Unruly Planet: How to Not Let the Climate Crisis Totally Depress You
Madeline Ostrander, a Seattle science journalist, doesn’t soft peddle the climate trends that make us all feel on the edge of doom.
Lis Smith: My Political Love Story
“You can have a good year – a great candidate, a winning campaign, accolades for being a strategic genius and feel like you’re on top of the world. Then you turn around and get completely shellacked and you question why you’re even in the business."
Have Turd, Will Polish: Mark Leibovich’s New Book Examines the Trump Sycophants
Leibovich starts with the view from the Trump International Hotel, “the flagship payola palace” that operated a few blocks from the White House.
Justice William O. Douglas and the Wilderness He Saved
The product of Yakima and Whitman College, Douglas was tapped for the high court in 1939 and confirmed at the age of 40.
The LA Times: How to Dismantle a Great Civic Institution
“Bad City” takes the reader inside the Times newsroom at a time of plummeting ad revenue and cancelled subscriptions.
Stirewalt’s Warning: How Media Outrage Divides Us
"Politicians, popular culture, the news media, and leaders of major institutions speak in a language of anxiety, and did so long before our now-receding pandemic began."
The Book John Steinbeck Almost Wrote About the Pacific Northwest
Together with Ed Ricketts’ seminal Between Pacific Tides (1939), “it was going to be a trilogy that would complete the biological intertidal scientific data on the entire West Coast of the United States to Mexico and as far as Alaska.
Fukuyama’s New Book: Standing Up for Classic Liberalism
By “liberalism” Fukuyama means “the doctrine that emerged in the second half of the seventeenth century that argued for the limitations of the powers of governments through law and ultimately constitutions, creating institutions protecting the rights of individuals living under their jurisdiction.”
High Flyer: Katy Tur Writes a Deeply Personal Memoir
Often ripped out of bed in the middle of the night, she and younger brother James rode along with Bob and Marika Tur as they patrolled the skies over Los Angeles.
Murder and Mayhem in Puget Sound
There may be more to life on Bainbridge Island than you ever imagined.
Monster Mash: Ken Auletta’s New Biography of Harvey Weinstein
Those who worked closely with Harvey have long thought about the hole in his psyche that he was desperate to fill.
Making a List: Writers who Touched the Pacific Northwest
One example: Gertrude Stein’s longtime companion, Alice B. Toklas, was raised in Seattle, where her father owned one of the city’s early department stores.
Moveable Feast: The “Travelling Library” that Informed Lewis and Clark
The Lewis and Clark Expedition was deeply "bookish," using many of the scientific books and experts of that Enlightened era.
The Violence Project: Mass Shootings Are Preventable
"The authors' message is clear: Mass shootings are preventable by numerous routes through individual, institutional, and societal effort. We’re just doing it wrong."
Jim McDermott: The Good and Bad of Serving in Congress
The book is a sharp, spot-on critique of Capitol Hill’s current clumsy dysfunction. Congress used to be collegial, with friendships across the aisle and a transactional culture of accommodating varied interests. No more.
Flay and Flatter: Tina Brown Does the Royals
Tina Brown is at heart a royalist. The former Vanity Fair and New Yorker editor is a Brit who moves in upper crust circles. But she is also a wickedly funny and perceptive writer.
Clyde Ford’s New Book: The Role of Black Labor in Building White Wealth and...
Under slavery, a privileged few benefited from the unpaid labor of many.
The Ambassador Recalled: Marie Yovanovitch’s Warnings on Ukraine
The United States lost an honest and dedicated representative of our democracy when Trump deposed her for standing up for what is right.
Too Much of a Good Thing? How Over-consumption is Dulling our Happiness
The problem is that if you keep hitting the pleasure button too often, everything goes to shit. Not only that, but you need more of whatever it is you are pleasured by to get that sensation.
Book Bans are on the rise. Why Now?
There's a not-so-subtle racism and sexism, not to mention homophobia, to book banning.
Total Compromise: How William Barr Sold his Soul
Memoirs by America’s political nabobs are designed to embellish or restore the author’s reputation. Clearly Barr has work to do on both fronts.
That’ll Never Sell! (Why You Still Shouldn’t Judge a Book by its Cover)
A naked woman on the cover? I said to myself. This won’t be appearing in bookstores.
Lost Boys: “We Lose Enough of our Young Men”
From a new novel set in Ireland: "Young men don’t know what to be doing with themselves at all."
David Guterson’s New Novel: Elegiac and Touched with Seattle Noir
Guterson's first novel in 10 years. As usual, he sets his story close to his heart and lived experience.
Dan Evans’ New Autobiography: An Uncommon Republican
The Republican Party was moving right, while Evans stayed loyal to the moderate-liberal Rockefeller wing and went down with that leaky ship. Reagan forces denied Evans, a sitting GOP governor, a delegate slot to the 1976 national convention.
Did the Pandemic Help Save Independent Bookstores?
For many of us, the forced downtime at home during the pandemic has heightened our need for books. Bookstores are here to stay, maybe.
Avatar: Richard Hugo’s Murky Murder Mystery about the Detective who Wanted to be a...
The hero of Hugo’s one and only mystery is Al “Mush Heart” Barnes, a 40-year-old former Seattle cop who quits the SPD after three near-fatal gunshot wounds and lights out for the Rocky Mountains.
Jonathan Franzen’s New Novel and the Unsuspected Down-Turning of the 1970s
It is, in retrospect, as if we came to a crossroads in our nation’s life. One way leads to life as we had known it. Another way is marked “Here be Dragons.”
How Boeing went from “Making 20th Century Cathedrals” to being Driven by the Bottom...
If airplanes are complex, so are human relationships. The 787 program outsourced chunks of the 787 to “partners,” thereby rupturing much of the web of relationships central to the culture of safety.
Three Books Out of COVID
I am thinking about some books I've read that use the pandemic as a main character
