Recommended books

Creature of Catastrophe

If CO2 was pink

April 7, 2010

Stumbling upon intersecting observations by two writers today, I was reminded of a vacation several years ago at the Olympic Peninsula’s northwestern tip. I was drinking coffee in the lobby of a lodge. A new guest was checking in. The innkeeper, making small talk, asked what he did for a living. “I work for Duke Energy in North Carolina,” the man answered. With barely a pause he added, as if reading from his business card, “And global warming has nothing to do with carbon emissions.” I regret not asking him what that day’s crystalline sky would have looked like if CO2 was pink instead of invisible.

The writers who triggered that memory are Elizabeth Kolbert of the New Yorker, whose 2006 book, Field Notes from a Catastrophe, slapped me awake to what we’re doing to the planet. The second is by Marilynne Robinson, the acclaimed novelist whose new work of non-fiction, Absence of Mind, tackles science, religion, and human consciousness. Read More

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Understanding the past

May 6, 2009

What’s the context of these quotes from the epigraph page of a book I bought today? Not the unfolding torture scandal, though it could be. Instead they set the tone for Savages & Scoundrels: The Untold Story of America’s Road to Empire Through Indian Territory by Paul VanDevelder.

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Story Quest

April 30, 2009

I’m lost in the Lost City of Z. When I open the book in bed at night, my world disappears. Reality becomes author David Grann’s riveting account of the obsessive hunt for a place that may have never existed.
Grann had phenomenal material without visiting what may be the remotest place on Earth. His adventure, blended [...]

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Explosions of Memory

April 14, 2009

Never has apocalypse looked so beautiful. That was my first thought today upon seeing four photographs from a 1970 French nuclear test. Then I thought of my childhood and pilot friend, whose Army adventures included flying helicopters to a radiated and cratered South Pacific atoll to help repair what an atomic bomb had wrought.
Then came [...]

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A World We Don’t Expect

April 3, 2009

I’ve entered a different world. Not the present one that’s changed so much, seemingly overnight. No, it’s one of many that famed science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick created.
Although others have long extolled him to me, I haven’t ventured into Dick’s genre for years. (I’m not counting science- fiction movies, including some based on his work, [...]

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Unclaimed Memories on Film

March 1, 2009

Recently I stumbled upon old snapshots of unidentified people I can’t get out of my head.
The photos are on two web sites, waiting for someone to give names to faces. One site features more than 500 color images from film found in cameras at flea markets and second-hand stores. The other site consists of 44 [...]

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Power of Love

January 22, 2009

Anyone doubting the grassroots power of online social media should consider this story, which I wrote for today’s edition of The Oregonian.
Without Twitter, Facebook, and blogs, a son’s heart-warming attempt to help his mother’s financially ailing bookstore would have never reached and connected with so many people so quickly.

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Thrill of Authorship

January 10, 2009

I worked on a book about a world-famous rodeo for 18 months with another writer, Ann Terry Hill. I also did extensive digging for old photographs. Recreating events from decades ago based on historical research was exhilarating. Nothing motivates me like the thrill of the hunt for hard-to-unearth information.
At the outset, most of what I [...]

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Hate Among Us

November 27, 2008

Hate knows no boundaries, judging from a map compiled by the Southern Poverty Law Center. It’s especially disconcerting to see the presence of hate groups in my city, Portland.
But I’m not naïve about such matters. After all, I grew up mainly in the South. Not that racism wasn’t rampant in the Northwest. I’ve read extensively [...]

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Heard but not heeded

September 11, 2008

No one who’s eighty says, “The years have dragged on and on. When is this thing going to finally end?”
So I wasn’t surprised to hear my father say on his eightieth birthday, “I’m amazed at how quickly it’s gone by.”

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Feast amid ghosts

August 13, 2008

We sit at long tables, nearly one hundred of us, amid fields of bounty. It’s Sauvie Island, ten miles west of Portland. I can smell the earth, fertile from Columbia River floods. The sun eases toward the hills, setting aglow acres of vegetables sprawling between guardian white oaks half a millennium old.

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Bridges to nowhere

July 10, 2008

Is there a direction and meaning in lives beyond the individual’s own will?
That, Thornton Wilder said, was the underlying question of his acclaimed 1927 novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey. The book explores the lives of five people who fall to their deaths when a rope bridge in Peru collapses.
I don’t think about the [...]

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Death, never rewritten

June 15, 2008

Odd what catches one’s eye. In Saturday’s Oregonian, a story about a man’s death at the coast invited a quick read. Why I’m not sure. The story was terse, as such stories usually are and have to be because of limited space: a for-the-record summary of another tragedy, another person dying too young.

This morning I [...]

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