Award News

Kurkpatrick Dorsey’s Whales and Nations: Environmental Diplomacy on the High Seas was selected as the recipient of the 2014 John Lyman Book Award for Naval and maritime science and technology. This prestigious book prize is awarded annually by the North American Society for Oceanic History. One judge called the book “an excellent, superbly balanced, and thoroughly researched presentation that cuts to the heart of its topic and, simultaneously, demonstrates the interplay of environmentalism, science, culture, and international diplomacy.”

Reviews

The Chicago Tribune reviewed Mine Okubo’s Citizen 13660: “This forerunner to the modern graphic memoir is a must read, both for the important — and shameful — period of American history it documents and its poignant beauty.” –Printers Row Journal, Chicago Tribune. Read the full review here.  

Jack Hart’s Skookum Summer was reviewed in City Living Seattle: “Skookum Summer is a suspenseful and satisfying whodunit, but it is, simultaneously, the fully realized coming-of-age tale of a young man taking stock of himself for the first time…Jack Hart’s substantial book entertains as it provokes thought and shines with the skookum of its subject.” Read the full review here.

New Books

Idaho’s Place: A New History of the Gem State edited by Adam M. Sowards Idaho’s Place is an anthology of the most current and original writing on Gem State history. From the state’s Indigenous roots and early environmental battles to recent political and social events, these essays provide much-needed context for understanding Idaho’s important role in the development of the American West.

The Gold Shop of Ba-‘Ali: Poems by Yayha Frederickson “The Gold Shop of Ba-‘Ali delivers us into an Arab world stripped of exoticism, a world made palpable by mundane reality, an ordinary world made luminous by the vision and speech of a genuinely gifted poet.”-Sam Hamill, Final Judge for the Idaho Prize for Poetry 2013

Folly: Poems by David Axelrod David Axelrod’s new collection of poems, Folly, is perhaps his most personal, vivid and honest work to date. Taking Desderius Erasmus as his noble guide, Axelrod follows the road of folly, error and ignorance that constitute our common life. Along the way we meet Dostoyevsky while Nordic skiing, get a haircut, watch a divorced woman and her daughter fly kites, hold a crippled bird in our hands, consider the virtue of shovels and the perversity of old chainsaws, cross a river with Basho, and blow up an oven heating bagels. This new collection from the author of What Next Old Knife?, reminds us over and over of our privilege and reverence for this existence and our “dumb luck.”

Upcoming Events

Dawn Day Biehler, Pests in the City: Flies, Bedbugs, Cockroaches, and Rats, Baltimore City Historical Society, June 6 at 10:00 a.m.

Aaron Glass, Return to the Land of the Head Hunters: Edward S. Curtis, the Kwakwaka’wakw, and the Making of Modern Cinema, book talk and film screening, Portland Art Museum, June 8 at 2:00 p.m.