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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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 discreetly into a multi-layered story, brings the narrator alive on the page and leavens his dire accounts of explorers forever lost in Amazon jungle.
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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 the flash of another high school classmate whose house in the 1960s had the only fully functioning backyard bomb shelter I ever saw. It was also the site of romantic encounters — none mine.
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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, notably Blade Runner.)
Troubled times may explain the sudden appeal of Dick’s often prescient tales. Reading The Man in the High Castle, in which Germanyt and Japan have won World War II and subdivided the United States, is a haunting escape. It’s also Dick’s chilling reminder that the real world ahead could turn out far different than we expect.
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 black and white pictures that have haunted a man since he found the negatives at a garage sale 15 years ago.
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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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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 knew about rodeos I learned from TV as a kid. The deeper into the project I went, the more I was moved by the triumphs and travails of cowboys, cowgirls, and Indians — notably those in the early part of the last century.
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