All media by Alumni
137 reviews of media by Alumni.
The Awakening
Summer 2015
The Awakening
weaves effortlessly through time, from the battle-scarred streets of
Spain in 1936 to nearly 60 years later as it tells the life story of
Diego Garcia and his descendants.
In this unconventional romance novel, Diego Garcia droppe...
Categories: Fiction
Tags: War, Spain, Spanish Civil War
Key to My Cage
Summer 2015
The human voice is our oldest acoustic instrument and it’s still one of
the most captivating. Add a few well struck strings—just a few chords
even—and you have a remarkable symphony of bass, harmony, lyrics, and
emotion.
This is the begu...
Categories: Music
Tags: Folk, Blues rock
Coal Wars: Unions, Strikes, and Violence in Depression-Era Central Washington
Summer 2015
There was a time, it’s been recalled, when each home in Roslyn had
three pictures on its wall: of Jesus, FDR, and John L. Lewis, the
powerful head of the United Mine Workers of America, or UMW. But labor
conflicts in the coal-mining town duri...
Categories: Washington state history
Tags: Labor and unions, Coal mining, Roslyn
The Slow Regard of Silent Things
Spring 2015
A darling of the sci-fi/fantasy set, Pat Rothfuss has diverted from the
long-awaited third part of his bestselling Kingkiller trilogy and,
instead, taken the time to explore the story of lovely, lonely Auri, one
of the secondary Kingkiller char...
Categories: Fiction
Tags: Fantasy
On This Borrowed Bike
Spring 2015
Rivers flow through the poems in Panepinto’s slim volume. They whisper
of the Northwest, of young people who have jumped in, of silvery fish
and poison in the water. In her first collection, the Spokane native
writes with a deft lyricism and ...
Categories: Poetry
Tags: Poets
Hunting for “Dirtbags”: Why Cops Over-police the Poor and Racial Minorities
Spring 2015
In this day of increased scrutiny of police, many people wonder about
policing styles and how officers use their unassigned time. The high
rate of minority arrests and stops as well as the higher level of
surveillance in poor communities have a...
Categories: Social sciences
Tags: Criminal justice, Police, Racial profiling
Looking Like the Enemy: Japanese Mexicans, the Mexican State, and US Hegemony, 1897-1945
Spring 2015
Eizi Matuda and his wife Miduho Kaneko de Matuda were Japanese
immigrants who had become Mexican citizens and had lived there for 20
years when agents of the Mexican government came to their home to
relocate them. However, unlike thousands of J...
Categories: History
Tags: Mexico, Immigration, Internment camps
Nikkei Baseball: Japanese American Players from Immigration and Internment to the Major Leagues
Winter 2014
Since Sam Regalado received his doctorate in history in 1987, he has
established himself as one of the leading authorities on the history of
baseball and the Hispanic population in the United States. Now a
professor at California State Universi...
Categories: Athletics, History, Cultural studies
Tags: Japanese-Americans, Baseball, Internment camps
New & Noteworthy
Fall 2014
Said & Done by Elder Crow2014 ::
Tyler Morgan ’03 and his band crank up some old-school rock and roll in
their debut album. The Vancouver, Washington, group blends lyrics of
social justice and civil rights with roaring guitars and solid d...
Categories: Music, Veterinary medicine, Memoirs
Tags: Country music
New & Noteworthy
Summer 2014
Kierkegaard for the Church: Essays and Sermons by Ronald F. Marshall ’71Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2013 ::
Søren Kierkegaard’s philosophy and writings on Christianity have been a
staple of classrooms and academics for many years, but have no...
Categories: Philosophy, Health sciences, Fiction
Tags: Golf, Christianity, Alzheimer's Disease
Hunger Immortal: The First Thirty Years of the West Seattle Food Bank, 1983–2013
Summer 2014
What is today the West Seattle Food Bank started as a shoestring
operation in an abandoned public school building. A pair of retired
grocers from South Dakota had taken on responsibility for distributing
government commodities like cheese and p...
Categories: Social work, History
Tags: Food security, Seattle
New & Noteworthy for Spring 2014
Spring 2014
Operation Cody: An Undercover Investigation of Illegal Wildlife Trafficking in Washington State
by Todd A. Vandivert ’79 :: 2013 ::
Undercover game wardens Todd Vandivert and Jennifer Maurstad posed as
husband and wife businesspeople in...
Categories: History, Business
Tags: Wildlife trafficking, Computers, Africa
A Yankee on Puget Sound
Spring 2014
Pioneer Edward Jay Allen lived near Olympia when the Oregon Territory
was split in two and federal politicians elected to name the new
territory Washington, rejecting the local suggestion of Columbia. Allen
helped survey a wagon road over Nache...
Categories: Washington state history
Tags: American West, Puget Sound, Exploration
Soldiers of Paint
Spring 2014
Through clouds of smoke, soldiers call out to each other at Omaha
Beach in the Normandy fields they recreated in Wyandotte, Oklahoma.
Paintballs fly through the air as Allied troops storm toward concrete
pillboxes filled with Axis troops intent...
Categories: Visual arts
Tags: Documentary, Paintball, World War II
Think About That
Winter 2013
As the rhythmic guitars launch “Son of a Gun,” the lead song from Chance McKinney’s album Think About That,
it’s easy to get hooked into his industrial country music, a powerful
blend of modern country and guitar-driven rock, with some un...
Categories: Music
Tags: Country music
The Barbless Hook: Inner Sanctum of Angling Revealed
Winter 2013
In the tradition of Patrick McManus ’56, ’59, Dennis Dauble ventures
into that conjoined alternate universe of outdoor sport and humor, the
difference between the two being that Dauble tends to catch more fish.
Perhaps that is because Daubl...
Categories: Humor
Tags: Fishing
Battered Women, Their Children, and International Law
Winter 2013
The 1980 Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child
Abduction ruled that any child taken from one parent by another across
international borders must be returned to their home country for custody
to be properly and legally det...
Categories: Law, Social work
Tags: Hague Convention, Child abduction
New & Noteworthy for Fall 2013
Fall 2013
Luna Sea
by Kim Roberts ’82
2012Aloha Jones, harbormaster at Lahaina, Maui, investigates the
murder of a local troublemaker in this mystery set in Hawaii and filled
with sharks and funky characters on the dark side of paradise.
The Boys Fr...
Categories: Education, Materials engineering, Fiction
Tags: Ecology, Mystery novels, Ireland
Oceania and the Victorian Imagination: Where All Things Are Possible
Fall 2013
Devotees of Victorian-era writers like Robert Louis Stevenson, Jules
Verne, H.G. Wells, and Joseph Conrad may well recognize the current of
interest in Oceania, or the South Pacific, that runs through their
stories.
During that period, from th...
Categories: Literature, History
Tags: Travel, Victorian Era, Oceania
New & Noteworthy
Summer 2013
Planet Rock Doc: Nuggets from Explorations of the Natural World
WSU Press, 2012
The Whole Story of Climate: What Science Reveals about the Nature of Endless Change
Prometheus Books, 2012
by E. Kirsten Peters
The Harvard-trained geologist, column...
Categories: Veterinary medicine, History, Earth sciences
Tags: Careers, American West, Climate change
WSU Cougars from A to Z
Summer 2013
Young future Cougars and current fans of the University will enjoy
this volume of WSU facts, stories, and profiles put together in an
alphabetical “A is for…” format and illustrated with full-page
watercolors. Nellis, a 1990 communication...
Categories: WSU history, Children's books
Tags: Illustrated books
Chicago, Barcelona Connections
Summer 2013
The Latin-themed recording is one of the great subgenres of jazz, going
back at least as far as Duke Ellington’s “Caravan” and running through
the likes of Dizzy Gillespie’s “Manteca” and the Getz/Gilberto
collaboration that brought...
Categories: Music
Tags: Jazz
We Are the Bus
Summer 2013
This small book of poetry plays on themes of reminiscence, travel,
and the bliss of simple things like being a boy with a Racket Box full
of fireworks. This collection of 42 poems won the 2011 X.J. Kennedy
Poetry Prize.
In it McKean transports...
Categories: Poetry
Tags: Basketball, Memory
Blasphemy: New and Selected Stories
Summer 2013
Most writers’ volumes of “new and selected” stories add only two or
three new pieces to twenty or thirty old ones. More than half of Sherman
Alexie’s Blasphemy is new, however, including a few lengthy stories. The success of Alexie’s te...
Categories: Fiction
Tags: Short stories, Native Americans, Humor
Montana Before History: 11,000 Years of Hunter-Gatherers in the Rockies and Plains
Spring 2013
The oldest archaeological site in Montana, the Anzick Site near
Wilsall, has been carbon-dated to 11,040 years ago. It is, writes
Douglas MacDonald in this fine survey of Montana archaeology, the only
Clovis site excavated in Montana. App...
Categories: Archaeology
Tags: Montana, Clovis people, Hunter-gatherers
Treasure, Treason and the Tower: El Dorado and the Murder of Sir Walter Raleigh
Spring 2013
Years ago while doing research in Stockholm, Sweden, Paul Sellin, a
scholar who specializes in literature and history of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, chanced upon some correspondence about Sir
Walter Raleigh and gold that he m...
Categories: History
Tags: Exploration, England, South America
Kayaking Puget Sound and the San Juan Islands: 60 Paddle Trips Including the Gulf Islands
Winter 2012
Fellow obsessives can relate to owning a catalog or guidebook that is
transformed from the occasional reference to a well-thumbed springboard
for the imagination. The Sears catalog fit that bill for rural America a
century ago, as did the REI c...
Categories: Recreation
Tags: Kayaking, Puget Sound, San Juan Islands
Alpha Phi Alpha: A Legacy of Greatness, the Demands of Transcendence
Winter 2012
Alpha Phi Alpha is the only black fraternity to be founded at an Ivy
League school. Starting at Cornell in 1906, its founders were just a
generation away from slavery and intent on creating an organization to
foster academic scholarship, build ...
Categories: History, Cultural studies
Tags: Black fraternities, African Americans
The Republic of Nature: An Environmental History of the United States
Fall 2012
Contemplate the founding of the United States, a budding democracy
carved out of a vast and unknown (to everyone other than its original
inhabitants) wilderness. At some point, one might find oneself unable to
extricate American history from Na...
Categories: History, Environmental studies
Tags: Ecology, Environmentalists, Conservation
Finding the River
Fall 2012
In 1992, President George H. W. Bush signed into law the Elwha Act,
which called for the removal of two hydroelectric dams from the 45-mile
river that flows from Washington’s Olympic Range to the Strait of Juan
de Fuca. Over the past year, th...
Categories: History, Environmental studies
Tags: Dams, Fish
Of Little Comfort: War Widows, Fallen Soldiers, and the Remaking of the Nation after the Great War
Fall 2012
In World War I, or the Great War, more than nine million combatants
died, leaving behind approximately a million and a half widows. The war
widows not only mourned their losses, they also faced quandaries about
their new post-war roles in Germa...
Categories: History
Tags: Veterans, World War I, Widows
Dog Days, Raven Nights
Summer 2012
Using field notes, personal diaries, and beautiful linocuts by Evon
Zerbetz ’82, the Marzluffs chronicle their three-year endeavor to
research the common raven, while raising and training sled dogs to help
them with their work in Maine. Zerbe...
Categories: Biological sciences, Fine Arts
Tags: Animal behavior, Artists
Alaska: A History
Summer 2012
In 1867 the Russia of Czar Alexander II was broke. As part of the
solution, the country sold its North American lands to the United States
for $7 million in a deal brokered by Secretary of State William Seward.
The transaction angered man...
Categories: History
Tags: Alaska
Winning the West for Women: The Life of Suffragist of Emma Smith DeVoe
Summer 2012
At a time when women’s rights and politics are dominating our national
discourse, it would be good to consider our past. Emma Smith DeVoe’s
story, for example, enhances our understanding of our nation’s Women’s
Suffrage movement a...
Categories: History, Political science
Tags: Suffrage, Voting, Women, American West
The Long Journey of the Nez Perce: A Battle History from Cottonwood to Bear Paw
Spring 2012
In his foreword to the latest account of the Nez Perce War of 1877, Kevin Carson ’81 writes, “In my memory, there was never a time when our family was not fascinated by the saga of the Nez Perce.” Carson’s great-great-great grandfather, Lev...
Categories: History, Military sciences
Tags: Native Americans, Native American leaders, Northwest history
Good Science: The Pursuit of Truth and the Evolution of Reality
Spring 2012
Truth, writes Timothy McGettigan, is a challenging subject.
It’s hard to get at, consuming the bulk of scientific endeavor for starters. It’s also hard to nail down, with paradigm shifts both altering our sense of reality while rattling our...
Categories: Sociology
Tags: Research, Innovation, Science history
The World’s Beaches: A Global Guide to the Science of the Shoreline
Spring 2012
It may appear to be a scholarly approach to beaches, but once you wade in to this book, you will find an entertaining and informative read. With a light touch, Pilkey and his co-authors manage to describe some heavy concepts like erosion, tsunamis,...
Categories: Earth sciences
Tags: Geology, Ocean, Beach
New & Noteworthy
Winter 2011
Standing Above the
Crowdby James
“Dukes” Donaldson ’79
Aviva Publishing , New York,
2011Donaldson mines
his experiences as a former
Cougar basketball and
NBA star, entrepreneur,
mentor, and community
leader not just to tell his
own st...
Categories: Business, Memoirs, Fiction
Tags: Management, Basketball, Organization, Fantasy, FBI
Montaña Y Caballo
Winter 2011
For fans of earthy,
Northwest indie-folk in the
vein of Seattle’s Band of
Horses and Fleet Foxes,
Pullman’s own Yarn Owl
delivers a lush and
satisfying debut. Montaña
Y Caballo, the band’s first
full-length album, was
recorded i...
Categories: Music
Tags: Independent music, Folk rock
The Docks
Fall 2011
In my sailing days on Puget Sound, I got used to watching for the
fast-moving container ships that could overtake my little boat in a
matter of minutes. One day, I found their schedules on the Internet and
saw the outline of a huge, econo...
Categories: Business, History
Tags: Trade, California, Ports, Los Angeles
Hard Water
Summer 2011
Insistently local, yet tapping into a national legacy of country and blues rock, Massy Ferguson’s second album Hard Water travels the back roads of Washington and treacherous paths of relationships with guitar, drum, and organ-driven songs. Da...
Categories: Music
Tags: Folk rock, Country rock, Blues rock
Murder at Foxbluff Lake
Summer 2011
Cougar fans of all ages will enjoy reading Jesse E. Freels’s first book, Murder at Foxbluff Lake,
a Coug Hawkins mystery. The novel tells the story of Coug, the
teenage son of a WSU football legend, who goes on a camping trip with...
Categories: Fiction
Tags: Mystery novels, Eastern Washington
A Home for Every Child
Summer 2011
At the end of the 19th century, adoption became part of a broader
movement to reform the orphanage and poor farm system in the United
States. In her most recent book, Patricia Susan Hart, who teaches
journalism and American studies ...
Categories: Social work, Washington state history
Tags: Children, Adoption
Fishes of the Columbia Basin: A guide to their natural history and identification
Summer 2011
It’s really pretty remarkable how much Dennis Dauble has managed to squeeze into this book of a mere 210 pages. If you read Fishes of the Columbia Basin:
You will get a good briefing on fish in Columbia Basin Indian culture and history.
You w...
Categories: Biological sciences
Tags: Columbia Basin, Fishing, Fish
Black Leapt In
Spring 2011
In Chris Forhan’s latest collection of poems, Black Leapt In,
the writer draws upon his childhood in Seattle, using striking natural
images and startling honesty and insight. He balances straightforward
description of the environment he grew ...
Categories: Poetry
Tags: Seattle, Family
A Marvelous Hundred Square Miles: Black Hills Tourism, 1880–1941
Spring 2011
The faces of four presidents gaze down on the Black Hills of South
Dakota, a fitting vigil for a tourist destination carved, like Mount
Rushmore itself, by public policy, political machinations, and private
investments.Historian Suzanne Barta J...
Categories: History
Tags: South Dakota, Black Hills, Tourism
Friends of the Old Mill
Spring 2011
This new roots-rock album has compelling lyrics, musical variety, and
an overall upbeat feel. Cody Beebe and the Crooks (most of whom are WSU
alumni) offer up twelve tracks with titles such as “Nine to Chain,”
“Change of Pace,” and “H...
Categories: Music
Tags: Folk rock, Country music, Blues rock
Mommy, Are We French yet?
Winter 2010
Don’t have enough money to travel to Europe? Sit down with this humorous memoir by Shawn Underwood and it’s easy to take an imaginary journey to France with Shawn and her family. Shawn and her husband Craig made the decision to live abroad in ...
Categories: Humor
Tags: France, Travel
Mrs. Annathena Gilly Gully From Puddle Rumple Tilly Willy
Winter 2010
Chellis Swenson Jensen has created a quirky lady backed by her pet parrot, Maurice. Tired of the neighborhood children’s teasing, the lead character decides the solution is to change her name. Only when she recognizes that she, too, can laugh a...
Categories: Children's books
Tags: Friends, Fiction, Children
Vol. XIII: "White Bed"
Winter 2010
Mining Neil Young’s “Harvest,” Eels’ “Electroshock Blues,” and a wealth of indie rockers, Super XX Man creates an alloy of fine instrumentation and catchy pop melodies to memorialize lead singer Scott Garred’s father on “White Bed...
Categories: Music
Tags: Independent music, Rock music, Folk rock
How to Implement Lean Manufacturing
Winter 2010
The rise of Toyota in the 1980s showed manufacturers a fundamental change in methods, called “Lean Manufacturing.” After 20 years in management, Lonnie Wilson (’69, Chemical Engineering) now consults with companies on Lean Manufacturing methods...
Categories: Business
Tags: Management, Lean Manufacturing
Live & Kickin'
Fall 2010
Bill Murlin ‘63 and Carl Allen ’60 created The Wanderers soon after they met in September, 1959, on the cusp of the Great Folk Scare of the 1960s. With Al Hansen on bass, the singer-guitarists performed regularly around Pullman for three years...
Categories: Music
Tags: Folk
Jump Into Life
Fall 2010
Eclectic Approach, a funk-rock Seattle band that includes Jowed Hadeed ’06, Ryan Jander ‘06 and Tony Poston ’07, released its third studio album, “Jump Into Life,” in June. Feel-good messages dominate the album. One track, “Change,” ...
Categories: Music
Tags: Seattle, Funk rock
Legacy of Angels
Fall 2010
The issue of whether to review self-published books resurfaces here at WSM periodically, as it does in many other review venues. The argument against reviewing such books assumes that publication by a commercial publisher promises some standa...
Categories: Fiction
Tags: Self-published books
Libera
Spring 2010
Some things you expect to find on the Palouse: tractors, football
fans, a smattering of laboratories probing the molecular basis of life
and the reaches of space. The rural alchemy of agriculture and academia
would seem less likely to nurture t...
Categories: Music
Tags: Jazz
The Rising Sea
Winter 2009
The
island nations of Tuvalu and the Maldives, the Inupiat Eskimo village
of Shishmaref, and Soldado Island off the Colombian coast might be
tough to find on a geography quiz. But all of these locations foretell
a future of oceans overwhelming co...
Categories: Environmental studies
Tags: Climate change, Ocean
Mountains On Our Backs
Winter 2009
Nestled
in the generally indescribable genre of indie music, Carcrashlander
challenges the listener by continuing to venture into experimental
music. In their most recent album, Mountains On Our Backs, the group combines basal vocals and keyboards...
Categories: Music
Tags: Alternative music, Independent music
Olive the Little Woolly Bugger :: Olive and the Big Stream :: Olive Goes for a Wild Ride
Winter 2009
Flyfishing— a sport and an art practiced for centuries—fascinates me
with its smooth casts and rhythm, but I had never connected flyfishing
with kids. At least not until Olive the Woolly Bugger, a cartoon “streamer” fly starring in a series...
Categories: Recreation, Children's books
Tags: Flyfishing
"They are all Red Out Here": Socialist Politics in the Pacific Northwest, 1895-1925
Fall 2009
Few if any aspects of the Northwest’s political and labor history have been so thoroughly documented as the region’s most radical era, from the 1890s to the First World War. Books and articles have highlighted such topics as the rise of...
Categories: History
Tags: Northwest history, Labor and unions, Radical politics
1200 Weeds—of the 48 States & Adjacent Canada
Summer 2009
When you don’t know what you’re dealing with, weedy plants may be hard to handle. Richard Old, a longtime Pullman resident and weed identification expert, has put together this comprehensive database of weeds for both public and private use.
...
Categories: Agriculture
Tags: Invasive weeds
Uncle Phil and the Atomic Bomb
Summer 2009
I was lucky enough to meet Philip Abelson in 2002 on the occasion of his visit to Pullman for the dedication of Abelson Hall (formerly Science Hall) in honor of the scientist and his wife
Dr. Neva Abelson ’34.
During our brief interview, Abelso...
Categories: Physics, WSU history
Tags: Manhattan Project, Atomic bomb
Plowed Under: Agriculture and Environment in the Palouse
Summer 2009
This is an important and disturbing book, both for the environmental degradation it documents and the message of what little progress our agricultural practices on the Palouse have made.
In a sense, the precursor of Plowed Under was a series ...
Categories: Agriculture, Environmental studies
Tags: Soil, Erosion
One More Mile
Spring 2009
What caught my attention from the first time I heard album was the silky-smooth blending of tonality this jazz quartet presents. The interplay between instruments (soprano sax, piano, bass, and drums) is balanced in such a way that one initially f...
Categories: Music
Tags: Jazz
Sudoku for Lunch
Spring 2009
How does one review a book of Sudoku puzzles? There's no plot, no metaphor, no elegant or awkward use of language. There are just the puzzles, which themselves are pure pattern.
But the puzzle-making process clearly involves skill and attention...
Categories: Puzzles
Tags: Sudoku
When the Circus Leaves Town
Winter 2008
Seattle-raised Brooke Ludwick spent time as a creative director and artist in the advertising field before recently returning to her first love, songwriting and performing. With her talents and understanding of the music business, she has created som...
Categories: Music
Tags: Country music
Catastrophe to Triumph: Bridges of the Tacoma Narrows
Winter 2008
To the relief of many commuters, Tacoma's new suspension bridge over the Narrows opened in summer 2007, joining the long-serving 1950 span that connects Tacoma to the Kitsap Peninsula. Both Tacoma Narrows bridges, however, are heirs to the dark and t...
Categories: Architecture and design
Tags: Bridges, Tacoma
Seasoned with Love: Favorite Heart-Healthy Recipes with Reflections about Food, Family, Friends, and Faith
Winter 2002
Carolyn Frances Meagher ('56 Speech) conceived a passion for cooking and baking while learning to make cinnamon rolls in a high school cooking class in Pullman, Washington. In time, rich desserts and "anything with cheese" became her trademark am...
Categories: Food
Tags: Cookbooks
Sojourner
Winter 2002
Style, phrasing, and rhythmic acuity are hallmarks of a great jazz singer. Julie Silvera displays all of these and more on her debut CD, Sojourner. A graduate of Washington State University with an M.A. in music, Julie cut her "jazz teeth" singin...
Categories: Music
Tags: Jazz
Sewing 911: Practical and Creative Rescues for Sewing Emergencies
Fall 2002
Practical is the operative word for this attractive sewing manual by Washington State University alumna Barbara Deckert ('75 English)—from the spiral binding that enables the book to lie flat when open, to the abundance of color photographs ...
Categories: Architecture and design
Tags: Sewing
Two Worlds
Spring 2002
As a longtime teacher of multicultural children, Marietta Taylor Barron ('45 Home Econ.) observed the struggles of Mexican-Americans to overcome poverty and prejudice. She was determined to tell their story simply and visually for all youngsters to u...
Categories: Fiction
Tags: Mexican Americans
The Work of Wolves
Fall 2005
Reading Kent Meyers's The Work of Wolves reminded me of a time when I loved horses. To watch them gallop, to see them stoop and eat grass, to feel their breath as they'd nuzzle my hand for oats. To sense in them an innate sovereignty that people in o...
Categories: Fiction
Tags: American West
Wisdom and Eloquence: A Christian Paradigm for Classical Learning
Winter 2007
If you're a parent seeking a quality model for secondary education for your child, you will be intrigued and encouraged in reading Robert Littlejohn '83 and Charles T. Evans's Wisdom and Eloquence: A Christian Paradigm for Classical Learning. If you'...
Categories: Education
Tags: Christian education
Windfalls
Winter 2005
To be a mother or an artist? Or both? Anyone interested in women's quest stories that explore these central questions will find Jean Hegland's second novel, Windfalls, to be essential reading. Readers who know the Palouse will enjoy her vivid ...
Categories: Fiction
Tags: Eastern Washington
Wiggle Like a Fish
Summer 2008
Sometime in the 1970s or '80s, when National Public Radio was airing a program called Folk Festival USA, I recorded a concert from one of those broadcasts by a singer named Sam Hinton. Among the songs Hinton performed was one called "Barney McCabe." ...
Categories: Music
Tags: Children's music
The War Years: A Chronicle of Washington State in World War II
Winter 2001
Most Washingtonians don't realize that their state—with a wartime population of just over 1.7 million—did as much or more per capita than any other state to help win World War II, says James R. Warren. The WSU alumnus ('49 S...
Categories: History
Tags: World War II
Unique Monique: Moki Time
Winter 2003
Young readers of Unique Monique: Moki Time, by Corinne Tyler Isaak '92, Karen A. Cooper, and illustrator Don Nutt will scarcely notice that they're learning to tell time and acquire new words, as they follow five-year-old Monique—or Moki—through ...
Categories: Children's books
Tags: Children
I Only Smoke on Thursdays
Winter 2003
What would Audrey Hepburn do? Look no further than the timeless class, spirit, and wit of the late actress for tips on dating and living as a modern woman. That's part of the advice of Seattle author Georgie Nickell ('94 Comm.) in her debut novel, I ...
Categories: Fiction
Tags: Dating
The Way I Feel Tonight
Spring 2008
For a lot of musicians, recording a second CD is typically a tough proposition. Do you take your music in a new direction, or do you maintain some aspects of the first CD that garnered attention and fans? Jennifer Lynn '03 manages to do both on her s...
Categories: Music
Tags: Country music
Index of Suspicion
Summer 2003
Don't read Index of Suspicion by Robert E. Armstrong until all your pets have had fresh rabies vaccinations. Using his knowledge as a veterinarian—he graduated from WSU's College of Veterinary Medicine in 1962—Armstrong has constructed a complex ...
Categories: Fiction
Tags: Mystery novels
Down Along the Sunset
Winter 2002
In this slender volume of 29 poems Benner Cummings ('51 Speech & Hearing Sci.) pays homage to the romance of surfing. Based upon Cummings's years as surfing and swimming coach at San Clemente High School, the poems celebrate the beauty, grace, daring...
Categories: Poetry
Tags: Surfing
Staying Tuned: A Life in Journalism
Fall 2002
In the beginning, radio was his second choice. After a journalistic teething in the service of the ANETA news agency in the Netherlands, Daniel Schorr wanted to be a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. When he fell victim to the Jewish-owne...
Categories: Communication, Memoirs
Tags: Journalism
The Show Makers: Great Directors of the American Musical Theatre
Spring 2005
Seek out and interview 12 of the most creative and highly respected directors of the American musical theatre, and let them reveal how they went about directing some of the most important and influential musicals of the 20th century. No easy task, bu...
Categories: Performing arts
Tags: Theatre
Is Self-Employment for You?
Fall 2004
Anyone can start a business, but only a few can sustain one. That's the premise of Paul. E. Casey's new book, Is Self-Employment for You? Casey Communications Inc., the company he founded in Seattle in 1988, is still going stron...
Categories: Business
Tags: Employment, Entrepreneurs
Salt Lick
Spring 2008
Anyone familiar with Brian Ames's three books of short stories—Smoke Follows Beauty, Head Full of Traffic, and Eighty-Sixed—will know that he's a writer of imagination and depth. His stories explore the boundaries between everyday existen...
Categories: Fiction
Tags: Literature
Sacajawea's People: The Lemhi Shoshones and the Salmon River Country
Winter 2005
In this year of 2005, the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, we are again reminded of the role Sacajawea played in that long journey westward. However, Sacajawea's tribe of origin, the Lemhi, has gone largely ignored. Only recently have ...
Categories: History
Tags: Native Americans
ROD: A True Story
Fall 2008
Rod Retherford '84 triumphed as an undersized athlete, but his plucky comeback tale has always been told in spaces that were too small to fully contain it. There were plenty of headlines in 1980 after a bullet ripped through the football player's sho...
Categories: Athletics
Tags: Football
The Restless Northwest
Summer 2002
In The Restless Northwest, former Seattle Times science writer Hill Williams provides a fascinating overview of the geological processes that shaped the Northwest. An attraction of the region is its varied terrain, from the volcanic Cascade m...
Categories: Earth sciences
Tags: Geology, Volcanoes
The Renaissance of American Indian Higher Education: Capturing the Dream
Fall 2004
Much of the effort of American Indian education in recent years has been to reverse the effects of the deadly programs of the past, when the schools most Indians had access to were procrustean institutions, to which they were required to adjust, or f...
Categories: Education
Tags: Native Americans
Recess at 20 Below
Summer 2008
Perhaps more than most books for children, Cindy Lou Aillaud's Recess at 20 Below has its feet firmly planted in the real world. The reason for that, of course, is that it's illustrated with the author's own photographs of children at the school in D...
Categories: Children's books
Tags: Alaska
Children at Promise: 9 Principles to Help Kids Thrive in an At-Risk World
Spring 2005
Many of us assume that the absence of adversity in a child's life predicts success. Hence, we strive to protect children from such experiences. In Children at Promise: 9 Principles to Help Kids Thrive in an At-Risk World, Cheryl Bostrom and Timothy S...
Categories: Psychology
Tags: Child development, Children
Prisoners of Flight
Summer 2004
In Prisoners of Flight, Sid Gustafson's veterinarian protagonist refers often to angels: "We haven't heard from our angels in a long time. But they're out there . . . waiting somewhere in the sky." Two ex-military pilots, Gustaf...
Categories: Fiction
Tags: Survival
In Praise of Fertile Land
Summer 2005
There aren't many anthologies that juxtapose poems by the likes of Robert Frost with those of elementary school kids. In Praise of Fertile Land does, and it works.
My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree Towar...
Categories: Poetry
Tags: Northwest history
Palouse Country
Spring 2003
George Bedirian's Palouse Country is a handsomely produced volume of over 100 duotone photographs. This revised WSU Press edition contains many previously unpublished images that provide an eloquent insight into a premotorized age of magnificent barn...
Categories: Photography
Tags: Palouse
Acoustic Jazz Quartet: Organic
Spring 2004
It becomes clearer the longer you listen to Organic that the title of this CD indicates the playing style that the Acoustic Jazz Quartet allows to grow in the middle of its straight-ahead jazz sounds. Most of the numbers begin s...
Categories: Music
Tags: Percussion, Jazz
Opening Minds: A Journey of Extraordinary Encounters, Crop Circles, and Resonance
Fall 2003
In Opening Minds: A Journey of Extraordinary Encounters, Crop Circles, and Resonance Simeon Hein ('93 Ph.D. Soc.) sets out to show that Western rationalism and the rise of technology have alienated us from our world and from each other, but that by t...
Categories: Sociology, Philosophy
Tags: Human development
O Palouse!
Winter 2007
O Palouse!, a DVD about the area, obviously started as one of those absolutely great ideas. Take an area that's extraordinarily photogenic. Good geologic bones, good seasonal color. Unique personality. Add a rich history of relatively recent European...
Categories: Geography, Photography
Tags: Northwest history, Natural Resources
On All Sides Nowhere
Winter 2004
Bill Gruber ('79 Ph.D. English) and his wife moved to rural Benewah County, Idaho, in 1972, inexperienced in all the necessary skills, but filled with a desire for solitude, simplicity, and natural beauty. In 1979 they left, after turning their 40 ac...
Categories: Memoirs
Tags: Idaho, Autobiography
Northwest Trees: Identifying and Understanding the Region's Native Trees
Summer 2008
Trees recall memories. Both thicken through the years, become storm-roughened, and may persist despite broken branches. We look at trees the way we look to memories as familiar waymarks in our personal landscapes. The new edition of Stephen Arno ('65...
Categories: Biological sciences
Tags: Trees, Botany
Return to Warden's Grove: Science, Desire and the Lives of Sparrows
Fall 2008
Spying on birds in the far northWarden's Grove is a tiny cluster of spruce trees in the generally treeless expanse of the north Canadian tundra, and Christopher Norment – who received his master's degree from WSU in 1982 – spent three long summer...
Categories: Biological sciences
Tags: Birds
Margarita: A Guatemalan Peace Corps Experience
Fall 2003
Starting at age 62, nutritionist Marjorie DeMoss Casebolt ('47 Home Econ. Ed.) served two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Guatemala. In Margarita: A Guatemalan Peace Corps Experience, she narrates her efforts to educate pregnant and nursing mothe...
Categories: Memoirs
Tags: Peace Corps, Autobiography
Louisiana—A Pianist's Journey
Fall 2008
In one of my first musical memories, I am sitting with my grandfather at his player-piano, watching the punched rolls spin as we listen to the popular music of his youth. As a young child, I hadn't yet developed a curiosity for the vast wealth and br...
Categories: Music
Tags: Piano
Great Lodges of the National Parks
Fall 2002
Teddy Roosevelt once claimed the best idea America ever had was its national parks. After flipping the cover open on Great Lodges of the National Parks, by Christine Barnes, readers should have an easy time understanding why he said that. ...
Categories: Architecture and design
Tags: National parks
Irrigated Eden: The Making of an Agricultural Landscape in the America
Fall 2003
This gem of a book is actually about the gem state, Idaho—specifically, the Snake River Plain of southern Idaho, where farmers, engineers, lawyers, bankers, and politicians have carved an agricultural landscape out of the parched and dusty sage...
Categories: History, Agriculture
Tags: Snake River, Irrigation
Hungry for Wood: An American Memoir from the Shores of Iwo Jima to the
Winter 2001
An Alaska sourdough with Washington State University credentials, C. Herb Rhodes has written his memoir book, Hungry for Wood: An American Memoir. The book derives its name from an Indian translation of the author's hometown of Hoquiam. ...
Categories: Memoirs
Tags: Alaska, Autobiography
Horses They Rode
Summer 2007
Midway through Sid Gustafson's new novel, Horses They Rode, I found myself put in mind of all the second chances I have had. His take on the reknitting of family, friendship, and one man's tumultuous life is such a story—a tale of second chance...
Categories: Fiction
Tags: Horses
Home Stand: Growing Up in Sports
Winter 2005
Poetry in motion he wasn’t. At least not on the basketball court, even though 6’ 9” Jim McKean, his fadeaway jump shot, and his rebounding (he still holds the single-game Far West Classic rebounding record of 27, set against Princeton in 1967) ...
Categories: Memoirs, Athletics
Tags: Basketball
Hike Lewis and Clark's Idaho
Summer 2004
Anyone interested in exploring firsthand the mountains and forests Lewis and Clark traversed in 1805-06 in western Montana and the Idaho panhandle will find this guidebook indispensable. Hike Lewis and Clark's Idaho is a collaboration between writer ...
Categories: Recreation
Tags: Idaho, Hiking
Hiding from Salesmen
Winter 2003
"Talk happiness," wrote the prolific poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox about 125 years ago. "The world is sad enough / Without your woe." The former U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins has largely gone in that direction, and so has Scott Poole ('92 B.S. Psych.; ...
Categories: Poetry
Tags: Humor
Flames in Our Forest: Disaster or Renewal?
Fall 2003
Forest fires have been much in the news. Beginning with the Yellowstone fires in 1988, the West has lived through a series of intense fire years. In 2000, the federal government spent nearly $1.6 billion fighting fires. But over the same period there...
Categories: Public affairs, Environmental studies
Tags: Forest fires
Where the Fins Meet the Frets
Fall 2008
If life imitates art, then for Ray Troll, so does music. More specifically, his music imitates his art. The debut CD from Ray Troll and the Ratfish Wranglers titled Where The Fins Meet The Frets contains 16 original songs that one could say leap dire...
Categories: Music
Tags: Children's music
FensePost (www.fensepost.com)
Spring 2008
When we were growing up, my best friend, Byron, and I would regularly head down to our local record store and browse through the new releases. Typically I'd pick out the ones that had the most interesting covers, and then read about the band. Byron w...
Categories: Websites
Tags: Music reviews, Music
Famous
Winter 2007
When it comes to fame and poetry, the locus classicus surely must be this passage from Milton's "Lycidas": "Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise / (That last infirmity of noble mind) / To scorn delights, and live laborious days." We of t...
Categories: Poetry
Tags: Popular culture
Idaho's Bunker Hill: The Rise and Fall of a Great Mining Company, 1885
Fall 2006
Bunker Hill finally has a book worthy of its story. BH, during its heyday, was one of the nation's most important mining and smelting operations, and wielded unprecedented influence over Idaho politics. At the time it closed in 1981 it produced 15 pe...
Categories: History
Tags: Bunker Hill, Mining
During the War Women Went To Work
Fall 2008
How often have you heard a group of women in their eighties reminisce about their service in World War II? My guess is—never. Out of all the interviews, books, films, and commemorations about World War II, female voices have seldom been heard. This...
Categories: Gender studies, History
Tags: World War II
Just Don't Get Sick: Access to Health Care in the Aftermath of Welfare
Summer 2008
Victor Sidel, the co-founder of Physicians for Social Responsibility, observes, "statistics are people with the tears washed away." Just Don't Get Sick, a new book by Karen Seccombe ('85 Ph.D. Soc.) and Kim Hoffman, offers a litany of statistics abou...
Categories: Public affairs, Political science
Tags: Health care policy
Dizzy
Summer 2008
Meet Dizzy, a Pacific white-sided dolphin who romps through the pages of this book at a—well, at a dizzying pace. Aimed at a readership of 3- to 8-year-olds, the story, such as it is, follows Dizzy through days spent flying among the clouds, hi...
Categories: Children's books
Tags: Dolphins
Keep A-Goin'
Summer 2007
It's hard to imagine Washington State drawing three straight coaches from the premier football school in the country, being the toast of football fans in the West, and winning the Rose Bowl. One of those three men coached the only victory Washington ...
Categories: Biography
Tags: Football
Destinations Unknown
Summer 2006
Broken hearts, barrooms, rodeos, and crying in your beer—the new CD, Destinations Unknown, from Chris Guenther '04 has all the ingredients of a traditional country from the heart of country music, Nashville. Chris separates himself from his crooner...
Categories: Music
Tags: Country music
Dancing to the Concertina's Tune
Summer 2005
Educating the incarcerated is not an undertaking for the faint of heart. In Dancing to the Concertina's Tune: A Prison Teacher's Memoir, Jan Walker '60 explores her unusual career in correctional education and seeks to give the reader an understandin...
Categories: Education, Memoirs
Tags: Prisons
Washington's Historical Courthouses
Spring 2004
In Washington's Historical Courthouses, Ray Graves ('50 Pol. Sci.) has compiled a wonderful pictorial survey of the proud cultural and architectural heritage of the state. It contains beautiful photographs by Erick Erickson, a thoughtful introduction...
Categories: History, Architecture and design
Tags: Courthouses
Company Towns of the Pacific Northwest
Spring 2005
In Company Towns of the Pacific Northwest, Linda Carlson provides much insight into the rewards and trials of life in the small, isolated communities of a bygone Northwest. A company town was generally a glorified camp establish...
Categories: History
Tags: Company towns
Common Courage: Bill Wassmuth, Human Rights, and Small-Town Activism
Fall 2005
"While those who act out violently—hate groups or lone wolves—may be few, the sentiments that lead them to believe their actions are acceptable stem from every-day bigotry and an unwillingness to confront it." So writes Andrea Vogt to ref...
Categories: Biography
Tags: Civil rights, Activists
Color + Modulation
Summer 2008
Rob Tyler's animated films combine hand-painted film cells, computer manipulation and atmospheric electronic music to produce a hypnotic come-hither based on changing, pulsing colors that riff off a primary abstract shape to the music of Unrecognizab...
Categories: Visual arts
Tags: Artists
The Cayton Legacy: An African American Family
Summer 2002
Set in Seattle, San Francisco, Chicago, and New York, The Cayton Legacy chronicles the evolution of a remarkable African American family. From the Civil War to the present, generations of the Horace and Susie Cayton family helped illuminate the black...
Categories: Cultural studies, History
Tags: African Americans
Bunion Derby: The 1928 Footrace Across America
Summer 2008
For generations, the 1920s have provided fodder for authors. The super-hyped sensationalism of those ballyhooed years seems a bottomless pool of entertaining topics. The decade of Lindbergh, Valentino, Capone, and Ruth, of flappers, Mah Jong, crosswo...
Categories: History, Athletics
Tags: Track and field
Breederman
Spring 2002
Author Murray Anderson ('50 Dairy Husbandry) weaves his experiences as a herdsman, milk tester, milking machine salesman, artificial inseminator, and fieldsman into a novel that describes the struggle for survival of small farmers in northwest Washin...
Categories: Fiction
Tags: American West
The Wakefields: Falling Down Blue
Fall 2007
Country music always seems to be filled with nostalgia—looking back on the days of old with a southern drawl, an acoustic guitar, and a broken heart. Yet every so often artists like The Wakefields come along to alter these perspectives. Falling Dow...
Categories: Music
Tags: Country music
Smoke Follows Beauty
Summer 2003
There's a scene in "The Kanasket Chicken Killings" that illuminates a great deal of what Brian Ames ('85 Political Science) is up to in his collection of short stories, Smoke Follows Beauty. As he's replacing the camshaft of a road grader, mechanic H...
Categories: Fiction
Tags: Short stories
Head Full of Traffic
Winter 2005
If his two latest short story collections are indicative, Brian Ames '85 is a prolific writer of unsettling talent. Releasing both Head Full of Traffic and Eighty-Sixed: A Compendium of the Hapless in 2004, Ames packs 22-plus pieces into each collect...
Categories: Fiction
Tags: Short stories
Eighty-Sixed: A Compendium of the Hapless
Winter 2005
If his two latest short story collections are indicative, Brian Ames ’85 is a prolific writer of unsettling talent. Releasing both Head Full of Traffic and Eighty-Sixed: A Compendium of the Hapless in 2004, Ames packs 22-plus pieces into each colle...
Categories: Fiction
Tags: Short stories
Domesticating the West: The Re-creation of the Nineteenth-Century Amer
Summer 2007
In Domesticating the West, Brenda K. Jackson '02, a Washington State University history Ph.D., explores the settlement of the West by the 19th-century middle class. Specifically, Jackson presents a dual biography of Thomas and Elizabeth Tannatt, midd...
Categories: History
Tags: Middle class, American West
Classic Houses of Seattle
Summer 2006
When something is regarded as "a classic," it is usually because the object has achieved the ability to express the cultural spirit of an era. Objects having this status are often considered as art, or at least as cultural symbols. And so we have cla...
Categories: Architecture and design
Tags: Seattle
The Best Dog in the World: Vintage Portraits of Children and Their Dog
Fall 2007
Its square format, 8¼-inch page size, and consciously retro design mark The Best Dog in the World: Vintage Portraits of Children and their Dogs by Donna Long '89 as a gift book—not a weighty tome by any means. Yet, unlike many other book...
Categories: Photography
Tags: Children
Mimicking Nature's Fire: Restoring Fire-Prone Forests in the West
Winter 2006
Forest health has been much in the news. It is a powerful metaphor—but one of uncertain and ambiguous content. Congress has used it to avoid environmental assessments of logging; opponents of logging have often portrayed it as a smokescreen. Mi...
Categories: Environmental studies
Tags: Forest fires, Natural Resources
Alternative Energy: Political, Economic, and Social Feasibility
Summer 2008
Readers wishing to stay current on one of today's most important public policy issues—the transition from fossil fuels to alternative energies—would do well to pick up a copy of Alternative Energy: Political, Economic, and Social Feasibil...
Categories: Political science, Environmental studies
Tags: Alternative energy
The Actual Moon, the Actual Stars
Fall 2005
While undertaking a 15-minute workout on the elliptical machine at the fitness center, I read a dozen poems from Chris Forhan's 2003 Morse Prize-winning book, The Actual Moon, the Actual Stars. Some poetry lovers might regard this as a shallow gestur...
Categories: Poetry
Tags: Memory
Alley the Cat
Winter 2003
In a graphic style reminiscent of Walt Disney cartoons, Alley the Cat, by Jarrett W. Mentink '98, '01 tells the story of Miss Alley, who not only breaks the "old rule" that "cats don't like mice," but actually finds mice "quite cool." In contrast, ga...
Categories: Children's books
Tags: Graphic novel