and turn it into something memorable; it encourages to keep eyes focused on the dream, whatever it may be, even when getting to it is tough. This is a good and memorable book for all ages. - Lauren Steigerwald, Christian Book Previews.com

Jane Kirkpatrick's writing carries with it the spirit of the pioneers. "Homestead" chronicles the Kirkpatricks' effort as a married couple to carve out a living from the dry, hard soil of eastern Oregon. They rough it as they go along, working toward a suitable well, a home with an actual foundation, and a road that doesn't rattle their teeth from their jaws.

A fitting testimony to the stubborn stamina and ingenuity of modern pioneers--and a bracing reminder of what our forbears went through--this book is also a heartwarming look into the meaning of family, faith, and friendship. Jane's love of life shines through every chapter, and yet there is no glossing over the troubles, large or small. This is an honest account of the price one pays to pave his or her own way.

While straightforward and economical, "Homestead" is a book that breathes with the fires of imagination and good humor. Jane's writing qualifies this story as a modern masterpiece. My wife and I read some of the chapters aloud to one another, and at a few points we were laughing to the point of tears; at others, we were moved to prayers of thankfulness for our creature comforts and to quiet hugs of love. This is a book for all to enjoy, and one that'll be read for years to come.

If you want a book to use a jumping off point for more learning about Oregon's rich, interesting history, the Oregonian's book on Oregon is a great place to start. Great for any personal library, I highly recommend it!

PURCHASED FOR MY HUSBAND FOR HIS BIRTHDAY AND HE HAS HARDLY PUT IT DOWN SINCE RECEIVING IT! AS WE ARE FAIRLY NEW TO THE STATE, WE UNDERSTAND THE PLACE WE NOW LIVE AND WHAT LEAD UP TO THE WAY WE FIND OREGON TODAY. WE HIGHLY RECOMMEND TO ANYONE INTERESTED IN NORTHWEST HISTORY AND IT PEOPLE.

Although we did purchase this as a gift for a friend and colleague moving to Sisters, Oregon we did scan it and it is a wonderful book.

Being a former Oregon resident and to this day occasional Oregon visitor, I was fascinated by this book, which is a history of the Beaver State, and one that is done quite well. From the chronology of the state, to recording historic events, and sidebars about influential people in its history, this book takes a wonderful look back over the past 150 years.

Since the book was written by staff members of the Oregonian, it reads like a "newspaper account" of the days leading from Oregon's inception to the present. But what an entertaining account. From the early days, through the "turn of the century, the roaring 20's, the Depression, wartime, the fifties, turbulent 60s, up to the year 2000, all events are well-documented.

I never knew for example that Tom McCall when he was governor in 1970 staged the only ever state-run rock concert. I only saw him years later when I lived in Oregon and saw him deliver commentary on the evening news. I knew of course about Vanport and its horrendous end. I also remembered the bad flooding in 1996, having been in Portland the weekend before it happened. And of course, who could ever forget Mt. St. Helens erupting in 1980? These of course are just a few of the events that have occured in Oregon's history

I mentioned sidebars about influential people. People like McCall, Artie Wilson (a famous Pacific Coast League baseball player now living in Portland), Beverly Cleary (who wrote the Henry books I loved as a kid), Neil Goldschmitt, and the current Portland mayor Vera Katz, among others.

I have always loved the state of Oregon and its people, even if I'm a dreaded "Californian." This book reinforces my love and admiration of the state to the north of me.

This is better than a history book. I lived in Oregon for years and never knew half of the things that are in this book. It is laid out so that you can pick it up for a few minutes of quick facts or read it as a novel; I did both. I think this will be a great gift for someone who has roots in Oregon

Ms. Mattern is a true hero. Her story has given me a new perspective on living. In the face of death, she saw life. I can only pray that I would possess half the courage she had while fighting cancer if ever I find myself in a similar situation. Her book will leave you with a whirlwind of emotions; I laughed and cried. The book is a beautiful composition of an amazing woman's will to live. Her family and friends were her backbone, never letting her fall. I highly recommend this book; it's a must-read for all.

This book is a testimony of a woman standing in the face of insurmountable odds and creating a recovery plan that goes beyond the traditional western model. It is a spiritual journey. The author used all of her stored up business skills to make her treatment and recovery a team effort. Loved it!!!

The writing is first class. This story is a riveting chronology of a compelling life. It is a must read for everyone facing great challenges in their life, for all those who love someone facing great challenges and for everyone else because we are all vulnerable. The open disclosure and emotional honesty is heartwarming. This book provides paths to success for others - it changed my view and approach to cancer and enriched my view of love. I would rate this book more than five stars if given the choice.

This is an inspiring book about a person's recognition, struggle and successful battle with a catastrophic illness. How does she reach down and find the strength to fight this cancer? How does she use all of her resourses and strengths and rely on friends and family for help? It's a must read since we will all have someone in our life...if not ourselves...who will deal with this.
This book is so real, so informative, at times lightened with humor but always a powerful story.

Each page of her book uncovers another layer of this beautiful lady's soul. You cannot help but to be drawn into her precious life and experiences. During your reading of this book, you too will experience a spiritual metamorphosis. Read it. Experience it. Find healing.

This remarkable book starts off slowly but builds steam thereafter in an absolutely spellbinding tale of a Polygamous wife - the second wife - entangled in the web woven by the opposing and confusing contradictions of Religion, Government, self-worth, and family. To further complicate matters for this particular family, it unfolds during the time that the Mormon Church was aligning with the U.S. Govt. in the attempt to phase out the practice of plural marriage among it's members, and be accepted as a State. In a catch 22, the people are often left to fend for themselves when the wheels of bureaucracy begin to turn against a tradition.

The story illuminates the potent undercurrent running turbulently beneath the "peaceable kingdom" concept of plural marriage; that of the human element so basic that no amount of religious teaching seems to tame; that of jealousy, the need for absolute love of one person for another, mingling with the eternal struggle for survival in desperate times without enough money; coupled with the anguish of trying to raise too many children without enough other resources either - and in an already unbearable set of new and complex circumstances thrust upon them.

The chapter dealing with the "deal" made between a first wife and a second regarding the "payment of the first girl child" is written with remarkable style and feeling, leaving the reader breathless, knowing this is far too believable to be fiction and is undoubtedly drawn on from a family history of long ago.

The chapter dealing with the "return of the missionary" and the surprise he brings with him is yet another story the reader does not expect and is related with humor, emotion and, thrown in, the unexpected "throwing to the winds" of what has up to then been a binding contract of the soul.

It's a wonderful book, and one that needed to be written. I highly recommend it if the reader is searching for an unusual reading experience, and can enjoy with an open mind a different type of literature.

I've been trying since I registered with Amazon four years ago to find the courage --and enough superlatives--to review this timeless, brilliant, incomparable, exquisite, flawless, hilarious, heartbreaking, life-affirming, never-to-be-forgotten story told from the viewpoint of the second wife-in-polygamy of a Mormon tailor during the tumultuous years when Utah had to abolish polygamy in order to join the Union.

Linnae is the most human and believable, yet the most lovable & admirable, heroine in literature--and that is no easy trick.

Every chapter describes a mini-epoch in those years of her life and is an almost-stand-alone jewel of a story. You will chuckle as long as you live about Christmas day at the novel-reader's house, and Mrs. Dancey and son Horace with their narrow hands and feet who used all the precious drinking water for bathing and hid the big green glass paperweight when it became a utilitarian object. And the hat that fell in the privy, the long campaign for toe slippers, the dead baby in the icehouse, the Old & Young Mrs. Monteith's tug of war over the first baby girl, poor Olaf's efforts to treat two wives exactly the same, Mrs. Sterling and the two beautiful Norwegian sisters her husband brought home from a mission trip. (I'm grinning now.)

Ardyth Kennelly was without doubt the finest dialogist who ever put pen to paper. The conversation between Linnae and the novel-reader's husband as he walks her home on Christmas evening, the bickering of the children while Linnae is telling them for the zillionth time their favorite story about Tom Thumb's wedding, her everyday exchanges with her children--there's not a false note in the nearly-400 pages.

Because I don't want to be a spoiler I won't even try to tell you about the most breathtakingly brilliant chapter in any book I've ever read--the last chapter of this book. Enough said.

I've surely bought and given away two dozen copies of this book since I first read it as a condensed novel in Good Housekeeping. I've never failed to get a call or card from the recipient thanking me for an extraordinary gift.

Several years ago I lent my copy to a dear friend who's even older than I and the only person I know who reads more than I do. We often exchange books we like and find little to say about most of them. But when she came for coffee the next week she handed it back to me with the strangest expression I've ever seen on her face and just looked at me for a second or two before she said in an awed voice, "It's.......... the best book..... I've ever read. Can you help me find copies for myself and Sam (her daughter) and maybe one for my library?" (I found her three copies from Amazon sellers.)

PLEASE read the superb Wikipedia entry on the beautiful and multi-talented woman whose first novel this was. (She died only a year or so ago.) Buy a used copy of the book TODAY and let's see if we can't persuade some influential reviewer to review it again so someone will reprint it for the next generation. It is a national disgrace to let a literary & historical treasure like this slip into oblivion.

I first read this book more than 20 years ago and the memory of it has haunted me (in a good way) ever since. Set in Utah in the late 1800's, shortly after the Morman Church had repudiated polygamy, the story is told from the perspective of the second wife of a polygamous marriage. The book is wise and funny and heartfelt. It moved me between belly laughs and tears (and isn't a day with both laughter and tears bound to be memorable?). If Mark Twain had been a Morman woman he would have written this book and I think it deserves to rank with Huckleberry Finn as an American classic.

I happened on Ardyth Kennelly's books at a library 35 years ago. I re-read each of her five novels every few years. I have been concerned that her works would disapear. ("Up Home" and "The Spur" are difficult to find on the used book market). How wonderful to learn that Kennelly's first novel has been reissued. I hope "Up Home," "Marry Me, Carry Me," "Good Morning Young Lady" and "The Spur" will also be back in print soon.
"Peaceable Kingdom" is the tale of a young Mormon second wife. Her story emerges in gem-like chapters, each one of which could stand on its own as an essay or short story. This book is a lovely reading experience.

Like the other reviewer, I just happened upon this book on the shelves and was surprised at how much it moved me. It is the story of the 2nd wife (and brood) in a Mormon, polygamous marriage near the turn of the century. The author's use of language creates vivid characters and anecdotes. I wish more people knew of this book.

This book are nothing but stories of Jesuit Priest Gary Smith finding Christ in the heart of the poor. The book is full of the beautiful mess that is serving the inner-city poor and homeless. The stories are painful. At times physically sickening from the details of the dirt and despair. And they are sometimes so heavy with heartbreak that they leave you speechless. But then there are stories that carry with them an amazing amount of hope. Stories of simple romance and huge sacrifices. Smith manages to describe how he finds God in both extremes. In the pain and the hope and how they both convey beauty, even when it's messy.

What a great book! A great balance of compassion and indignation at the way we treat the poor. It gave a me a wonderful insight into the heart of the poor and challnegened me to look at each person as a precious individual

Gary Smith shows a view of the poor that I never thought of before. Ultimately, that they are human beings and have feelings. Smith helps people without wanting to receive anything in return. It's a fascinating book and very touching.

I could not put this book down. The poor were fairly and honestly represented and the author treats them with such dignity and kindness. One is hard pressed to find any fault with a man or woman who ministers to the poor. They are often a light to us and Mother Theresa made this blatantly clear through her life and work among them. A magnificent text; worth reading and worth living!

Halfway through his book, Jesuit priest Gary Smith describes a 2 a.m. street scene he once witnessed. A couple of guys, both probably drunk, were having a shouting and shoving match. Tempers escalated until one of the two pulled a knife. The other guy shouted: "You can't kill me, motherf***er! I'm already dead!"

This haunting scene serves as a metaphor for the book's message. The people with whom Smith lives and ministers--the street people, the abandoned, the unstable, the addicted, the hopeless--too frequently see themselves as the walking dead. Why wouldn't they? "Respectable" society dismisses them as the dark, dirty secret it would like to sweep under the rug. It doesn't take too much exposure to our success-oriented culture to internalize its standards of social condemnation. If you're told often enough that you're garbage, you begin to believe it.

The stories that Smith tells about these people are heartrending. But they also sometimes shine with a certain dignity and hope that helps readers break through the stereotypical way we've been trained to think about the homeless. In listening to Smith's stories, those of us who are fortunate to live on the right side of the tracks just might be able to recognize that we're also among the living dead. Our pocketbooks may be healthy, but our hearts are dead because we tolerate the suffering of our fellow humans and do nothing about it. Radical compassion--to which all of us are called--quickens us back to life. The poor's very existence is a challenge to our lifestyles and a gift to us of the possibility of conversion.

Smith refuses to be a zombie. As he says (p. 98): "I take it all [the suffering of others] personally. If a woman or a man is abused, then I am abused, and if I don't feel that way, then I want to feel that way. If your flesh is lacerated, so is mine."

To which I say: "Amen!"

For anybody going on bike tours this is a humbling book to read, and hard to put down. You can't help but root for two 18 year old boys who don't know enough not to make the trip. It also has special meaning for anyone who has ever driven all or parts of I-5 from San Francisco to Seattle. In 1909 it was possible to stay on the best road between California and Washington, and still get lost. Finally you get a feel for what life was like when my grandfather was alive. The postcards the two boys sent to their parents show buildings still standing today, but life was so much different. A good read.

If you enjoy reading about cycling and living this is a great book. I've read every touring and cycling book you can imagine, but this is the best! It really gives you a new perspective on how we ride today when you look at what these two boys had to endure at the turn of the century when roads did not exists as we know today. A truly well written adventure, great venacular dialogue, credible and yet an incredible story.

This book is an amazingly well-written story of the adventures of two young men bicycling from Santa Rosa, California to the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition in Seattle in 1909. You are drawn into the narrative until, before you know it, you find yourself riding along with them on their trip, tasting the dust, feeling their occasional pain, and even enjoying a piece of pie with them... and then you realize that, like an Ansel Adams photograph, you have been drawn into an illusion of a reality long past. And, smiling, you dive back into the book and continue pedaling.

I bought this book thinking it would be an interesting adventure tale. It is that but so much more. The writing is poetic and heart warming. An absolutely wonderful little book!!

I first bought the book because of its Vashon Island connection, being a lifelong islander myself. But I quickly decided it's one of the best bicycle touring stories in my library -- the boys come alive in the writing, no dreary list of statistics and mileposts, just two boys becoming men on their ride north to Seattle. Puts a whole new perspective on that ride for anyone who has cycled the Pacific Coast route in modern times.

If you have never lived on the Oregon Coast, but are planning a visit, you need this book immediately. If, like me, you spent many childhood years on the Oregon coast, freezing and miserable, and you wish that someone would finally reveal that it is a perfect place to stock with polar bears and penguins, and that the beaches of Oregon are ideal for hardcore fanatic beach-lovers who enjoy sandblaster wind in the face and water so cold that it invites damnation, you must get multiple copies of this book and start handing it out to anyone who thinks Oregon beaches are the northern version of California beaches.

I bought this book because it's by one of my favorite authors, and was not disappointed. Uncle Mike is a talented author. I grew up in Oregon, and all my "beach" experience revolved around the Pacific Ocean--on or near Cannon Beach. My friend grew up in both California and Oregon, and defines Oregon as a coast, which you "look at it from the warm car while you drive by to a real beach (in California)." As I can't stand California beaches, and think cold and gray is a perfect way to see the ocean, we frequently debate the points of our favorite locales. Based on my background, I wholeheartedly support Uncle Mike's portrayal of the sea monster, sea gulls, and other fine folk of the coast. I enjoy reading it to my friend, who morosely insists that it's funny because it's TRUE. (Apparently she's one of those that should have read the book before venturing out barefoot onto the sand as a child.)
The artwood is phenomenal, and Uncle Mike's commentary is first hilarious. If you've never experienced the Oregon Coast, read this book and be warned!

A copy of this book was sent to humorist Dave Barry taped to a six-pack of beer. In return, Uncle Mike recived a dummy front page of the Miami Herald, the headline of which declared: "Michael Burgess is excellent. Why do I say this? Because he sent me beer."

I lived on the Oregon Coast for almost two years. A friend gave this to me as a going-away present and it was the perfect gift. This book sums up all the reasons you wouldn't want to visit Oregon like sea-monsters, clever sea gulls, devious ravens, and, of course, the weather. All in a dark tone that perfectly matches my memories of the dark skies, and yet side-splitting funny. A great gift for an Oregon Coast dweller.

I've lived in Oregon for over 20 years, and this is the first book that tells the frightening truth about the Oregon coast. Forget those posters and coffee table books showing beautiful coastlines and majestic cliffs bathed in sunshine--as Uncle Mike explains, these pictures were actually taken "during a break between storm fronts that occurs once or twice a decade and can last as long as a week." As for the inhabitants, "the culture that endures today, while of morbid interest to anthropologists, isn't for the squeamish."

The wildlife is not much better. Uncle Mike points out that there are many sharks on the Oregon coast--and that there are no happy sharks, only hungry ones. A giant octopus can "snatch you and your toy poodle from the rocks with the lightning ease of a frog catching flies." An elk is "basically a deer on steroids," and a sasquatch is a "nearly nonexistent" monster that "hunts down humans for sport." You get the idea: from tsunamis to seagulls to ceaseless rain, the Oregon Coast is a scary place to be.

Of course, it may be that Uncle Mike is only joking. It may be that the Oregon Coast is really a bright, beautiful place with cheerful inhabitants and friendly critters. On the other hand, it might be true that Oregon coast crabs "move quickly, are quiet as ghosts, and work well in groups." You do the math.

If you enjoy Uncle Mike's sardonic sense of humor, consider getting "Uncle Mike's Guide to Sex and Drinking" (hard to find) and the two volumes of "Letters to Uncle Mike." Come what may, the Oregon Coast will never be the same.