Libraries Unbound: 2014 Authors (Literary Voices)

This beautiful book offers a treasure trove of rare photos plus the vivid narration of Melinda Bargreen, who covered Seattle Opera for The Seattle Times for close to 40 of the company's 50 years. Bargreen's compelling chronicle begins with the pioneering days of opera in Seattle and covers the power struggles at Seattle Opera's inception; details founding General Director Glynn Ross's friendships with superstars Joan Sutherland and Beverly Sills, and his pie-in-the-sky idea of presenting Wagner's Ring in Seattle; follows Speight Jenkins from his first Seattle appearance (as a speaker on the Ring) to the triumph of operatic glasnost he engineered when Seattle Opera gave War and Peace for the 1990 Goodwill Games, to the creation of McCaw Hall. The book features a "Who's Who" of more than 50 key players including Marion Oliver McCaw, Henry Holt, Archie Drake, Perry Lorenzo, Vinson Cole, Jane Eaglen, Greer Grimsley, and many others.

In 1931, a 12-year-old boy shot and killed the sheriff of Asotin, Washington. The incident stunned the small town and a mob threatened to hang him. Both the crime and Herbert Niccolls's eventual sentence of life imprisonment at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla drew national attention, only to be buried later in local archives. Journalist Nancy Bartley has conducted extensive research to construct a compelling narrative of the events and characters that make this a unique episode in the history of criminal justice in the United States. Niccolls became a cause for Father Flanagan of Boys Town,who took to the airwaves, imploring listeners to write Governor Hartley on the boy's behalf. The bitter campaign put Hartley in such a negative light that he lost his bid for reelection. Under a new and progressive warden, Niccolls thrived in prison. Inmates like physician Peter Miller and literary agent James Ashe became his tutors, finding that Niccolls had an insatiable appetite for knowledge. During the deadly 1934 prison riot at Walla Walla, several prisoners kept him from harm. Niccolls was finally released from prison in his early twenties. He went to work at 20th Century Fox in Hollywood, where he kept his secret for the rest of his long life. The Boy Who Shot the Sheriff explores this little-known story of a young boy's fate in the juvenile justice system during the bloodiest years in the nation's penitentiaries.

While there are more than 15,000 museums in our country, visitors get to see only about  five percent of any institution's collections. Most museums simply don't have room to display everything they've got. However, there are a wide variety of surprising and intriguing reasons that, for example, the Smithsonian Institution doesn't display its collection of condoms, Florida's Lightner Museum locks up all but one of its shrunken heads, and a world-class stash of Japanese erotica (shunga) art was kept in the Honolulu Museum of Art's storage until only recently. Each item or collection included in this volume is described and placed in context with stories and interviews that explore the historical, social, cultural, political, environmental, or other circumstances that led to keeping that object or group of objects out of public view--the ultimate museum buff's voyeuristic experience. Color photographs of the artifacts are included.

Walking Washington's History: Ten Cities, a follow-up to Judy Bentley's bestselling Hiking Washington's History, showcases the state's engaging urban history through guided walks in ten major cities. Using narrated walks, maps, and historic photographs, Bentley reveals each city's aspirations. She begins in Vancouver, established as a fur trade emporium on a plain above the Columbia River, and ends with Bellevue, a bedroom community turned edge city. In between, readers crisscross the state, with walks through urban Olympia, Walla Walla, Tacoma, Seattle, Everett, Bellingham, Yakima, and Spokane. Whether readers pass through these cities as tourists or set out to explore their home terrain, they will discover both the visible and invisible markers of Washington history underfoot.  

An extraordinary epic of love, family and war set in the Basque town of Guernica before, during, and after its destruction by the German Luftwaffe during the Spanish Civil War. Calling to mind such timeless war-and-love classics as Corelli's Mandolin and The English Patient, Guernica is a transporting novel that thrums with the power of storytelling and is peopled with characters driven by grit and heart. In 1935, Miguel Navarro finds himself in conflict with the Spanish Civil Guard, and flees the Basque fishing village of Lekeitio to make a new start in Guernica, the center of Basque culture and tradition. In the midst of this isolated bastion of democratic values, Miguel finds more than a new life--he finds someone to live for. Miren Ansotegui is a charismatic and graceful dancer who has her pick of the bachelors in Guernica, but focuses only on the charming and mysterious Miguel. The two discover a love that war and tragedy can not destroy. History and fiction merge seamlessly in this beautiful novel about the resilience of family, love, and tradition in the face of hardship. The bombing of Guernica was a devastating experiment in total warfare by the German Luftwaffe in the run-up to World War II. For the Basques, it was an attack on the soul of their ancient nation; for the world, it was an unprecedented crime against humanity. In his first novel, Boling reintroduces the event and paints his own picture of a people so strong, vibrant, and proud that they are willing to do whatever it takes to protect their values, their country, and their loved ones.

O Chonghui crafts historically-rooted yet timeless tales imagining core human experiences from a female point of view. Since her debut in 1968, she has formed a powerful challenge to the patriarchal literary establishment in Korea, and her work has invited rich comparisons with the achievements of Joyce Carol Oates, Alice Munro, and Virginia Woolf. These nine stories range from O Chonghui's first published work, in 1968, to one of her last publications, in 1994. Her early stories are compact, often chilling accounts of family dysfunction, reflecting the decline of traditional, agrarian economics and the rise of urban, industrial living. Later stories are more expansive, weaving eloquent, occasionally wistful reflections on lost love and tradition together with provocative explorations of sexuality and gender. O Chonghui makes use of flashbacks, interior monologues, and stream-of-consciousness in her narratives, developing themes of abandonment and loneliness in a carefully cultivated, dispassionate tone. O Chonghui's narrators stand in for the average individual, struggling to cope with emotional rootlessness and a yearning for permanence in family and society. Arguably the first female Korean fiction writer to follow Woolf's dictum to do away with the egoless, self-sacrificing "angel in the house," O Chonghui is a crucial figure in the history of modern Korean literature, one of the most astute observers of Korean society and the place of tradition within it.

For 15 years, Jerome Gold worked as a rehabilitation counsellor in a juvenile detention facility in Washington state. Throughout his time there, he kept a journal of his experiences with youths who had been imprisoned for murder, kidnap, assault, rape, theft, burglary and drug offences. What started as a journal designed to relieve stress turned into the evocation of one man's nuanced perspective on a unique group of young people who have crossed over to the other side of their own humanity.

WINNER OF THE WASHINGTON STATE BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION In seventh-century Britain, a new religion is coming ashore and small kingdoms are merging, frequently and violently. Hild is the king's youngest niece, with a glittering mind and a natural authority. She is destined to become one of the pivotal figures of the Early Middle Ages: Saint Hilda of Whitby. But for now she has only the powerful curiosity of a bright child and the precarious advantage of a plotting uncle, Edwin of Northumbria, who will stop at nothing to become overking of Angles. Hild establishes a place for herself at his side as the king's seer, and she is indispensable--as long as she doesn't lead Edwin astray. The stakes are high--life and death--for Hild, for her family,and, increasingly, for those who seek the protection from this strange girl who seems to see the future. Drawing from the few records history has left us, Nicola Griffith has brought the young Saint Hilda's harsh, but beautiful, world to vivid, absorbing life.

A New York Times bestseller, the shocking story of one of the few people born in a North Korean political prison to have escaped and survived. Blaine Harden's latest book, King of Spies, will be available from Viking in Fall 2017. North Korea is isolated and hungry, bankrupt and belligerent. It is also armed with nuclear weapons. Between 150,000 and 200,000 people are being held in its political prison camps, which have existed twice as long as Stalin's Soviet gulags and twelve times as long as the Nazi concentration camps. Very few born and raised in these camps have escaped. But Shin Donghyuk did. In Escape from Camp 14, acclaimed journalist Blaine Harden tells the story of Shin Dong-hyuk and through the lens of Shin's life unlocks the secrets of the world's most repressive totalitarian state. Shin knew nothing of civilized existence-he saw his mother as a competitor for food, guards raised him to be a snitch, and he witnessed the execution of his own family. Through Harden's harrowing narrative of Shin's life and remarkable escape, he offers an unequaled inside account of one of the world's darkest nations and a riveting tale of endurance, courage, and survival.

The acclaimed author of What's Worth Knowing reveals the truth about aging: Old age often offers a richer, better, and more self-assured life than youth. From our earliest lives, we are told that our youth will be the best time of our lives-that the energy and vitality of youth are the most important qualities a person can possess, and that everything that comes after will be a sad decline. But in reality, says Wendy Lustbader, youth is not the golden era it is often made out to be. For many, it is a time riddled with anxiety, angst, confusion, and the torture of uncertainty. Conversely, the media often feeds us a vision of growing older as a journey of defeat and diminishment. They are dead wrong. As Lustbader counters, "Life gets better as we get older, on all levels except the physical." Life Gets Better is not a precious or whimsical tome on the quirky wisdom of the elderly. Lustbader-who has worked for several decades as a social worker specializing in aging issues-conducted firsthand research with aging and elderly people in all walks of life, and she found that they overwhelmingly spoke of the mental and emotional richness they have drawn from aging. Lustbader discovered that rather than experiencing a decline from youth, aging people were happier, more courageous, and more interested in being true to their inner selves than were young people. Life Gets Better examines through first-person stories, as well as Lustbader's own observations, how a lifetime of lessons learned can yield one of the most personally and emotionally fruitful periods of anyone's life. As an eighty-six-year-old who contributed her story to the book noted, "For me, being old is the reward for outlasting all the big and little problems that happen to all of us along life's pathway." The collected stories in Life Gets Better provide a hopeful corrective to the fear of aging aggressively instilled in us by the media. Don't dread the future: The best years of our lives just may be ahead.

Domingo Martinez lays bare his interior and exterior worlds as he struggles to make sense of the violent and the ugly, along with the beautiful and the loving. Partly a reflection on the culture of machismo and partly an exploration of the author's boyhood spent in his sister's hand-me-down clothes, this book delves into the enduring and complex bond between Martinez and his deeply flawed, but fiercely protective older brother. It features a cast of memorable characters, including his gun-hoarding, former farmhand Gramma and "The Mimi's," two of his older sisters who for a short, glorious time, manage to transform themselves from poor Latina adolescents into upper-class white girls.   Martinez delves into the complicated relationships between extended family and the inner conflicts that result when the desire to Americanize clashes with the inherent need to defend one’s manhood in an aggressive, archaic patriarchal farming culture. He provides a real glimpse into a society where children are traded like commerce, physical altercations routinely solve problems, drugs are rampant, sex is often crude, and people depend on the family witch doctor for advice. Charming, painful, and enlightening, it examines the traumas and pleasures of growing up in South Texas, and the often terrible consequences when two very different cultures collide on the banks of a dying river.

Each year thousands of drivers travel Washington State's breathtakingly beautiful North Cascades Highway (State Route 20), observing the region's alpine flora and fauna and its dramatic geologic features. The North Cascades Highway, an illustrated natural history guide, helps travelers and readers to appreciate the deeper beauty behind the landscape. Organized as a series of stops at eye-catching sites along eighty miles of the highway, The North Cascades Highway reveals the geological story of each location. Plate tectonics, rock formation, erosion, and glaciation are explored to show how the features of the North Cascades landscape came into being as they exist today. Human history is also included, as the book describes how miners, climbers, and poets have been inspired by the geology and terrain of the North Cascades. For travelers on the road, the easy-to-use guidebook format includes mileage, parking information, and detailed maps. Stunning color photographs allow armchair travelers to enjoy the journey as well. Appendices provide detailed information on geologic time, rock types, glaciers, and the geologists who have decoded stories hidden in rock and ice. The North Cascades Highway provides a unique experience of a striking landscape that is also a rich, interwoven system of living things, climate, and geology.

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

Kathleen Murphy authored one of the UW’s first film focused dissertations while directing and teaching in a University cinema studies program. An internationally published film critic (Film Comment, SteadyCam, Village Voice, Film West, Cinemania, MSN), her work has been included in many film anthologies (Best American Film Writing 1998, Women and Cinema, Citizen Sarris). While writer-in residence at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York, she curated film programs, notably the first comprehensive survey of Irish cinema, and served on the selection committee of the New York Film Festival. In Seattle, Murphy has taught film at the UW and has been a member of the Seattle International Film Festival selection committee; SIFF Director of Education; Director, Women in Cinema festival.

Like a fly box with colourful patterns, these pages hold some of the best and brightest moments of a long-fly- fishing life. Here is the ecstasy (occasional agony) of fishing for trout, salmon, and saltwater gamefish - in waters from Canada to the Caribbean, northern Scotland to the South Pacific.

In 1859 Great Britain and the United States almost went to war over the Northwest boundary when an American farmer shot a British pig. That July, U.S. Army Captain George E. Pickett looked down the gun ports of two British warships from his camp on San Juan Island. He knew he needed help, and the sooner the better. The future Confederate general had been ordered there to protect the rights of U.S. settlers from the might of the British Empire. First published in 1999, Mike Vouri's lively account of the Pig War crisis has been revised and expanded into a definitive new edition. Additional photographs, maps, and drawings are combined with new material providing fresh insights into the boundary dispute that confounded diplomats of three nations, but never quite descended into a shooting war.