Libraries Unbound: 2013 Authors (Literary Voices)

As Four Thousand Hooks opens, an Alaskan fishing schooneris sinking. It is the summer of 1972, and the sixteen-year-old narratoris at the helm. Dean Adams tells how he came to be a crew member on theGrant and unfolds a tale of adventure that reads like anovel--full of drama, conflict, and resonant portrayals of halibutfishing. At sea, the Grant's crew teach Dean the dailytasks of baiting thousands of longline hooks and handling the catch,and on shore they lead him through the seedy bars and guilty pleasuresof Kodiak. Four Thousand Hooks is both an absorbing adventuretale and a rich ethnography of a way of life and work that hassustained Northwest families for generations. This coming of age storywill appeal to readers--including young adults--interested inocean adventures, commercial fishing, maritime life, and the NorthwestCoast.

Strange with Age, by prize-winning poet Sharon Cumberland, explores the gains and losses of the ageing process through the prism of her 95-year-old father, as well as other, wide-ranging subjects concerned with the vagaries and challenges of living. Built around the sonnet cycle "My Father Has Grown Strange with Age," the poems reflect the poet's travels to Rome, Glasgow, Seattle, and San Francisco, and an array of nursing homes, fantasies, and dreams. Cumberland's poems are known for the clarity and accessibility of her voice. They can be understood and appreciated by adolescent and college readers, while mature readers will find a treasure trove of meaning in the clever use of imagery and metaphor. Cumberland is also known for her spirituality in the tradition of Mary Oliver, Wendell Berry, and Denise Levertov. Her poems explore the mysteries of faith, both in contemporary and biblical settings, without being off-putting to secular readers. Her work is a magic mirror in which the reader can see the extraordinary through the mundanity of daily life. Sandra Cisneros calls Cumberland's poetry "truer than x-ray or photo." Kathleen Flenniken says the Strange with Age offers "truth, consolation, and a lovely sense of humor."

The studio was decorated in the style of Don't Be Afraid, We're Not a Cult. All was white and blond and clean, as though the room had been designed for surgery, or Swedish people. The only spot of color came from the Tibetan prayer flags strung over the doorway into the studio. In flagrant defiance of my longtime policy of never entering a structure adorned with Tibetan prayer flags, I removed my shoes, paid my ten bucks, and walked in . . . Ten years ago, Claire Dederer put her back out while breastfeeding her baby daughter. Told to try yoga by everyone from the woman behind the counter at the co-op to the homeless guy on the corner, she signed up for her first class. She fell madly in love. Over the next decade, she would tackle triangle, wheel, and the dreaded crow, becoming fast friends with some poses and developing long-standing feuds with others. At the same time, she found herself confronting the forces that shaped her generation. Daughters of women who ran away to find themselves and made a few messes along the way, Dederer and her peers grew up determined to be good, good, good--even if this meant feeling hemmed in by the smugness of their organic-buying, attachment-parenting, anxiously conscientious little world. Yoga seemed to fit right into this virtuous program, but to her surprise, Dederer found that the deeper she went into the poses, the more they tested her most basic ideas of what makes a good mother, daughter, friend, wife--and the more they made her want something a little less tidy, a little more improvisational. Less goodness, more joy. Poseris unlike any other book about yoga you will read--because it is actually a book about life. Witty and heartfelt, sharp and irreverent,Poseris for anyone who has ever tried to stand on their head while keeping both feet on the ground.

The poems in Plume are nuclear-age songs of innocence and experience set in the "empty" desert West. Award-winning poet Kathleen Flenniken grew up in Richland, Washington, at the height of the Cold War, next door to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, where "every father I knew disappeared to fuel the bomb," and worked at Hanford herself as a civil engineer and hydrologist. By the late 1980s, declassified documents revealed decades of environmental contamination and deception at the plutonium production facility, contradicting a lifetime of official assurances to workers and their families that their community was and always had been safe. At the same time, her childhood friend Carolyn's own father was dying of radiation-induced illness: "blood cells began to err one moment efficient the next / a few gone wrong stunned by exposure to radiation / as [he] milled uranium into slugs or swabbed down / train cars or reported to B Reactor for a quick run-in / run-out." Plume, written twenty years later, traces this American betrayal and explores the human capacity to hold truth at bay when it threatens one's fundamental identity. Flenniken observes her own resistance to facts: "one box contains my childhood / the other contains his death / if one is true / how can the other be true?" The book's personal story and its historical one converge with enriching interplay and wide technical variety, introducing characters that range from Carolyn and her father to Italian physicist Enrico Fermi and Manhattan Project health physicist Herbert Parker. As a child of "Atomic City," Kathleen Flenniken brings to this tragedy the knowing perspective of an insider coupled with the art of a precise, unflinching, gifted poet. Watch the book trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch'v=3iSaR9mfeeM

Immigrants from South Asia first began settling in Washington and Oregon in the nineteenth century, but because of restrictions placed on Asian immigration to the United States in the early twentieth century, the vast majority have come to the region since World War II. Roots and Reflections uses oral history to show how South Asian immigrant experiences were shaped by the region and how they differed over time and across generations. It includes the stories of immigrants from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka who arrived from the end of World War II through the 1980s.

The 1900 edition of Polk's Seattle City Directory listed four apartment buildings. By 1939, that number had grown to almost 1,400. This study explores the circumstances that prompted the explosive growth of this previously unknown form of housing in Seattle and takes an in-depth look at a large number of different apartment buildings, from the small and simple to the large and grand. Illustrated with numerous contemporary and vintage photographs and sketches, this volume preserves an intimate record of these under-studied and under-appreciated buildings and will inspire an appreciation for their history and architectural variety, and for their preservation as an integral part of Seattle's urban landscape.

Bayes' rule appears to be a straightforward, one-line theorem: by updating our initial beliefs with objective new information, we get a new and improved belief. To its adherents, it is an elegant statement about learning from experience. To its opponents, it is subjectivity run amok. In the first-ever account of Bayes' rule for general readers, Sharon Bertsch McGrayne explores this controversial theorem and the human obsessions surrounding it. She traces its discovery by an amateur mathematician in the 1740s through its development into roughly its modern form by French scientist Pierre Simon Laplace. She reveals why respected statisticians rendered it professionally taboo for 150 years--at the same time that practitioners relied on it to solve crises involving great uncertainty and scanty information (Alan Turing's role in breaking Germany's Enigma code during World War II), and explains how the advent of off-the-shelf computer technology in the 1980s proved to be a game-changer. Today, Bayes' rule is used everywhere from DNA de-coding to Homeland Security. Drawing on primary source material and interviews with statisticians and other scientists, The Theory That Would Not Die is the riveting account of how a seemingly simple theorem ignited one of the greatest controversies of all time.

Gray, fuzzy, a little wrinkled, and waving around one helluva snout, Hansa the baby elephant was born at Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle -- and is now a star Hansa, which means supreme happiness in Thai, is a rare and endangered Asian elephant born in captivity to mom Chai. Clare Meeker follows Hansa's true-life story and tells of Chai's difficulties getting pregnant (including a 2,000-mile road trip to Missouri to flirt with an 11,000-pound male ), her 22-month pregnancy, and the wondrous birth of 235-pound Hansa. Richly illustrated with full-color photographs, this fun and educational book chronicles Hansa's remarkable birth and includes facts about elephant habitat, feeding habits, and anatomy.

At the close of the Chinese Civil War, two million Chinese fled from the victorious communist army under Mao Zedong. They fled across a long ocean strait to the island of Taiwan where they waited for almost fifty years, dreaming of their lost homes and relatives left behind, aging and living out their lives as defeated, cursed people. But when both Taiwan and China began to become wealthy, the two sides allowed cautious exchanges. The split families met up again. There was hope, joy, sorrow, and disasters. Yet the losers of the Chinese civil war, who had endured for so long, now found a new reason to persevere they no longer hated their enemies. In fact, they now wanted to join them. This book draws on oral histories with Kuomintang loyalists in Taiwan to show their painful struggles with family, friends, and relatives back in the mainland, their hopes and disappointments, the effects on a changing society and political situation in Taiwan, and the dynamics of cross-strait relations shared by millions on both sides of the Taiwan strait.

What happens when a coffee-drinking, cigarette-smoking, steak-eating twenty-five-year-old atheist decides it is time to get in touch with her spiritual side? Not what you'd expect... nbsp; When Suzanne Morrison decides to travel to Bali for a two-month yoga retreat, she wants nothing more than to be transformed from a twenty-five-year-old with a crippling fear of death into her enchanting yoga teacher, Indra--a woman who seems to have found it all: love, self, and God. nbsp; But things don't go quite as expected. Once in Bali, she finds that her beloved yoga teacher and all of her yogamates wake up every morning to drink a large, steaming mug...of their own urine. Sugar is a mortal sin. Spirits inhabit kitchen appliances. And the more she tries to find her higher self, the more she faces her cynical, egomaniacal, cigarette-, wine-, and chocolate-craving lower self. nbsp; Yoga Bitch chronicles Suzanne's hilarious adventures and misadventures as an aspiring yogi who might be just a bit too skeptical to drink the Kool-Aid. But along the way she discovers that no spiritual effort is wasted; even if her yoga retreat doesn't turn her into the gorgeously calm, wise believer she hopes it will, it does plant seeds that continue to blossom in surprising ways over the next decade of her life. suzannemorrison.blogspot.com

A SECRET WORTH KILLING FOR... In July 1970, actress Elaina Styles was slain in her rented Seattle mansion along with her husband and their son's nanny. When the baby's remains were found buried in a shallow grave close to a hippie commune, police moved in--only to find all its members already dead in a grisly mass suicide.   AGAIN... Now, decades later, a film about the murders is shooting at the mansion. On-set caterer Laurie Trotter ignores gossip that the production is cursed. But then people start dying...   AND AGAIN... As Laurie digs deep into what happened all those years ago, the truth emerges more twisted than any whispered rumor, as a legacy of brutal vengeance reaches its terrifying climax...

Having translatedThe Diamond Sutra andThe Heart Sutra, and following withThe Platform Sutra, Red Pine now turns his attention to perhaps the greatest Sutra of all.The Lankavatara Sutra is the holy grail of Zen. Zen's First Patriarch, Bodhidharma, gave a copy of this text to his successor, Hui-k'o, and told him everything he needed to know was in this book. Passed down from teacher to student ever since, this is the only Zen sutra ever spoken by the Buddha. Although it covers all the major teachings of Mahayana Buddhism, it contains but two teachings: that everything we perceive as being real is nothing but the perceptions of our own mind and that the knowledge of this is something that must be realized and experienced for oneself and cannot be expressed in words. In the words of Chinese Zen masters, these two teachings became known as "have a cup of tea" and "taste the tea." This is the first translation into English of the original text used by Bodhidharma, which was the Chinese translation made by Gunabhadra in 443 and upon which all Chinese Zen masters have relied ever since. In addition to presenting one of the most difficult of all Buddhist texts in clear English, Red Pine has also added summaries, explanations and notes, including relevant Sanskrit terms on the basis of which the Chinese translation was made. This promises to become an essential text for anyone seeking to deepen their understanding or knowledge of Zen.

A bona-fide city dweller, Kurt Timmermeister never intended to run his own dairy farm. When he purchased four acres of land on Vashon Island, he was looking for an affordable home a ferry ride away from the restaurants he ran in Seattle. But as he continued to serve his customers frozen chicken breasts and packaged pork, he became aware of the connection between what he ate and where it came from: a hive of bees provided honey; a young cow could give fresh milk; an apple orchard allowed him to make vinegar. Told in Timmermeister's plainspoken voice, Growing a Farmer details with honesty the initial stumbles and subsequent realities he had to face in his quest to establish a profitable farm for himself. Personal yet practical, Growing a Farmer includes the specifics of making cheese, raising cows, and slaughtering pigs, and it will recast entirely the way we think about our relationship to the food we consume.

By the end of the eighteenth century, Peru had witnessed the decline of its once-thriving silver industry, and it had barely begun to recover from massive population losses due to smallpox and other diseases. At the time, it was widely believed that economic salvation was contingent upon increasing the labor force and maintaining as many healthy workers as possible. In Medicine and Politics in Colonial Peru,Adam Warrenpresents a groundbreaking study of the primacy placed on medical care to generate population growth during this era. The Bourbon reforms of the eighteenth century shaped many of the political, economic, and social interests of Spain and its colonies. In Peru, local elites saw the reforms as an opportunity to positively transform society and its conceptions of medicine and medical institutions in the name of the Crown. Creole physicians in particular, took advantage of Bourbon reforms to wrest control of medical treatment away from the Catholic Church, establish their own medical expertise, and create a new, secular medical culture. They asserted their new influence by treating smallpox and leprosy, by reforming medical education, and by introducing hygienic routines into local funeral rites, among other practices. Later, during the early years of independence, government officials began to usurp the power of physicians and shifted control of medical care back to the church. Creole doctors, without the support of the empire, lost much of their influence, and medical reforms ground to a halt.  As Warren's study reveals, despite falling in and out of political favor, Bourbon reforms and creole physicians were instrumental to the founding of modern medicine in Peru, and their influence can still be felt today.

Seventeen year-old dirt-bike-riding daredevil Arlo Santiago catches the eye of the U.S. military with his first-place ranking on a video game featuring drone warfare, and must reconcile the work they want him to do with the emotional scars he has suffered following a violent death in his family. Adios, Nirvana author Conrad Wesselhoeft, takes readers from the skies over war-torn Pakistan to the dusty arroyos of New Mexico's outback in this young adult novel about daring to live in the wake of unbearable loss.

Returning with showy brilliance year after year, perennials continue to be the center of gardening interest both nationally and regionally. Master gardener Marty Wingate and photographer Jacqueline Koch present a gorgeous and definitive guide to the best perennials for Northwestern climates, filled with specific advice on how to select the best type and quality, as well as recommendations on which perennials work best together (similar light and water needs). Wingate's easy-to-follow instructions on caring for perennials are enhanced by Koch's lovely photos, which fill the book with vibrant color.