University of Washington Press is all over the Map, and loving it from Seattle

From Coulee Dam to the Monterey coast, from the far-flung territories of Native American art to a quaint hillside garden in Seattle, from the frontlines in the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 60s to the origins of the Shan state in Myanmar, this university press continues a tradition of eclectic excellence in its seasonal book offerings.

There is an eerie Thai mystery, featuring the ace detective Father Ananda, in a book distributed for Silkworm Books called Killer Karma by Nick Wilgus, chief sub-editor for the “Outlook” section of the Bangkok Post. A grisly spectacle of ghostly heads bobbing on the surface of the sea attracts a crowd near Wat Phloi, a tiny monastery on the coast of Chanthaburi Province in central Thailand. Ananda, an urban monk and former Bangkok police officer, is sent to investigate. This becomes his most challenging case to date, and he is accompanied by Jak, a former temple boy, who assists the good Father in unraveling the case. Wilgus’ previous books include Adventures of Birdshit Foreigner under the pen name of Sulayman X. Previous books in the Father Ananda series are Mindfulness and Murder and Garden of Hell, both available from Silkworm through Washington. Booksellers and librarians should order up.

Towards the back of the Washington catalog for those readers with curiosity and perseverance there is a really interesting book distributed for UNSW Press (University of New South Wales Press in Australia). The F Word: How We Learned to Swear by Feminism by Jane Caro and Catherine Fox is a topical new book that addresses the crucial work/life balance that women face in Western society. They dispel the idea that the balancing act women go through as they juggle work and family is a no-win situation for them. In vivacious prose they offer practical suggestions for effectively combining work and social life with parenting and marriage for women. There are a range of women profiled here that provide readers with a big picture, and the book helps women in forgiving themselves, having fun and not giving up while holding it all together. The cover hangs its hat on a big lowercase F, along with a brassier, a frying pan, and a brief case. See the cover: http://www.unswpress.com.au/isbn/9780868408231.htm

Books from Washington referred to above are B Street: Notorious Playground of Coulee Dam by Lawney L. Reyes. This is Reyes’ memoir of growing up in the Depression-era in and around the town where the Grand Coulee Dam was built. The Reyes’ were a mixed-race family of a Indian mother and a Filipino father and they faced racism as white workers on the dam came after-hours to the bars and the brothels along B Street to let off steam after a grueling work day. Based on his own experience and those of his little sister, Luana, and from his mother’s diary and stories told to him by his parents and members of the Sin-Aikst tribe, this is a fascinating and important document about a way of life that was irrevocably changed forever when the Grand Coulee Dam was built.

In Shaping the Shoreline: Fisheries and Tourism on the Monterey Coast, Connie Y. Chiang, explores the history and development of this key town, which was the setting for John Steinbeck’s classic novel, Cannery Row. What makes this book distinctive is that this is an environmental history of a key region that pays as much attention to human interactions as it does changes in the natural world. She draws on such hot-button issues of race and class, and integrates it with how events in the outside world affected the town and overall region. Monterey began as a quaint seaside resort and developed into a fishing center, as Steinbeck wrote about it in Cannery Row, and then a world-class aquarium was built and this turned the town into a tourism powerhouse. This is being called “a compelling narrative” by Carol McKibben, author of Beyond Cannery Row, and by Richard White of Sanford University says this is “a revealing story of people of Monterey and the sea that gave them life.”

Judith Ostrowitz, the author of Privileging the Past: Reconstructing History in Northwest Coast Art (Washington, 1999), provides a close reading of the contemporary art of native tribes such as Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshain in her new book, Interventions: Native American Art for Far-Flung Territories. These artists cross borders and boundaries in more ways than one, and many are from Canadian First Nation groups, along with their native counterparts in the States. Among many key issues discussed in this thought-provoking book, Ostrowitz explores the impact of modernity on Indian art, and the extraordinary use of the Internet to establish an Indian territory there. This has to do with complex issues dealing with construction of self-identity, and a wacky update to what was previous known as Indian Country. Native American art is becoming more and more familiar to the mainstream art world, and Ostrowitz offers what is being called “an invaluable and timely contribution to the increasingly complex debates around Northwest Coast Native Art” (Charlotte Townsend-Gault, University of British Columbia). Janet Catherine Berlo of University of Rochester pegged it when she said Ostrowitz’s “first-rate” book “brings many intellectual worlds together.” “Interventions” appears to be an apt title for this ground-breaking book.

Streissguth Gardens is a hillside park in the City of Seattle that was founded by a couple who work at University of Washington there. Daniel Streissguth is a Architecture and Urban Planning professor, and his wife Ann is a professor in the School of Medicine, and an avid gardener. Together with their son Benjamin, the Streissguth family worked diligently over 40 years to convert a steep forested hillside in the heart of Seattle into a beautiful woodland garden with vistas of the city and lake. In an engaging narrative, In Love With a Hillside Garden, they discuss their philosophy of creating a green park in the middle of the city, and they describe the process in detail about how they achieved their dreams. There are 147 color illustrations in an oversize 7 x 10 format, with 128 pages in paperback. This beautiful book should travel well beyond the city limits of Seattle, and be a source of inspiration for readers in cities around the globe who would like to try this very thing.

There are several books published every year about the American civil rights movement in the 1950s and 60s and the various things occurred during that tumultuous time period. The High Museum of Art in Atlanta is publishing a riveting photography book on the period called Road to Freedom: Photographs of the Civil Rights Movement, 1956-1968 by Julian Cox, a curator at the museum. The introduction is by Charles Johnson, a professor at University of Washington, and Congressman John L. Lewis, a key civil rights leader at the time, provides the afterword. The 120 unforgettable images in the book are by many different photographers – photojournalists, artists, activists and amateurs. This book is a significant visual record of some of the key events that took place then, such as the Freedom Rides of 1961, the Birmingham hosings of 1963, and the Selma to Montgomery March of 1965. This is a fascinating collection of images that speaks directly to the struggle of another generation as they helped to change the nation for themselves and their children.

The Shan people in Myanmar (formerly Burma) are one of the largest and most influential ethnic groups in the country. They settled in the rugged eastern part of the country, the Shan Plateau in the first century, CE from their native China. Sai Aung Tun, a historian and native of the Shan, is writing a useful and fascinating history of the region and its people. History of the Shan State: From Its Origins to 1962, published by Silkworm Books, describes how the Shan dominated the political stage in the country for several years, and how they played an important part after World War II in gaining independence from the British and creating an autonomous state. Sai Aung Tun does a remarkable job of tracing the cultural and political history of the Shan from their immigrant origins to the constitutional crisis of 1962. He highlights the period of 1946 to 1962, and discusses the historic Second Pang Long Conference in 1947 where all nationalities in Myanmar agreed to work together for independence. He concludes with an account of the military coup in 1962. This book provides a sorely needed historical perspective on Myanmar, and will help readers gain a greater understanding and insight to current events unfolding there today.

Readers of all stripes are encouraged to get a hard copy of Washington’s Fall 2008 catalog, or go to their website http://www.washington.edu/uwpress/ to view some really cool books.

The Underground Railroad Comes to Vibrant Life in a New Book from Mississippi

Passage on the Underground Railroad is an arresting book of color photographs by Stephen Marc, a professor of art in the Herberger College of Art at Arizona State University. Click here for a sample of these remarkable photographs: http://herbergercollege.asu.edu/marc/montages.html -- some are montages and others are composites, and you can view samples of both on this cool website. Mississippi aptly describes Marc’s digital photographs as “thought-provoking, unconventional, and haunting.” Detailed captions and multilayered narrative photographs weave together various elements from the landscape of slavery. The freedom sites along the Underground Railroad are also depicted in this book, and there is an essay by Diane Miller, director of the Network to Freedom division of the National Park Service. There is also an interview with Marc by Carla Williams, editor of the journal exposure. An essay by Keith Griffler, a professor of African American Studies at SUNY - Buffalo, rounds out the book. The horror and historical drama of slavery is rendered powerfully in this book, as Marc embarked on a seven year journey photographing the route of runaway slaves. This is one photographer’s evocative interpretation of the history and places along the slave’s path to freedom. This book is a potent combination of photographic innovation and historical documentation.

Iowa Press Celebrates Its Very Own

In November 2008, University of Iowa Press is publishing two fascinating reprints by Iowa native sons. The first is Prairie City, Iowa: Three Seasons at Home by novelist/teacher Douglas Bauer. This was originally published in 1982 by the now defunct Iowa State University Press. The book is a memoir of returning home to Prairie City, a town East of Des Moines in central Iowa. Philip Lopate called this book “one of the finest books about place I know.” Bauer spent time in Des Moines working for Better Homes and Gardens, and then in Chicago working as an editor and writer for Playboy Magazine. In 1975 he returned home to work on his father’s farm and to mingle with people in his hometown. The reviews say it all, this book is a regional classic: -- according to Bill Bryson, “Kindly, shrewd and endlessly absorbing – this is as good as a book gets.” The Des Moines Sunday Register said, “Bauer’s book is, at least, the most brilliant report of an Iowa small town ever written …” This book is neither wistful nostalgia nor a harsh look at those who choose to stay on in a small town (so-called Stay Morons), but a unsentimental and loving account of life in a small Midwestern town. This could be a town anywhere.

John Madson is considered to be the father of the modern prairie restoration movement, and his book Out Home is a collection of essays on hunting, fishing and wildlife management, originally published in 1979. Iowa previously reprinted Madson’s brilliant book, Where the Sky Began: Land of the Tallgrass Prairie, called “a lovely little study” by the New York Times, and “instructive and entertaining” by the New Yorker, and now they are following up with this gem of a book. The essays herein were originally penned for such venues as Sports Afield, Outdoor Life, Audubon, and Guns and Ammo. Madson died in 1995, and the Kansas City Star said of his books, “Reading Madson is like reading some of his more illustrious and heady predecessors in the American experience … namely Emerson and Thoreau.” This is the first paperback edition of these ageless wilderness tales. All readers and writers of natural history need to take notice of this amazing book.