Libraries Unbound: 2009 Authors (Literary Voices)

My parents always told me I was Mexican. I was Mexican because they were Mexican. This was sometimes modified to "Mexican American," since I was born in California, and thus automatically a U.S. citizen. But, my parents said, this, too, was once part of Mexico. My father would say this with a sweeping gesture, taking in the smog, the beautiful mountains, the cars and houses and fast-food franchises. When he made that gesture, all was cleared away in my mind's eye to leave the hazy impression of a better place. We were here when the white people came, the Spaniards, then the Americans. And we will be here when they go away, he would say, and it will be part of Mexico again. Thus begins a lyrical and entirely absorbing collection of personal essays by esteemed Chicana writer and gifted storyteller Kathleen Alcalá. Loosely linked by an exploration of the many meanings of "family," these essays move in a broad arc from the stories and experiences of those close to her to those whom she wonders about, like Andrea Yates, a mother who drowned her children. In the process of digging and sifting, she is frequently surprised by what she unearths. Her family, she discovers, were Jewish refugees from the Spanish Inquisition who took on the trappings of Catholicism in order to survive. Although the essays are in many ways personal, they are also universal. When she examines her family history, she is encouraging us to inspect our own families, too. When she investigates a family secret, she is supporting our own search for meaning. And when she writes that being separated from our indigenous culture is "a form of illiteracy," we know exactly what she means. After reading these essays, we find that we have discovered not only why Kathleen Alcalá is a writer but also why we appreciate her so much. She helps us to find ourselves.

“The first time we came here I didn’t know what to expect,” she told me as we paddled upstream. “What we found just blew me away. Jaguars, pumas, river otters, howler monkeys. The place was like a Noah’s Ark for all the endangered species driven out of the rest of Central America. There was so much life! That expedition was when I first saw the macaws.” As a young woman, Sharon Matola lived many lives. She was a mushroom expert, an Air Force survival specialist, and an Iowa housewife. She hopped freight trains for fun and starred as a tiger tamer in a traveling Mexican circus. Finally she found her one true calling: caring for orphaned animals at her own zoo in the Central American country of Belize. Beloved as “the Zoo Lady” in her adopted land, Matola became one of Central America’s greatest wildlife defenders. And when powerful outside forces conspired with the local government to build a dam that would flood the nesting ground of the last scarlet macaws in Belize, Sharon Matola was drawn into the fight of her life. InThe Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw, award-winning author Bruce Barcott chronicles Sharon Matola’s inspiring crusade to stop a multinational corporation in its tracks. Ferocious in her passion, she and her confederates–a ragtag army of courageous locals and eccentric expatriates–endure slander and reprisals and take the fight to the courtroom and the boardroom, from local village streets to protests around the world. As the dramatic story unfolds, Barcott addresses the realities of economic survival in Third World countries, explores the tension between environmental conservation and human development, and puts a human face on the battle over globalization. In this marvelous and spirited book, Barcott shows us how one unwavering woman risked her life to save the most beautiful bird in the world.

From the #1 bestselling author of The Boys in the Boat comes an unforgettable epic of family, tragedy, and survival on the American frontier "An ideal pairing of talent and material.... Engrossing.... A deft and ambitious storyteller." - Mary Roach, New York Times Book Review In April of 1846, twenty-one-year-old Sarah Graves, intent on a better future, set out west from Illinois with her new husband, her parents, and eight siblings. Seven months later, after joining a party of pioneers led by George Donner, they reached the Sierra Nevada Mountains as the first heavy snows of the season closed the pass ahead of them. In early December, starving and desperate, Sarah and fourteen others set out for California on snowshoes, and, over the next thirty-two days, endured almost unfathomable hardships and horrors. In this gripping narrative, New York Times bestselling author Daniel James Brown sheds new light on one of the most legendary events in American history. Following every painful footstep of Sarah's journey with the Donner Party, Brown produces a tale both spellbinding and richly informative.

An unparalleled look inside the brilliant mind of one ofAmerica's most revered rock legends, Cobain Unseen collects previously unseen artifacts and photographs from the estate's archives to form a fascinating portrait of the creativity, madness, and genius of Kurt Cobain. Personal items and photographs take readers deeper inside Cobain's life than they've ever been before, and interactive features, such as Kurt's handwritten sticker-sheet of Nirvana name tags, facsimiles of unseen journal pages, and gatefolds of his graffiti-embellished guitars make this an essential keepsake. An audio CD showcasing spoken-word material by Cobain, some of it never before released, will be included. Accompanying the previously unpublished images and memorabilia is a compelling biographical narrative by New York Times-bestselling author Charles R. Cross.

"DeFrees is committed to rigorous, even ritualistic, forms and a dense economy and precision of language."--Poetry Brimming with characteristic charm and careful regard, Madeline DeFrees ranges in scope and scale from sonnets about Elvis, a poem-cycle about sculptor Henry Moore, and lyrics about cataracts. DeFrees's poems are filled with daily encounters--birds outside the window, trips to the doctor, the plants in her well-tended garden--yet she brilliantly elevates these subjects beyond the personal. From "A Crown of Sonnets for 'The King'": "D.O.A." Although the mourners know his fate is sealed they can't give up on God, Who may come through. They cast about for something more to do: into Emergency, the patient's wheeled. The human curtain parts. Aides leave the field to doctors who inject the heart and who start IV drips, then shock a time or two the organ grown so large with caring that it failed. Why are we working on this corpse?The nurse throws up her hands. The crew, shocked back to normal, admits discretion is the better part of valor. They'll stare suspicion down, advise, rehearse the clothes that Elvis wears for his last formal. Up to this moment, blue was his favorite color. At 17,Madeline DeFrees entered a Catholic convent and remained a nun for 38 years. She has published nine volumes of poetry and has taught at universities and colleges throughout the United States. Her most recent book,Blue Dusk, won the Lenore Marshall/The Nation prize. She lives in Seattle.

"Arreguín's palpitations of color and light and arrested movement awaken our sublimated vision. His paintings seem to force our entire being to experience its livingness as an insatiable yearning and questing of the eyes." - from the Foreword by Tess GallagherBorn in Mexico in 1935 and a resident of Washington State for nearly five decades, Alfredo Arreguín has long been recognized as a major force in pattern painting. His canvases are tapestries that mingle diverse and interpenetrating influences and images: the traditional crafts of his native Michoacán; the lush rainforests of his homeland and of the Pacific Northwest; Japanese ukiyo-e prints; sacred and endangered animals; gods and and totemic figures; icons like Frida Kahlo and César Chávez; and motifs including masks, eyes, and abstractly patterned tiles.But Arreguín's paintings, for all the apparent flatness of their surfaces, conceal an astonishing depth of perspective. The basis of their composition is a grid of colorful patterns applied to superimposed planes, and below the surface of each completed painting are many others, transformed by the artist's strategic occlusions and erasures. The result is an exuberant, phosphorescent visual interplay in which images combine to form other images, yielding a potent narrative power and pointing up the profound, ambiguous symbiosis between human beings and nature, fiction and reality, and the natural and supernatural worlds.Lauro Flores reveals Alfredo Arreguín as "a genuinely American painter, in the real, hemispheric sense of this term" - an artist of magic, mystery, and revelation whose place in the history of North American art has already been secured.

Despite the relative youth of the Pacific Northwest, its buildings and historic sites are reminders of a rich and colorful heritage. Made to Last describes exemplary preservation programs in Seattle and King County, how they developed, and the process and the extent of protection offered landmark properties. Descriptions and photographs provide a guide to individual buildings and landmark districts, demonstrating how each played a part in the remarkably swift development of county and city. Examples of rehabilitation and adaptive reuse projects accomplished through creative public and private financing are described and illustrated, as are the personal stories of commitment, perseverance, and labor that have spurred the renewal of properties--designated or not--and made them useful again. Made to Last celebrates buildings whose age is not a detriment, but rather a valuable and contributing force in the community.

First published in 1985, this satiric suburban take on cyberpunk imagined a rapidly approaching future that is now rapidly dwindling in our rear-view mirror: The far-flung year of 1998.

Against a background of anarchy and apocalypse, white suburban families have withdrawn into fortified enclaves, where they struggle to conform in a world where life has accelerated to a blur. No longer questioning what lies beyond their compound, they occupy themselves with domestic chores, virtual fantasies, and the occasional neighborhood arms race.

William D. “Dad” Johnson, cantankerous patriarch of the Johnson clan, ought to be a figurehead of his staunchly generic community. Instead, he finds himself in the role of rebel, at odds with his neighbors as well as his family, once he begins to question the designs of the sinister Dr. Edison in shaping every aspect of their lives. It’s easier, after all, than questioning his own values.

In 2003, a backhoe operator hired by the state of Washington to work on the Port Angeles waterfront discovered what a larger world would soon learn. The place chosen to dig a massive dry dock was atop one of the largest and oldest Indian village sites ever found in the region. Yet the state continued its project, disturbing hundreds of burials and unearthing more than 10,000 artifacts at Tse-whit-zen village, the heart of the long-buried homeland of the Klallam people. Excitement at the archaeological find of a generation gave way to anguish as tribal members working alongside state construction workers encountered more and more human remains, including many intact burials. Finally, tribal members said the words that stopped the project: "Enough is enough." Soon after, Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe chairwoman Frances Charles asked the state to walk away from more than $70 million in public money already spent on the project and find a new site. The state, in an unprecedented and controversial decision that reverberated around the nation, agreed. In search of the story behind the story, Seattle Times reporter Lynda V. Mapes spent more than a year interviewing tribal members, archaeologists, historians, city and state officials, and local residents and business leaders. Her account begins with the history of Tse-whit-zen village, and the nineteenth- and twentieth-century impacts of contact, forced assimilation, and industrialization. She then engages all the voices involved in the dry dock controversy to explore how the site was chosen, and how the decisions were made first to proceed and then to abandon the project, as well as the aftermath and implications of those controversial choices. This beautifully crafted and compassionate account, illustrated with nearly 100 photographs, illuminates the collective amnesia that led to the choice of the Port Angeles construction site. "You have to know your past in order to build your future," Charles says, recounting the words of tribal elders. Breaking Ground takes that teaching to heart, demonstrating that the lessons of Tse-whit-zen are teachings from which we all may benefit.

The Pacific Northwest experiences the most varied and fascinating weather in the United States, including world-record winter snows, the strongest non-tropical storms in the nation, and shifts from desert to rain forest in a matter of miles. Local weather features dominate the meteorological landscape, from the Puget Sound convergence zone and wind surges along the Washington Coast, to gap winds through the Columbia Gorge and the "Banana Belt" of southern Oregon. This book is the first comprehensive and authoritative guide to Northwest weather that is directed to the general reader; helpful to boaters, hikers, and skiers; and valuable to expert meteorologists. In The Weather of the Pacific Northwest, University of Washington atmospheric scientist and popular radio commentator Cliff Mass unravels the intricacies of Northwest weather, from the mundane to the mystifying. By examining our legendary floods, snowstorms, and windstorms, and a wide variety of local weather features, Mass answers such interesting questions as: o Why does the Northwest have localized rain shadows? o What is the origin of the hurricane force winds that often buffet the region? o Why does the Northwest have so few thunderstorms? o What is the origin of the Pineapple Express? o Why do ferryboats sometimes seem to float above the water's surface? o Why is it so hard to predict Northwest weather? Mass brings together eyewitness accounts, historical records, and meteorological science to explain Pacific Northwest weather. He also considers possible local effects of global warming. The final chapters guide readers in interpreting the Northwest sky and in securing weather information on their own.

Set in present day West Virginia, Ann Pancake's debut novel,Strange As This Weather Has Been, tells the story of a coal mining family--a couple and their four children--living through the latest mining boom and dealing with the mountaintop removal and strip mining that is ruining what is left of their mountain life. As the mine turns the mountains to slag and wastewater, workers struggle with layoffs and children find adventure in the blasted moonscape craters. Strange As This Weather Has Been follows several members of the family, with a particular focus on fifteen-year-old Bant and her mother, Lace. Working at a "scab" motel, Bant becomes involved with a young miner while her mother contemplates joining the fight against the mining companies. As domestic conflicts escalate at home, the children are pushed more and more outside among junk from the floods and felled trees in the hollows--the only nature they have ever known. But Bant has other memories and is as curious and strong-willed as her mother, and ultimately comes to discover the very real threat of destruction that looms as much in the landscape as it does at home.

The effort to understand personal relationships has traditionally focused on the individual characteristics of participants. Personal Relationships and Personal Networks takes this analysis a step further, focusing on research linking participants' feelings and actions within a given personal relationship to the larger social context surrounding it. Author Malcolm R. Parks expands on the idea that the initiation, development, maintenance, and dissolution of relationships are inextricably connected to each participant's social network-a perspective that allows for a better appreciation of our connection to the world, and a greater understanding our significant power as social actors.   This book offers a new way to consider basic notions about how relationships form, such as how particular people meet, and how relationships are started. Among many findings, the volume demonstrates that individuals in relationships feel closer and generally more connected when they also have a greater amount of contact with the members of each other's personal networks and when they believe that network members support their relationship. Additional topics discussed include how this social context model is applicable to different types of relationships; how participants interact with network members; how social networks are involved in the deterioration of personal relationships; and what drives change in relationships.   Students, researchers, and professionals in a wide variety of disciplines such as communication, psychology, sociology, anthropology, family studies, clinical psychology, public health nursing, education, and social work will find this book useful, as will anyone seeking to better understand their own personal relationships.

Jane Charlotte has been arrested for murder. She says she's a member of a secret organization devoted to fighting evil. She says she's working with the Department for the Final Disposition of Irredeemable Persons--aka "Bad Monkeys." Her confession lands her in the jail's psychiatric wing and earns her countless hours of poking, probing, and questioning by a professional. But is Jane crazy or lying? Or is she playing a whole different game altogether?

In a landmark work of science two distinguished scientists offer a vivid narrative describing the second half of the life of our planet Planet Earth is middle-aged. Science has worked hard to piece together the story of the evolution of our world up to this point, but only recently have we developed the understanding and the tools to describe the entire life cycle of a planet-of our planet.Peter Ward and Don Brownlee, a geologist and an astronomer respectively, are in the vanguard of the new field of astrobiology. Combining their knowledge of how the critical sustaining systems of our planet evolve through time with their understanding of how stars and solar systems grow and change throughout their own life cycles, the authors tell the story of the second half of Earth's life. The process of planetary evolution will essentially reverse itself; life as we know it will subside until only the simplest forms remain. Eventually, they too will disappear. The oceans will evaporate, the atmosphere will degrade, and, as the sun slowly expands, Earth itself will eventually meet a fiery end.In this masterful melding of groundbreaking research and captivating, eloquent science writing, Ward and Brownlee provide a comprehensive portrait of Earth's life cycle that allows us to understand and appreciate how the planet sustains itself today, and offers us a glimpse of our place in the cosmic order.