Former Mayor Norm Rice’s new Book: Bringing People Together to do What
The focus of the book is the 1989 race for mayor, which Rice won handily. The city sent a mixed message, narrowly approving the anti-busing initiative, while electing the first black mayor in a city with only 10 percent black population.
Good Counsel for Hard Times
You may think yourself rightminded when it comes to clumsy thought and slipshod reasoning, but reading him is to discover what’s slipshod and clumsy in your own thought. You don’t just learn about how “the enemy” thinks and acts, you discover how your own compromises and oversimplifications help him get away with it.
A Dog’s Take on The Lewis & Clark and on that Black Dog Depression
The book is narrated by Meriwether Lewis’ dog, Seaman, a Newfoundland. As such it is a great introduction to this important chapter in American history. And there really was a “Seaman.”
Review: ‘Caste’ Explores the Underlying Structure of Racism
The author quotes race historian George M. Fredrickson: “American laws were the main foreign precedents” for Germany becoming a “full-fledged racist regime.” What laws? U.S. miscegenation laws, also known as Blood Laws, that defined who could and could not marry.
Which Trump Books Should you Read?
It's been my lot to end up reading a number of the more prominent books about the Trump era, so I can give some advice. "Rage" (backed by 17 tape recordings of interviews with Trump) is the number-one enduring read.
Stirring The Imagination: The Majestic Great Gray and Snowy Owls
Baby owls are fluffy, wide-eyes and irresistibly cute, as Bannick records in his nesting pictures. A very different picture is provided when the great birds are plunging downward and dismembering prey.
“Managing Chaos”: Michael Cohen Dishes on his Mob Boss
Cohen writes that, if you want to understand how Donald J. Trump became president, "you have to know the biggest influence by far was the media. Donald Trump's presidency is a product of the free press. The free press gave America Trump -- that's who elected Trump and might well elect him again."
Bob Woodward’s New Book: All The President’s Deceits
Jared Kushner said the key to understanding Trump is the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland who famously said, "If you don't know where you're going, any path will take you there." Kushner describes his father-in-law variously as "crazy, unpredictable, stubborn and manipulative."
Unsettled Ground: The Whitman Massacre and its Shifting Legacy
The Cayuse were openly social, giving gifts and moving freely among each other’s lodges. The Whitmans built fences, locked their doors, and had no gifts to give. The missionaries, had a rigid belief system; the Cayuse, Tate writes, “were religious synthesizers willing to graft new ideas onto old beliefs.”
Book Review: The Apocalypse Factory
The 560-square mile Hanford Reservation manufactured plutonium for nuclear weapons for more than four decades. Its mishaps, and cleanup of the nation’s largest concentration of high-level nuclear waste, have been a major Northwest news story for 40 years.
Mindy Cameron’s New Book: Struggles in a Newsroom
As a newsie myself, I appreciated her early struggles at the Times where she worked in a male-dominated atmosphere and answered to at least one unsympathetic editor.
Vitamin W: Health Benefits Of that Nightly Glass of Wine
Research conducted by Serge Renaud of the University of Bordeaux discovered that although the French smoke and eat more dietary fat than Americans, they suffer half the mortality rate from coronary disease. Renaud argued that the French’s regular red wine consumption accounted for the difference.
Reading: The Plague During Plague
This spring I decided to take a zoomed book class offered by Alliance Française Seattle. The assigned book was “La Peste” by Albert Camus.
It...
How to fight racism and anti-black violence? Another reading list
Books may not have the answers we seek to confronting and understanding racism and anti-black violence. But maybe they can help.
What Can Existentialism Teach Us About Today?
All of the Existentialists are philosophers of life who refuse to spin systems of ideals, insisting instead, like the American Pragmatists, that philosophies are only truly tested in lived experience.
Ten Books To Read in the Pandemic
Looking for insights on our current circumstances from other times and writers? Here is a basket full of books that speak to our time from the past.
Rebecca Solnit’s Book: Remaking Our Lives Amid Major Disasters
Disasters are “extraordinarily generative,” Solnit contends. From them emerge new ways of seeing the world and one another. Fruitless preoccupations suddenly fade away. Hitherto un-imagined possibilities emerge.
A Plague Reader – From Florence to Seattle
The onset and turbulent passage of Seattle’ influenza epidemic matches our present experience, and its history may serve as a route-guide. The "Spanish" Flu orphaned Emmett Watson and Mary McCarthy who, arguably, became writers as a result.
Nation Divided: Of Social Distancing And Polarization
Here’s my question. Have we not been demanding social distancing, admittedly of a different type, for some time now? Another word for “social distancing” is “polarization.”
Books: International Intrigue – A Handful of Current Thrillers
The Names of the Dead Kevin Wignall
Abandoned by his CIA colleagues when an anti-terrorism operation in Europe goes wrong, Wes Wesley serves out his...
Books: The Forgotten, Shameful Story of the Chinese Who Built the Western Railways
They laid rail in blistering desert heat and spent brutal winters digging and blasting tunnels in the treacherous Sierra Nevada Mountains. And they were segregated, mocked, beaten, robbed, and murdered.
What & How – The Twin Towers of History
History is an agonizingly difficult study. It is not a science, and as an art it is risky business.
The Mystery Behind The Mystery Writer: Michael Gruber’s Long Con
It says something about the state of publishing today that Gruber couldn't find a buyer for this book - it's an almost perfect example of a caper novel, more light-hearted than some of his earlier thrillers but just as erudite, well-plotted and entertaining as his previous books.
Evangelical Churches Create Celebrities, While Mainliners Get Shy. Why?
"We cannot imagine being proud to see one of our mainline authors, from our subculture, on the shelf at Walmart. In many ways, our objections to celebrity are a veiled way of talking about class.”
Architecture and The Unlamented End of ‘Modernism’
"Making Dystopia" makes me wonder if Modernism -- the word itself is a marvel of marketing -- may be about to fade from favor and be "deconstructed" like so many other imposed-from-above cultural values.
Books: Sound Transit’s Arduous Trek to Building Rail Transit
Approving a fixed-rail rapid transit for a city is one of the most contentious decisions that an urban populace can make. In Seattle, rail proposals were defeated at the election polls in 1968, 1970, and 1995. And it was still difficult after that.
Books: A New Crime Blogger In Town
You can practically smell the salty tang in the air and taste the coffee in one of the author's favorite cafes. It's a promising debut.
Why Do Christian Evangelicals Support Trump And Not Buttigieg?
"If mainstream media figures believe that Mayor Pete speaks the same Christian language as Trump’s Evangelical base, they need to think again. He’s a sincere proponent of a faith that is very different from theirs.”
Books: A Seattle Historian on How the West Rescued a Starving Russia
I was shocked by this story — it was so dramatic, moving, powerful, and historically important — yet few Americans, and even fewer Russians know about it.
Books: David Guterson’s “Turn Around Time” – Nature’s Call To Arms
"Turn around time is an alpinist’s notion – that preplanned moment when, no matter what, it’s time to reverse course and head back. The principle acknowledges an unstoppable coming darkness."
