News

Our Spring 2015 catalog is now available! We’re excited to announce a number of great new titles: a history of bikes and cars battling over rights to the road; the role of Hollywood and black celebrities in the Civil Rights Movement;  an illustrated survey of the work of world-renowned landscape architect, Richard Haag; and much, much more. Browse through our online catalog to learn more about our forthcoming books.

Media and Reviews

The Utne Reader website featured an extended excerpt from Lincoln Bramwell‘s book, Wilderburbs: Communities on Nature’s Edge:

Since the 1950s, a growing number of people have been moving into the once-rural landscapes of the West and transforming them into neighborhoods. In Wilderburbs (University of Washington Press, 2014), author Lincoln Bramwell tells the story of how roads, houses, and water development have transformed the rural landscape from wilderness into suburbia. He introduces readers to developers, homeowners, and government regulators who have all experienced environmental problems while designing and building residential housing in remote locations. This excerpt, which explains how and why these types of communities began, is from the Introduction, “Moving into the Woods.” Read the excerpt.

Cities of the Dead: The Ancestral Cemeteries of Kyrgyzstan by Margaret Morton was reviewed in DART: Design Arts Daily:

“A mythical landscape emerges from the dust under the scrubby mountains of Central Asia’s high plateau desert….the strange beauty of these cemeteries is inscrutable.” Read more.

In the Spirit of the Ancestors: Contemporary Northwest Coast Art at the Burke Museum by Robin Wright and Kathryn Bunn-Marcuse was reviewed in Museum Anthropology:

“Besides being a beautiful [book], In the Spirit of the Ancestors demonstrates alliances between museums and indigenous peoples and reveals the continuity of “traditional” and contemporary art.”

New Books

Northwest Coast Indian Art: An Analysis of Form, 50th Anniversary Edition
By Bill Holm
The 50th anniversary edition of this classic work on the art of Northwest Coast Indians now offers color illustrations for a new generation of readers along with reflections from contemporary Northwest Coast artists about the impact of this book. The masterworks of Northwest Coast Native artists are admired today as among the great achievements of the world’s artists. The painted and carved wooden screens, chests and boxes, rattles, crest hats, and other artworks display the complex and sophisticated northern Northwest Coast style of art that is the visual language used to illustrate inherited crests and tell family stories.

Tattoo Traditions of Native North America: Ancient and Contemporary Expressions of Identity
By Lars Krutak
Distributed for LM Publishers
For thousands of years the Indigenous peoples of North America have produced astonishingly rich and diverse forms of tattooing. Long neglected by anthropologists and art historians, tattooing was a time-honored practice that expressed the patterns of tribal social organization and religion, while also channelling worlds inhabited by deities, spirits, and the ancestors. Tattoo Traditions of Native North America explores the many facets of indelible Indigenous body marking across every cultural region of North America. As the first book on the subject, it breaks new ground on one of the least-known mediums of Native American expressive culture that nearly disappeared from view in the twentieth century, until it was reborn in recent decades.

Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910-1940, Second Edition
Edited by Him Mark Lai, Genny Lim, and Judy Yung

In the early twentieth century, most Chinese immigrants coming to the United States were detained at the Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco Bay. There, they were subject to physical exams, interrogations, and often long detentions aimed at upholding the exclusion laws that kept Chinese out of the country. Many detainees recorded their anger and frustrations, hopes and despair in poetry written and carved on the barrack walls. Island tells these immigrants’ stories while underscoring their relevance to contemporary immigration issues.

Events

Frances McCue, Mary Randlett Portraits, Urban Craft Uprising, December 6 at 1:00 p.m.

Frances McCue, Mary Randlett Portraits, Seattle Public Library, December 7 at 2:00 p.m.

Robin Wright and Kathryn Bunn-Marcuse, In the Spirit of the Ancestors, Seattle Public Library, December 11 at 7:00 p.m.

Seattle Indie Press Book Bazaar, University Book Store, December 13  from 1:00 to 4:00 p.m.

Judy Yung and Genny Lim, Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910-1940, Eastwind Books of Berkeley, December 13 at 3:00 p.m.

Aaron Glass and Barb Cranmer, Film screening of the fully restored Edward Curtis film, In the Land of the Head Hunters (1914), Seattle Public Library, January 6 at 7:00 p.m.

Aaron Glass and Barb Cranmer with Feliks Banel, Return to the Land of the Head Hunters book talk, Town Hall Seattle, January 7 at 7:00 p.m.

An exhibition of original photographs from Cities of the Dead: Ancestral Cemeteries of Kyrgyzstan will open to the public in the Arthur A. Houghton Jr. Gallery of The Cooper Union on January 27, 2015. Join Margaret Morton at 6:30 p.m. on the 27th to celebrate the exhibition at the opening reception.