Western Regional Roundup

West Coast -- What's Cookin'

Graphically SpeakingOn December 4, 1850, the first issue of The Oregonian rolled off the press. Oregon was only a territory then, and Portland just a raw frontier lumber village (population about 700) affectionately known as "Stumptown." To help celebrate the sesquicentennial of the Northwest's largest newspaper, Graphic Arts Center Publishing is offering The Oregon Story: 1850-2000, a collection of engaging stories and historical photographs by the Oregonian staff that spans the paper's existence and traces the state's past and present. The book will be featured at PNBA, NCIBA, and CBA. Another Graphic Arts title, this one being featured at PNBA, is Bears of Katmai by wildlife photographer and biologist Matthias Breiter, who traveled to Alaska to get up close and personal with the residents of the largest sanctuary for brown and grizzly bears in the U.S. His book includes the first successful underwater photographs of brown bears diving for fish.

In This Article: Graphically Speaking A Wildlands Debut The Eyes Have It Waste Not Ladies of the Court Communal Living, Montana-Style A Place by Any Other Name... Shedding Light on the Pacific California Creative Screen Scene

A Wildlands DebutMore wildlife can be spotted in Art Wolfe's The Living Wild, the first title from Seattle-based publisher Wildlands Press. Set to debut at PNBA, the book features essays from five of the world's leading naturalists, including Jane Goodall, along with Wolfe's images of the world's rarest and most spectacular animals, from the never-before-photographed Bornean bay cat to an endangered Florida panther, great white sharks in South Africa, Andean condors, Siberian tigers and more. To capture these images, renowned wildlife photographer Wolfe circled the globe four times, logged over one million kilometers by every means imaginable (from camel to kayak, fins and scuba tank to helicopter) and shot over 7,000 rolls of film. He'll be at PNBA on Friday afternoon to share his experiences in the field via a multimedia audiovisual presentation.

The Eyes Have ItAt Powell's "Celebration of Authors" will be Colin Chisholm, whose unusual memoir Through Yup'ik Eyes will be published by Alaska Northwest Books. In it, Chisholm traces the complicated threads of his life and that of his adoptive mother, the daughter of a Yup'ik Eskimo woman and a Scandinavian trader. After her parents died, his mother left the small Alaskan fishing village where she was born and raised, and was adopted by a family in Washington. Growing up in the Seattle area in the '40s, she encountered racism (her driver's license was stamped "half-breed") and lost all contact with her roots. After her death, Chisholm returned to Alaska to find her birth family, who welcomed him with open arms, and also traveled to Yugoslavia to search for his own beginnings.

Waste NotAnother memoir sure to spark interest at the Powell's event is Fulcrum Publishing's Atomic Farmgirl by Teri Hein, who explores a childhood filled with horseback riding, haying and the Cold War duck-and-cover drills of the '50s. The great-granddaughter of homesteaders, Hein grew up in the Paulouse Hills in eastern Washington, a region of golden wheat fields in the shadow of the Hanford Atomic Plant, whose dispersal of nuclear waste--both accidental and intentional--forever changed the people and the landscape.

Ladies of the CourtJournalist Larry Colton, author of the critically acclaimed Goat Brothers, will also be featured at the Powell's celebration. In Counting Coup, he chronicles a season with the girls' varsity basketball team of Hardin High School in Crow, Mont., a hardscrabble town beset by racism, alcoholism and domestic violence. In Native American tradition, "counting coup" meant literally touching one's enemy in battle and living to tell about it. Colton puts a new twist on the term as he uses it to describe how this team, comprised of both Native American and Caucasian girls and led by a talented Crow athlete who hopes to be the first female from her school to earn a basketball scholarship to college, plays winning hoops and aims to dominate their opponents.

Communal Living, Montana-StyleSlightly farther west lies another intriguing community, which Yale University Press spotlights in Hutterites of Montana by Laura Wilson, to be featured at PNBA. Through words and photographs, Wilson documents the lives of this close-knit and little-known religious society that shuns the modern world, shares ownership of all property and income, and practices communal living. What emerges, according to David McCullough, is a "a surpassing portrait" illuminated by themes of "religious freedom, the right of privacy, independence, community, and steadfastness in the face of adversity set in the immense open spaces of the West."

A Place by Any Other Name...Heading south to the Golden State, Word Dancer Press helps California wind up its three-year sesquicentennial celebration with Durham's California Place Names, a 14-book series that will be unveiled at NCIBA. A spin-off from its pricier ($195) California's Geographic Names, these attractively priced ($11.95-$15.95) tomes cover the state by region (Wine Country, Central Coast, Eastern Sierra, etc.), defining each area's geographical, topographical and cultural features and supplying longitude and latitude as well, a nifty addition that can help hikers keep on track via GPS devices.

Shedding Light on the PacificAnother book of keen interest to travelers will be in the spotlight at both NCIBA and PNBA--Voyageur Press's Lighthouses of the Pacific Coast by Randy Leffingwell and Pamela Welty. Through photographs and text, the authors trace the development of the region's lighthouses and their

Nature, sports and the great outdoors (Wildlands, Warner, Voyageur).

technological evolution, offer a peek at what life was like for lighthouse keepers, and examine the current movement to preserve and restore these fascinating structures.
It's only a short hop--albeit a wet one--from lighthouses to the ocean, and a book sure to make waves at these shows is Maverick's: The Story of Big-Wave Surfing, one of Chronicle's lead titles for fall. Located just south of San Francisco, Maverick's offers a unique challenge to surfers, from 50-degree murky waters and 60-foot faces to shifting currents and a punishing rock bottom. Matt Warshaw, former editor of Surfer magazine, takes on this Everest of the ocean as he documents the five most dangerous days in the history of this mecca for extreme sports enthusiasts, including big-wave celebrity Mark Woo, who died on the morning of his very first visit.

California CreativeArtists of a different stripe are in the limelight in State of the Arts by Barbara Isenberg, a Morrow title that will also debut at NCIBA. Drawn from a series of interviews that the former chief arts writer for the Los Angeles Times conducted with nationally known California artists of all kinds--folks such as Dave Brubeck, Randy Newman, David Hockney and Clint Eastwood--the book features more than 50 composers, writers, architects, performers, fine artists and more reflecting on the influence that California has had on their creativity. Its publication is slated to coincide with the largest art exhibition ever staged by the L.A. County Museum of Art, its millennial show "Made in California."

Screen SceneAlso premiering at NCIBA, SCBA and PNBA are a pair of books about the movies. From A Capella Books comes Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Conspire to Limit What Films We Can See by Jonathan Rosenbaum, and from New York University Press Hollywood v. Hard Core: How the Struggle over Censorship Created the Modern Film Industry by Jon Lewis. In his book, Rosenbaum, film critic for the Chicago Reader, examines what he calls "the media-industrial complex" and shows how movies are packaged and promoted, exposing industry secrets regarding distribution rights and corporate ownership of movie theaters that he contends defies antitrust laws. Lewis, a professor of English at Oregon State University, spans the 20th century with a history of censorship and regulation in the film industry, exploring the origins of Hollywood's industry-wide film rating system.
--Heather Vogel Frederick

The First Fiction Scene Life in the fast lane: Holt, Little, Brown). Eden Robinson, a First Nations woman who grew up in Haisla territory 500 miles north of Vancouver in the Canadian Pacific northwest, will be on hand at PNBA for her first novel, Monkey Beach (Houghton Mifflin, Dec.). Set in the Haisla homeland, the book concerns 20-year-old Lisa Hill, who receives visits from otherworldly friends as she searches for her drowned brother. Robinson lives in Vancouver. Pale Truth (MaxIt Publishing, Oct.) by Daniel Alef is the first entry in the Niantic Chronicles, an historical trilogy about California during the turbulent times of gold discovery. Alef, who lives in California's Santa Ynez Valley, bolsters his fictional account with illustrations of background events, a timeline and a bibliography. Riches of a different kind are the contemporary focus of Silicon Follies (Pocket Books, Jan.) by Thomas Scoville, where the fast-paced and highly remunerative tech world offers opportunity, loss and sometimes love in the valley serving as today's promised land. Scoville lives in Providence, R.I. California's San Fernando Valley is where the dysfunctional Kelbow family makes its home, and Leslie Brenner's satirical first novel, Greetings from the Golden State (Holt, Feb.), follows their misadventures for over three decades. Brenner lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. The five stories and novella collected in Rope Burns (Ecco Press, Sept.) by 69-year-old F.X. Toole portray the gritty underworld of professional boxing in East L.A. Toole himself trains fighters and has worked as a cut man (the person who stanches a boxer's wounds in the ring) for 20 years. "This book is very hard to describe," admits Dan Halpern, Ecco's v-p and editorial director. "It's not like anything else. The writing style is not noir so much as it's in your face." The novella is particularly charged by its setting: East L.A. during the Rodney King riots. Toole lives in Hermosa Beach, Calif. Moving from boxing to football, Neil Garvin is a popular Las Vegas high school quarterback in Diamond Dogs (Little, Brown, Sept.) by L.A. resident Alan Watt. When Neil accidentally commits a terrible crime, his abusive sheriff father covers for him--and then the FBI closes in. The Dying Ground (Jan.) by Nichelle Tramble launches Villard's new African-American trade paperback line christened Strivers Row. Tramble's debut is an African-American mystery set in Oakland during the drug wars of the late 1980s, as a young man is drawn into that dangerous realm while solving the murder of a friend. Tramble lives in Berkeley, Calif. Jenoyne Adams deals with interracial marriage, biracial children and infidelity in Resurrecting Mingus (S&S, Feb.), as lawyer Mingus Browning defends her white mother in divorce proceedings when her black father leaves his 35-year-old marriage for a black woman. L.A. is Adams's home and its suburbs are the setting. On a lighter note, The Last Hollywood Romance (Bridge Works, Sept.) by Beverly Bloomberg is a behind-the-scenes satire of the world of TV sitcoms. "It's a very contemporary story about two writers working on sitcoms," says editorial director Barbara Phillips. "Beverly is an insider and she zaps a lot of Hollywood characters, a lot of scrambling people without morals." Bloomberg, who wrote for Welcome Back, Kotter in the 70s, now lives in Worcester, Mass. Alev Lytle Croutier divides her time between San Francisco and Paris. The latter in 1868 sets the scene for The Palace of Tears (Delacorte, Nov.), wherein a vintner becomes obsessed with a woman in a miniature portrait, pursues her and finds her in the sultan's palace in Istanbul. The Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco takes center stage as the 1960s' "summer of love" is recalled by James Fadiman in The Other Side of Haight (Celestial Arts, Jan.). The other side is the darker side when a government experiment involving LSD spins out of control, impacting lives with tragic results. --Robert Dahlin Top