In a year full of weighty political tomes, each grimmer than the last, I find myself in need of inspiration more than information. The Faithful Spy is both a salve for the weary soul and a much needed encouragement to brave action in dark times. In this slim volume, John Hendrix chronicles Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s life, …
The Prix Goncourt is France’s highest award for fiction, and the most recent recipient was Éric Vuillard for The Order of the Day. It’s an interesting choice for at least three reasons. First, it’s really good, like prize-winning good, written in crystalline sentences ably translated by Mark Polizzotti. Second, it’s not a bog-standard war story about generals and …
Seattle7Writers, the nonprofit collective of Pacific Northwest authors, partners with independent bookstores this summer to introduce readers to favorite authors and raise money for literacy nonprofits. In July, Island Books hosted the Seattle7Writers cookout to benefit Team Read, a nonprofit organization that pairs struggling young readers with trained teen reading coaches for one-on-one tutoring after school and …
Non-fiction for the cold, hard facts, fiction for flights of fancy. One grounds you while the other sets you spinning. Most of the time, maybe, but my experience this week perfectly inverts that paradigm. I’ve been reading a brand-new book from Oscar-winning documentarian Errol Morris, who is best known as the filmmaker behind such projects …
The autobiography of the late Oregon birder extraordinaire, David B. Marshall, Memoirs of a Wildlife Biologist, is available in limited supply exclusively at the [Audubon Society of Portland] Nature Store. Co-editor of the definitive 2003 OSU Press publication Birds of Oregon, Marshall illuminated his own life as a career biologist in this self-published work. It …
One of the reasons I love this book is because the heroes of the story are badass bookish people. The other reason is that it explores an often overlooked aspect of World War II. With the many other atrocities committed by the Nazis, it’s easy to forget that they were waging another, quieter war on …
I have rather eclectic tastes in history books, drawn to singular events or individuals that I’ve had no prior knowledge of, rather than those of a broader historical scope. Oregon writer Bruning brings to life the story of P.I.” Pappy” Gunn, an aviator whose skills as a pilot/mechanic/engineer in the Pacific theater of WWII is …
Diane Simmons’s The Courtship of Eva Eldridge: A Story of Bigamy in the Marriage-Mad Fifties tells the true story of one woman, whose life was transformed by World War II and its aftermath. Here is the rarely told female side of the “Greatest Generation:” her war work, the shifting government propaganda about women’s roles, and the charming man she loved, …
Giving a lesser-known historical event— the development of the Citroën C2V, the brilliantly simple French “people’s car”— a fictional, kid-friendly spin by putting 13-year-old Angelo Fabrizzi at its center, McAllister has constructed a fast-moving plot packed not just with action and humor but with family drama, spy skullduggery, tween romance, and, in a mild form, …
Salt to the Sea is all that I hoped for and more from Ruta Sepetys (the author of Between Shades of Gray). Once again, she shines a light on a dark part of history with a beautifully crafted novel. Because of the alternating points of view and short, poignant chapters, I was torn between wanting …
