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Review

Blasphemy cover by Sherman Alexie
Summer 2013

Blasphemy: New and Selected Stories

Blasphemy-Alexie

 

Sherman Alexie ’94
Grove Press, 2012

Most writers’ volumes of “new and selected” stories add only two or three new pieces to twenty or thirty old ones. More than half of Sherman Alexie’s Blasphemy is new, however, including a few lengthy stories. The success of Alexie’s teen novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian seems to have invigorated his short stories, and readers who regard them as his best work will be … » More …

That One Spooky Night cover
Spring 2013

That One Spooky Night

spooky

Dan Bar-El, illustrated by David Huyck
Kids Can Press, 2012

Strange things can happen on a Halloween night, as the young protagonists find out in the three stories of this illustrated book. Populated by sea monsters in the bathtub, witches, vampires, and pranks, author Dan Bar-El’s funny and, of course, scary tales get an excellent graphic treatment by David Huyck, an instructor at Washington State University and Moscow, Idaho-based artist.

With stories titled “Broom with … » More …

Academic Motherhood cover
Spring 2013

Academic Motherhood: How Faculty Manage Work and Family

academic-motherhood-how-faculty-manage-work-family-kelly-ward-paperback-cover-art

Kelly Ward and Lisa Wolf-Wendel
Rutgers University Press, 2012

Kelly Ward, a Washington State University professor and co-author of Academic Motherhood, contends that a “don’t ask, don’t tell” culture still prevails in academia when it comes to pregnancy.

Sometimes that keeps women from reaching their professional potential and getting the personal support they need.

“Department chairs fear saying the wrong thing, so they say nothing,” says Ward. “The pregnant woman ends up not understanding medical … » More …

Montana before History cover
Spring 2013

Montana Before History: 11,000 Years of Hunter-Gatherers in the Rockies and Plains

Montana before history book cover

Douglas H. MacDonald ’94
Mountain Press, 2012

The oldest archaeological site in Montana, the Anzick Site near Wilsall, has been carbon-dated to 11,040 years ago. It is, writes Douglas MacDonald in this fine survey of Montana archaeology, the only Clovis site excavated in Montana. Apparently a ceremonial burial site, it contained the oldest human remains found in North America.

Whether or not they were a coherent “culture,” the Clovis people are … » More …

Spring 2013

Treasure, Treason and the Tower: El Dorado and the Murder of Sir Walter Raleigh

treasure treason tower Raleigh

Paul Sellin ’52
Ashgate, 2011

Years ago while doing research in Stockholm, Sweden, Paul Sellin, a scholar who specializes in literature and history of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, chanced upon some correspondence about Sir Walter Raleigh and gold that he may have found in South America.

Sellin, who studied history at WSU and then went on to the University of Chicago to complete a doctorate in English, is a professor … » More …

Boocoo Dinky Dow
Winter 2012

Boocoo Dinky Dow: My Short, Crazy Vietnam War

Boocoo Dinky Dow

Grady C. Myers and Julie Titone

2012

When the United States was in the thick of the Vietnam War, a legally blind, out of shape young man from Boise volunteered. Grady Myers had been rejected previously because of his physical problems, but the Army of 1968, desperate to fill its ranks, snapped him up and shipped him off to Fort Lewis for basic training. This memoir of Myers’s time in training and then … » More …

No Room of Her Own
Winter 2012

No Room of Her Own: Women’s Stories of Homelessness, Life, Death, and Resistance

No Room of Her Own

Desiree Hellegers

Palgrave Macmillan

2011

“As a form of social punishment, homelessness is far sterner in many respects than sentences handed out in court for most criminal offenses,” writes Desiree Hellegers, an associate professor of English and founding co-director of the Center for Social and Environmental Justice at WSU Vancouver, in her introduction. In presenting the individual stories of 15 women in Seattle collected over two decades, Hellegers offers a view … » More …

Kayaking Puget Sound
Winter 2012

Kayaking Puget Sound and the San Juan Islands: 60 Paddle Trips Including the Gulf Islands

Kayaking Puget Sound

Rob Casey ’91

The Mountaineers Books

2012

Fellow obsessives can relate to owning a catalog or guidebook that is transformed from the occasional reference to a well-thumbed springboard for the imagination. The Sears catalog fit that bill for rural America a century ago, as did the REI catalog for so many pre-Internet Northwest adventurers.

Rob Casey ’91 had a similar feeling toward Randel Washburne’s classic Kayaking Puget Sound, the San Juans, and Gulf … » More …

Alpha Phi Alpha
Winter 2012

Alpha Phi Alpha: A Legacy of Greatness, the Demands of Transcendence

Alpha Phi Alpha

Gregory S. Parks and Stefan M. Bradley (’98 MA History)

University Press of Kentucky

2012

Alpha Phi Alpha is the only black fraternity to be founded at an Ivy League school. Starting at Cornell in 1906, its founders were just a generation away from slavery and intent on creating an organization to foster academic scholarship, build lifelong friendships, and promote social progress. The organization soon opened chapters at Harvard, Howard, and Virginia Union … » More …

Cover of The Republic of Nature
Fall 2012

The Republic of Nature: An Environmental History of the United States

repub-nature

Mark Fiege ’85 MA
University of Washington Press, 2012

Contemplate the founding of the United States, a budding democracy carved out of a vast and unknown (to everyone other than its original inhabitants) wilderness. At some point, one might find oneself unable to extricate American history from Nature and its effects and implications. But we haven’t really, not until Fiege’s remarkable analysis.

Although he is keenly aware of Thomas Jefferson’s warning that “The moment a … » More …