Washington Books

I have to say that even though I love food and finding awesome recipes, I rarely use the awesome cookbooks and recipes that I already have. EXCEPT THIS ONE! I can honestly say that I have made and tasted several of Kathy Casey's recipes. I really like that the ingredients are all easy to find in your local, normal grocery store. (B/c I want quality AND a one-stop shop.) I also love the flavors that come from the finished product. Try the crab cakes or endive salad!

This beautiful coffee table cookbook has it all; from creative uses of apples and hazelnuts to raspberries and rhubarb (w/honey mousse!). Crab, salmon, muscles, oysters, and halibut all here as well as pork loin, lamb, chicken and duck. And the cocktails and desserts are spot on for our region. As a northwest native and editor of The Good Home Cookbook: More Than 1,000 Classic American Recipes, I can say that these recipes well represent our region in a classy, tasteful and accurate manner. I highly recommend it!

Last night we finally got rid of the left over turkey from Thanksgiving and I get to think about fixing something else. I think I'm in a shrimp mood, and this book just fell open to page 66 with Sesame Roasted Shrimp Sticks with Zippy Apricot Dipping Sauce. Spicy, quick, easy and they look absolutely delicious.

As you would expect, this book from the Northwest has a lot of seafood. More ways to cook salmon that you can count (well, really you could count them) including some ways that are quite different from the others I've seen.

Another food area that has a lot of production in the Northwest is fruit, and some of her combinations of fresh fruit with farly shart ingredients like blue cheese look like the evenings side dishes are well taken care of.

Complaints, well there's one - Martini's are sacred things, you don't go messing them up with things like cucumber and sake (see page 38) - you don't even make them out of vodka - yuch! And Seattle Expresso Martini isn't really a Martini at all. Then again, the Slow-Roasted Martini Short Ribs (page 134) maybe I won't do shrimp tonight after all.

There are a lot of things here that you don't see in other cookbooks.

I just picked up Kathy Casey's new book and I love it. I must admit that I am one of those cooks that needs pictures to entice me to make something and Kathy's cookbooks always have them. Her salad recipes are to die for. So many salads are just so bland, but the Endive salad with Roasted pears is amazing. I'm also a big fan of her French Seasoning salt. I put it on everything!

Everything we have tried from "Kathy Casey's Northwest Table" has been incredible!! I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to impress their Family and Friends with delicious (and fairly easy---a must for me!) Northwest favorites. You can't go wrong!

This book if fun to read, Good writing, Makes you laugh and cry. You will have a great time with this book.

Patos Island is a tiny, magical, mystical undeveloped island that only a few fortunate sailors visit. I fell in love with it on my first visit, and only later did I learn of Helene Glidden's book. What a treasure! It brings her family alive in vivid detail--the hilarious, the heartbreaks and the nearly unimaginable hardships. After reading "The Light on the Island" I could not sail in that area without the benevolent company of their ghosts--I could almost hear them singing across the water, as if rowing on their way to a party on a neighboring island. Anyone who loves the San Juan Islands, anyone with a thirst for history will love this little book.

The Light On The Island was written by my great aunt, Helene Glidden. We have enjoyed reading the story over and over, and have spent two nights in Active Cove on Patos Island with our children. The last night we spent there was about 5 years ago, tied up to a bouy in our 29 foot sailboat. It was a terrible night, as Active Cove often lives up to it's name. I spent all night thinking about my aunt and what it must have been like to call that lighthouse home.
...a lovely book. I hope you read it and enjoy it as much as we have.

Helen Glidden wrote this gem for the amusement of her children. Lucky for us, she was persuaded to have it published. Now, happily, 50 years hence it's back in print. It's an enchanting story (mostly true) about a large family (13 children) of light house keepers posted to tiny Patos Island in the San Juan Islands of NW Washington State at the turn of the century. It is told through the eyes of the five-year-old, middle daughter and comes complete with smugglers, heroes, a murder or two, colorful characters, whimsy and plenty of humor. Glidden masters the tricky business of writing from the point of view of a youngster growing from five to 13 who, for example, thinks the bushy bearded man living on the lam in their forest and know only to her is God. The author was this girl.

In 1953 as a 10 year old living in upstate New York, I read The Light On The Island and was mesmerized by the adventures of Angie and her family on Patos Island. Living on an island with a lighthouse, surrounded by marine animals and birds, rowing about in boats, exploring the beaches, coves and woods of Patos was a dreamworld away from mine. The book remained one of my favorite childhood books,[ I still have the book---its dustcover in tatters] so imagine how I felt when 16 years later I met my husband, who was from the Seattle area and we eventually moved there and Angie's world was in my backyard. Four years ago we took our sailboat up to Patos and we walked the beaches, "the petticoats" of Patos Island. For young and old alike, The Light On The Island explores the world of a child, the dreams, the harsh reality, the innocence, life and death, and growing up. Read it for the first time, read it again, ---it will light up your day!

anyone wanting to understand what makes great art great should study this book. this collection includes tasteful and insightful comments about numerous paintings. this book is invaluable to me as an aspiring artist

This is a large book full of pictures of beautiful artworks. While there are some photos of sculpture and some of drawings, the bulk of what is reproduced here is painting. While many pages have multiple artworks, there are also quite a few where the painting is given a full page for more close observation and study.

The quality of the reproductions is quite good, if not quite superb. The captions and text describing the art and artists are very good and most helpful for the general reader. The book opens with several articles on the National Gallery and its history and policies.

The plates are organized chronologically and by the national schools of their times. The earliest artworks are circa the 13th century and concludes with works of the 20th century.

You could spend many days enjoying this glorious selection of art and still find many more days of study before you exhaust all that is offered in this fine book about a great national treasure.

This big, beautiful book should be on any art lover's shelf! A treasury of reproductions of the world's best art is contained here. The reproductions are excellent; colors are preserved in all their glory. Walker's text is informative & interesting. The next best thing to actually visiting the National Gallery is owning this book.

This is a beautiful book! The color plates are very nice and are good representations of the actual paintings. Brief histories are also presented. I bought it after my first visit to the National Gallery of Art and before my second visit. I enjoyed the second visit much more because I felt that I really knew what was going on with the artists and paintings. Get the book and then go to the National Gallery of Art!

This book is one of my favorites, and has been for many years. Its beautiful color illustrations are grouped by the period and country in which they were created. The book presents works (mostly paintings) from many countries (mostly Western) beginning in the Byzantine era, extending up until the early twentieth century. Many of the works are accompanied by art historical abstracts which offer insight for both the inexperienced and learned art enthusiast. This is a great book to have around as an extensive survey of Western painting.

I read this book several times when I was young. It brings together 2 people who society has forgotten. They both turn out to be great human beings. This book has adventure suspense and a great ending.

One of Astrid Lindgren's best books, deserves to be better known and more widely circulated. The characters are realistic, and the story carries them through difficult times into an ending that is satisfying as it is surprising. Bravo!

Rasmus is a likeable boy stuck in an orphanage because the prospective parents that come always pick the curly haired girls. He runs away and meets a vagabond named Oscar, and then the adventures begin. This book has it all - warmth, humour, danger, excitement, wonderful characters, and an ending that is deeply satisfying. I loved this book as a child and have bought several since as presents for other children. A hardcover edition holds a place of honor on my bookshelf. If you have a heart, you will love this book.

This is one of the best books I have ever read. Its like a kid running off and joining the circus. Like going to the animal shelter and always seeeing the puppys or kittens getting to go home. This will take you back to simpler times, that I miss. I felt this is a great book for any kid to read. I read this at least 20-30 times and still am reading it! A+ A+ A+

I must have read this book 100 times as a kid. I remember checking it out from my school library so many times that the librarian told me I should go out and buy a copy to have forever. I wish I would have taken her advice as it is now out of print. I recently found a copy at our public library and had the pleasure to read it aloud to my 7 and 9 year old boys. It was great to see them enjoy this tale as much as I had. I would read two chapters a night and every night it was the same old thing... "Just one more chapter Dad???" Reading about Rasmus and Oscar again after all of these years was like meeting up with old, long-lost friends.

This book is very educational on the Gay Homeless Underground Society. It was fascinating to me & I finished the book voraciously.

Warm, intelligent, humorous, sensitive, are words I use to describe Mr. Washington's first published offering. I'm sure it won't be his last. He shows a world most of us will never see, and usually try to forget. Yet, does it with warmth and charm rarely associated with the subject. He could teach us all the value of love without question. For me, I see a larger message "life is a "learning process" sometimes good, sometimes bad, but you have to experience the pain and joy to learn and grow. We never know how we will be effected till journeys end.
I think we are all very lucky there was a chapter two, and more. Can't wait for the next edition.

totally groovy...realistic portrayal of homelessness...story draws you in...

They are with us every day. We try to avoid seeing them at the street corners and traffic lights of any large city. They are "street people". They are part of what is termed the "Civilized World". This world, however, wishes to ignore them by pretending they are invisible. They disturb our idea of "civilization", but they are real.

Archie Washington describes their daily struggle to survive in detailed and even colourful pictures. Depicting their quest for warmth, friendship, love and recognition in dry humour he shows that they are fellow human beings just like you and I, regardless of the way which led them into their current situation and of their chances to escape from it.

This narrative, which remains timeless, takes place in a past not long ago. It is an important document creating empathy and making us think about the war the homeless people wage on the system every day - in America and in most countries of the Western world.

then you should have no problem picking up this book, reading it and being able to go right to sleep after with a clear concience. Mr Bouvier takes the reader right to the heart of what is going on around me & YOU in our everyday lives. The events that he experienced took place some 10+ years ago, but don't let that discourage you for one moment, it may be 10 years old, but is actually more current then this morning's news on CNN. It gives you a frightening taste of what is really going on around us as we drive our late model cars and sip on our designer coffee everyday. It all takes place at a time when the name in the White House is "Bush" and we are about to embark on another WAR for Oil in IRAQ. Seems we are wasting more precious time and energy for over 10 years that has only achieved yet another WAR, meanwhile back at home, our own people are dropping like flies, suffering needlessly by our own ignorance. We have some nerve trying to tell other countries how they should run thiers when we can't seem to even run our own. I've never been a reader, but was instantly captivated by some of Mr. Bouvier's opening comments at the beginning of his travels. It is a very short book that will have your attention and keep you in suspense with something that surrounds us everday...... REALITY.

Winner of the 2004 Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry, The Sleep Accusations is an eclectic, intimate, and highly recommended collection of the greatest poetry from the intriguing and intuitive works by Randall Watson. A Dog's Life: I love the morning rain./I am like a dog in the street/with my ears up./It's as if I've been out all night/and I am hungry./I can hear the one who feeds me/calling me home.

Winner of the 2004 Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry, The Sleep Accusations is an eclectic, intimate, and highly recommended collection of the greatest poetry from the intriguing and intuitive works by Randall Watson. A Dog's Life: I love the morning rain./I am like a dog in the street/with my ears up./It's as if I've been out all night/and I am hungry./I can hear the one who feeds me/calling me home.

Winner of the 2004 Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry, The Sleep Accusations is an eclectic, intimate, and highly recommended collection of the greatest poetry from the intriguing and intuitive works by Randall Watson. A Dog's Life: I love the morning rain./I am like a dog in the street/with my ears up./It's as if I've been out all night/and I am hungry./I can hear the one who feeds me/calling me home.

Winner of the 2004 Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry, The Sleep Accusations is an eclectic, intimate, and highly recommended collection of the greatest poetry from the intriguing and intuitive works by Randall Watson. A Dog's Life: I love the morning rain./I am like a dog in the street/with my ears up./It's as if I've been out all night/and I am hungry./I can hear the one who feeds me/calling me home.

Winner of the 2004 Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry, The Sleep Accusations is an eclectic, intimate, and highly recommended collection of the greatest poetry from the intriguing and intuitive works by Randall Watson. A Dog's Life: I love the morning rain./I am like a dog in the street/with my ears up./It's as if I've been out all night/and I am hungry./I can hear the one who feeds me/calling me home.

After reading Before Women had Wings, I hungered for more from Connie May Fowler. I found Sugar Cage to be a deeply satisfying follow-up. The novel, told in many different voices, takes us on the unforgettable journeys of a diverse cast of characters, all of whom reel the reader into an intricate tapestry woven by Fowler. Startling descriptions of Hatian voodoo rituals were among the most vivid scenes from the book, whose magical conclusion leaves the reader spellbound. A mesmerizing novel, Sugar Cage, like Fowler's other work, has left me hungry for more!

SUGAR CAGE weaves the story of such disparate people as Inez Temple, black maid to rich folks, Patrick Lackley, finicky mortician, and Charlie Loonie, front-man schmoozer for a local band. The women in this book will steal your heart -- especially the dear-hearted Inez, Charlie's loyal wife, Rose, and the magical Soleil Marie Beauvoir. The story is often dark and sad, but the mystical ending will inspire and uplift you.

For a first novel, I found the writing astonishing. Anyone who can make you care about so many contrasting characters (and make it easy to follow the thread) is a born writer. I adore a novel that pulls you in from the very first sentence . . . SUGAR CAGE does that.

Inez Temple is working as a maid in a cheap tourist hotel on the South Florida coast when she meets Rose Looney. A Haitian woman with an ability to "see' the outlines of peoples lives, Inez sees in the sugar crystals in the bottom of a glass Rose has drunk from the outlines of a cage and knows early on that Rose and her new husband, Charlie, and their friends Junior and Eudora, and their children, are destined to be trapped in many ways in the years to come.

15 years later, Rose knows this as well. How she struggles to find her way through her broken marriage and try to save her only son from the same fate in the midst of all the "bars of the cages" society and life confine her within--poverty, racism, sexism, cultural snobbery and so on, is at the core of this unusual tale of life in the melting pot that is South Florida.

The mysticism gets a bit out of hand at times-and stretches credulity it the process, but this is a minor flaw in an otherwise excellent novel.

This was the type of book that you can never put down. I read it all in one night. The best part about the book is the way the author displayed each character individually. It then ended up showing how each of the characters were uniquely linked togeather. It's a book that I will always love to read again and again. I would most definitly reccomend it.

Connie May Fowler creates intimacy for the reader and all of the books characters. By bringing first person to all the characters we get to know more about how people choose the decisions they made and what motivates each one towards the life they choose. I really enjoyed the way she was able to keep the story progressing thorugh time but also using other's perspective on what occured or is occuring at the moment. Also the influences of Haitian voo-doo help add new depth to Florida southern culture. And gives new information to the reader about pagean religion and the intellegence and beauty it brings to the characters of this book. I felt her pride or her willingness to explore and place in a positive light Haitian voo-doo. I think the main essence of the book for me was that everyone needed to listen to thier own voice. And once they steered away from that is when thier lives turned towards unhappiness. The realness of coming to terms with our demons and releasing ourselves into our own strengths was what I felt Fowler was trying to get across. The beauty of how she used everyones perspective instead of one main character and narrator is what I enjoyed the most. I enjoyed being able to be sypathetic to everyone's life and the way they had/have chosen to live it.

My hiking, camping, backpacking, Nature-loving, outdoorsman hubby bought this book for me - and I began it reluctantly. Boy, was this gal surprized and pleased. A beautifully written narrative with fascinating characters, settings, dialogue, and points of view. I loved it! And now plan on reading more of Harrison. SUNDOG would make a great film! And I would love to write the script.

This powerful novel by the author of LEGENDS OF THE FALL and Farmer concerns the life and loves of a foreman named Robert Corvus Strang. Strang worked on giant dam projects in the U.S., South America, and Africa, until he was crippled in a fall down a three-hundred-foot dam. Now as he tries to regain use of his legs, he has a chance to reassess his life, and a bored journalist who has heard of Strang's reputation in the field arrives to draw him out about his various incarnations. Strang recounts his life, including his childhood in the Midwest, his several marriages and children, dozens of lovers, and his work on projects around the world. Strang has the violently heightened sensibilities of a man who has gone to the limits and back, a man who is passionately and unequivocally committed to life. Harrison captures the foreman's tale with head-on frankness and clarity that needs no elaboration, no embellishment. This is a story as true and gripping as real life, and ultimately as victorious.

About the Author -- Jim Harrison has been awarded the National Endowment for the Arts (1968-69) and the Guggenheim Fellowship (1969-70). He is the author of WOLF: A FALSE MEMOIR, A GOOD DAY TO DIE, FARMER, LEGENDS OF THE FALL, WARLOCK, and SELECTED AND NEW POEMS. The author has lived in Michigan, Arizona, and Montana.

I am from Brasil and I live in da UP! I drank from the Tocantins and took many a swim in Superior. This book rocks my world!

The best there is! ...and if you read it and like it, you should try the short story "Brown Dog." ...or maybe it's "Browndog." Either way, it's from "The Woman Lit by Fireflies."

Jim Harrison rules!

In Corvus Strang, Harrison has created a character as significant in American Literature as any of those created by Melville, Twain, or Kerouac. This novel is truly a classic.

When I read for pleasure, the most important thing to me is the quality of the fictional dream. If it pulls me in and captures my imagination, I'm happy and satisfied. I really don't pay much attention to whatever messages the author might be trying to send to the readers, or what deeper meanings might be concealed in the prose. I just want to be carried off in a fictional dream which provokes thought and perhaps changes my outlook, if only for a short time. SUNDOG is such a book. The fictional dream it creates is wonderful and seductive. I've reread this book time and again and it just keeps getting better and better. You should read it; I bet you'll like it, and enjoy it. Harrison's talent is really something rare and great, and this book is one of my all-time favorites.

This final entry--1988 marks its long-delayed arrival--in a lengthy career (starting in the mid-1940s) of scant fiction marks the end of the postwar, triumphalist, yet marginalized, Midwestern Catholic parish--and notably here, rectory--intrigues that Powers excelled at conveying. His scale, being so focused, gains accuracy and depth by its concentration upon detail. Like a model railroad set, the 1:150 (or whatever!) ratio means painstaking attention to fidelity. Such realism to the untutored eye appears grotesque or caricatured, but to an aware observer reveals a nearly exact fit of form with content.

I give it four rather than five stars as I have re-read (and reviewed here, "Morte" and the thirty stories in their original three volumes as well as the collected reissue) all of Powers recently, and I believe that his many strengths as a writer are at times clouded slightly by his tendency towards oversubtlety. A forgivable fault in an era of so many authors straining for the obvious or what critics call "overdetermining" their subject, but Powers tends in all his work towards lengthy passages where not much goes on at all, but in which an editor could have polished the presentation and refined the craft even further. Powers appears to have been his own worse enemy and his own most scrupulous critic, on the other hand. Be it as it may, Powers makes nearly all of his peers look hasty, scattered, and undisciplined by comparison.

Action over the course of a priest's youth, coming of age, and gradual rise from curate to administrative assistant (when that word did not connote a secretary or receptionist) and then pastor comprises the narrative. Less verve here than the worldlier, more urbane Fr Urban had, but perhaps in his principled if compromised (the whole crux of the tension) fidelity to the needs of separating "Church from Dreck" Powers reveals that the need for reform Fr Urban realized while Vatican II was still in session (so to speak) by the end of the decade became all the more apparent as the slow slide downhill accelerated. Set by its conclusion around 1968, if offhandedly, the Catholic Worker roots of Powers and his conservative radicalism stand his fictional main character in good stead as priests wander off, parishioners ignore crusty priests' reprimands, malls open on Sundays, the hillbilly's war machine thunders on in the small town press, and guitars with cant supplant chant.

This novel, like his earlier (sharing with it a clumsy if rarified referential title) "Morte d'Urban," (1962), suffers from arid stretches, where the humor is so deadpan, the pace so true that the inert nature of our own shared experience with the clerical protagonists appears too neatly aligned. Dullness enters. A VD quarantine warning takes up one and a half pages verbatim. A few sample sermons from Father Felix (who helps out saying weekend Masses) summarize the stultifying, yet sincere, homiletics of a certain, less soundbitten, age. So with Powers, who in this novel had been criticized as a man out of time, with figures he identified with whose era had passed them by. Joe is only in his mid-forties. He seems much older. This may be a sign of now-diminished respect, when the maturity demanded of authority figures gave an earned dignity and a bit of unearned noblesse oblige to the clergy in smaller towns where the collar still mattered. Joe Hackett manages to get through the routine, and out of the limelight that had once courted his counterpart Fr. Urban, this parish priest does his best balancing God with Mammon, as the demands of a new accounting system make fundraising all the more essential, even as this pulls at the Gospel admonition that it's better to give alms in secret. How to square this with the need to make accountable freeloading parishioners when the Archbishop's needs come payable on demand? Out of such quandaries, Powers raises his own quiet art.

The need in fiction for a jolt, a spark, a spin off from the quotidian to the profound nestles, certainly, in Powers. This, however, moves along leisurely, and often nothing seems to happen for chapters at a time. Then, you understand that this accurately limns the trajectory of a recognizably human life like our own. You can see Powers' study of Joyce in his preparation of the slow ascent to epiphanies, such as Fr. Joe Hackett's finessed blessing of a scruffy draft resister who steps to tie his shoelaces while the padre finagles praying over his head and out of eyesight or earshot as the young man prepares to flee to Canada, on the pastor's unspoken advice but according to his moral example.

Re-reading this nearly two decades after it appeared, I admire Powers' critique of not only the institutional Church and its compromises with the world, but of his own admission that holy Joes only go so far in their own zeal in battling for their losing side. They must do so, vowed to do so and called by their Maker, but Powers recognizes in his own mellowing how annoying piety and phariseeism can be for the rest of us. Not for nothing is an early battle Joe engages in at the seminary, much to the disgust of some classmates and the suspicion of his rector, over the necessity of wearing a hairshirt.

Constructed in part from stories written over the past (two of which appeared in the last of his three thin story collections, 1975's "Look How the Fish Live," the novel does let its seams show. I wonder if parts of this novel were left too long on the shelf, or in hibernation. Yet, this is how Powers wrote. Very slowly, spending days pondering if a character would use the term "pal" or "chum" in referring to a confrere. Such was his state of mind, and more power to him. Probably a patron saint of scrupulous writers, if he is canonized as he deserves! His friend and colleague Jon Hassler eulogized him as "a saint with a bad temper." Hassler notes how Powers could strain so long over a detail that a reader, even an informed one such as himself, might miss the very nuanced finesse.

The extended battle of the story that was "Bill" for Joe to learn his new curate's name appears tedious and unbelievable, a shaggy-dog tale after a few pages of the many devoted to this embarrassing and rather cryptic episode. The story earlier published as "Priestly Fellowship" enters the novel mostly unchanged, but again the dive into the post-Vatican II uproar appears muted, if perhaps less dated for its lack of topicality to specific changes so much as the persistent lack of clerical fidelity. Yet, as the novel lengthens, the episodes do build upon possibilities tucked into these two stories, and while they unfold in off-handed and perhaps overly-controlled fashion, they are truer to the texture of everyday life for being so controlled. Holiness comes, if at all, minutely slow. The lack of histrionics or forced symbolism remains despite the uneven pacing in his longer works Powers' greatest talent. Powers knew when and how indirect first-person voice carried his stories; his shift in and out of his protagonist's minds is at its best in the imagined reverie Joe lets himself into as he pitches in the yard with Bill to let off steam. As with Urban's similarly prosy--both exaggerated and ordinary-- temptation at Belleisle in "Morte," the priestly heroes let their deepest selves emerge when they pretend they are just like the rest of us. Powers, and we, know better.

A final word, quoted from one of his students in Commonweal on his death in 1999. In the novel, out of his collar on a much-needed vacation, Joe passes himself off at the hotel bar as working for a "big concern," in "life insurance." The firm? "Eternal." Sort of a multinational, he admits, although he works out of a local "branch office." Powers explained when asked in class why he wrote so much about the clergy, and if he was anticlerical. "I'm not anticlerical. I simply look for a story that elucidates truth. If a human being buys an insurance policy, that's not much of a story. But when a priest buys an insurance policy, there's something going on that needs to be said and I want to say it." It took him nearly fifty years to write it.

Anyone who has not read J.F. Powers is missing a major American voice in letters. This review will not be adequate to even speak of his skill.

Complete lives are sketched with the faintest of references, such as a family who the hero, Father Joe Hackett, brings from the city to remind his comfy parishioners of the trials of the poor (shades of the "holy poverty in the city" mantra so common from my youth). He tells their entire story with three unconnected lines sprinkled as a leitmotif throughout the narrative.

The hero's interior monologue is both revealing, and surprising. Throughout the novel faint points of challenges and grace (and simple, just-sufficient grace) carry the reader along with Father Joe's eventual conversion (rededication?). This is the story of a bumbling soul who eventually inhales the breath of the Divine.

Every person I've ever given a J.F. Powers book to has thanked me (Catholics and non-Catholics alike). Highly recommended, for this is monumentally great literature.

It is nothing short of a tragedy that more readers aren't familiar with J.F. Powers. This book is truly brilliant. Powers is at heart more craftsman than contemporary novelist, which is doubtless why he only published two novels. Wheat That Springeth Green is unlike anything else I've ever read. It's that rare novel that achieves perfection.

Joe Hackett, for all his faults, is one of the most fully-realized and sympathetic characters in contemporary fiction. As he matures, so does the book: from his hilariously overblown pretensions at the seminary, to his ennui and malaise as a pastor, to his subtly glorious final redemption.

In the final analysis, the book is not so much satire as fable about goodness. Despite being about the life of priests, the book is more a moral fable than a simply Catholic one: it's about how to do good in a world where it all seems futile. Joe Hackett is a cynic, but he's also at heart an idealist and optimist. So is J.F. Powers.

I read it in the early fall, a perfect time of year for me to read this sort of book, as it reminded me of my early years as a student at a Catholic elementary school in the suburbs. The book follows the life of a Catholic priest named Joe Hackett who struggles with faith and politics and more than anything else the shattering mundanity of his suburban life. Tree-lined streets, shopping malls, station wagons, vinyl siding, and wall to wall carpeting are Hackett's foils in a book that manages to be charming, melancholy, and very funny at the same time. Reading the book turned out to be a great way to spend a few September weeks. If anyone out there happened to enjoy The Sportswriter and Independence Day by Richard Ford, then you will enjoy this book as well.

The best of the series of books published by The New York Review of Books are all the works of J.F. Powers, who died in 1989. Powers' novels and stories are almost entirely concerned with Catholic clerical life in the midwest. I hadn't read his last novel, Wheat That Springeth Green, and I was happy to find that the new edition contained an introduction by the author's daughter, Katherine Powers. Wheat That Springeth Green is every bit as fine as Morte D'Urban, his first and only other novel written some 25 years earlier, and a National Book Award winner as well. In its treatment of character and plot the latter novel is theologically perhaps even more complex.

Joe's character is cast from the first pages: as a toddler he gets attention from his parents' friends merely for declaiming at a party "I go to church!" We also learn of his parents' antipathy towards the parish priest's intoning on the subject of the "Dollar-a-Sunday Club," an attitude that Joe will inherit, and which becomes a theme that will be played out in a number of surprising ways. We also sense something of his aloofness in these first chapters as well. He doesn't keep up with many friends, but he does seem to know the value in keeping up appearances: "Joe just smiled at Frances and everybody, so they couldn't tell how he really felt about being in the sack race..." Joe is a good athlete, even in grade school, and the race he really wants, but doesn't get, is the sprint.

Much of the story revolves around Joe's relation to money, so that even an early adventure (described in nearly pornographic detail) involving his first adult relations with women is later understood to be subsumed by his larger pecuniary obsessions. His sexual sins, or at least the memory of them, turn out to be something of a red herring: at the seminary he asks his instructor, "Father, how can we make sanctity as attractive as sex to the common man?" a question that (rightly) earns him nothing but mirth from his fellow seminarians. We are given hints that as Joe grows older he succeeds in overcoming his youthful scrupulosity. After a stint at Archdiocesan Charities he is assigned to the parish of St. Frances - a name shared by his childhood infatuation and a co-traveler in that youthful adventure. So as far as sex is concerned, there is in his maturity there a sense that all is right with Joe, if not the world. That this is the case is dramatically reinforced by the nearly hopeless entanglements of an ex-seminarian, some of which leads to misplaced retribution that Joe patiently, even faithfully endures. These episodes are magnificently structured, displaying in Joe's life a kind of fate that is worked out through choices made less in freedom than with a concern for propriety and in service to principles that are neither his own, nor of the church in which, as he says in other circumstances, he does so much hard time.

Other obstacles to holiness, as perhaps they always must, remain. Although his basic attitude is good, the reader realizes that the young Father Hackett has refused one halo in favor of another when he refuses to toady up to either the priest in his parish or to the archbishop in his archdiocese. Money matters are everywhere in evidence: the rectory built by Joe; bribes offered by parishoners; purses collected on behalf of retiring priests; inheritence; a collection drive that is farmed out to a private firm - in which Joe will take no part. All this points to beyond the contradiction in one man's character to a paradox that is funamental to our very being. How do we care for an abundance which is most fully ours when we least consider it our own?

Joe's misappropriation of his own nature, and indeed human nature, leads to a truly heinous transgression in one of the final chapters. That this transgression is committed and then resolved in secret, without comment from Joe or even the narrator, points toward a God who is as truly all merciful as he is unnoticed even by lesser beings working on his behalf. I would guess that the true thorn in Joe's side is also Powers', and while reading I several times wondered whether the crux of the story wasn't inspired by his frustration at watching baskets and plates passed through the pews, week in and week out, for a lifetime.

Very highly recommended.

I would recommend "A Year in the Life of a Shinto Shrine", by John K. Nelson, to anyone with an interest in Shinto and Japanese Culture. The book provides a detailed look at Shinto rituals at Suwa Jinja in Nagasaki, Japan. My favorite chapters were about the purification of a plot of land for a construction company, the great purification ceremony, and ringing in the New Year. The chapters about women at the shrine and how younger Japanese relate to the shrine were also really interesting from a cultural perspective.

"A Year in the Life" contains a wealth of knowledge of interest to the scholar. The book is however, easy to read - as if you were listening to a friend telling a story. A glossary of Japanese terms, end notes, maps of the shrine, and pictures broaden the reader's context and add depth to the narrative.

I really appreciated how the book was arranged in five sections. The first section gives the reader an introduction to the history of the shrine, the kami that the shrine is dedicated to, and the people who make the shrine work. The following four sections, one per season, tell the story of the major rituals at the shrine over the course of year.

Each chapter usually begins with a description of the shrine on the day of the ceremony, which allows the reader to understand how they might have felt had they arrived at the shrine for the ritual. This reminded me of my own experiences visiting a shrine in Japan. The description also set the mood for the author's descriptions of the rituals that follow.

For someone interested in the "human" side of Shinto religion, Nelson's book is a fascinating study of a religion little understood by most westerners. Its best to skip the introductory chapters, which are a bit pedantic and dry, and start with the actual description of shrine activities. Nelson is most interesting when talking about the priests and their relationship with Shinto, their "parishioners" and each other. Ultimately, it is this sort of writing that convinces the reader that Shinto is not a bunch of exotic rituals, but has a very real meaning and value in its followers lives. Written in 1996, Nelson poses a number of questions about Shinto's future throughout the book. It would be interesting if a second edition of the book was published updating the reader on the present activities of the shrine and its priests.

I recently finished reading this book in preparation for a trip I'm taking to Japan in the fall, I will be studying at University for year. I had read a couple of other books about Shinto and found them useful but what I really wanted to read was a book on Shinto practice so when I visit a Shinto Shrine I will have a more complex understanding of what is going on. In a way, this book goes beyond just understanding a Shinto practice it also covers details on things like how to finance a Shrine and how to sit so your legs fall asleep less often etc. I should clarify that this book isn't a travel guide but a well written ethnography, one that primarily focuses on one medium-large Shinto Shrine. In general the book doesn't get to detailed or too hard to read. The author spends some time with theory's and interpretations but mostly focuses on observation. Some of my favorite parts of the book are the interviews with the Guji, he had an interesting life story and some good comparative religion thoughts. Some of the younger priests also have some interesting input, some times complaints. The chapter about a woman Shinto Priest was another highlight. I believe this book would be great for undergraduates, I'm an undergrad in Religious Studies and Philosophy, or for anyone interested in Shinto practice.

It has been years, but I still remember Doc Nelson quite well, as one of the best professors I have ever had. He was capable of educating you without feeling like you were being schooled, if you know what I mean. In his book, it is much the same as in his classes. He provides such powerful imagery to invoke the spirit of the Suwa Shrine that it feels like you are there. And given that I lived in Nagasaki and have been there on several occasions, it feels to me that I have returned. You can experience through his first-person narrative the depth of ritual and see as well how it permeates into the life of the average Japanese person, who may not even realize it.

"A Year in the Life of a Shinto Shrine" is the best book on Shinto that I have ever read, and that is really saying something as I have read a lot of books on Shinto. It is the first book I have seen that puts things in layman's terms while not dumbing down a fairly complicated system of beliefs and cultural practices.

Instead of attempting to interpret the mysteries and cosmology of the inscrutable religion, author John Nelson puts you in the shoes of Shinto practitioners, from the highest ranking priest to the novices, to the casual visitors who drop by. He takes you behind the scenes, showing you what the day-to-day life is of a Shinto priest, what they believe and what they do. The shrine he introduces, Suwa Shrine in Nagasaki, is a fairly major one, with a full calendar of events and rituals.

On top of all this Nelson frames Shinto in its cultural context. It is not simply a religion, something to be believed in and practiced, but it is a sort of societal glue for Japan, something that connects the present to the past and provides a contextual framework that all Japanese people can recognize. It is difficult to understand this element of Shinto, because the very concept of religion is different.

One of the most fascinating sections of this book is the chapter called "I shouldn't be telling you this but..." where he allows several Shinto priests to express their private opinions under the protection of anonymity. It is exactly this kind of human touch that has been missing from all previous books. Shinto is a religion of human beings, and without this necessary voice it loses all context.