Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Jack Nisbet, a PNBA Book Award winner and bestselling author, is a highly regarded chronicler of landscape and the human story in the Northwest. In this essay collection, Nisbet reveals how the land shaped the people and how the people shaped the land.
Ancient Places is an assembly of nonfiction stories about the interplay between people and the landscape where they happen to live. Drawing on a range of fresh personal research, both oral and written, author Jack Nisbet (
Sources of the River,
The Collector) engages some of the iconic images in Northwest history: from fossil riches to ice age floods; from the Willamette Meteorite to the 1872 Earthquake; from up-and-down mining cycles to steady rounds of tribal food gathering. Although the scale of time and space in some of the pieces is immense, individual characters still manage to leave their marks; even though the force of modern civilization sometimes seems overwhelming, small places and their key components somehow persevere.
These are the genesis stories of a region. In Ancient Places, Jack Nisbet uncovers touchstones across the Pacific Northwest that reveal the symbiotic relationship of people and place in this corner of the world.
Synopsis
Master historian Nisbet has communed with Indians, astronauts, miners, and scientists to reveal a wonderfully personal, engaging, and authoritative picture of the cultural and natural history of the Inland Northwest.
--John Marzluff, author of Welcome to Subirdia and Gifts of the Crow Ancient Places is a collection of nonfiction stories about the interplay between people and the landscape where they happen to live. Drawing on a range of fresh personal research, both oral and written, author Jack Nisbet (Sources of the River, The Collector) engages some of the iconic images in Northwest history: from fossil riches to ice age floods; from the Willamette Meteorite to the 1872 Earthquake; from up-and-down mining cycles to steady rounds of tribal food gathering. Although the scale of time and space in some of the pieces is immense, individual characters still manage to leave their marks; even though the force of modern civilization sometimes seems overwhelming, small places and their key components somehow persevere.
These are the genesis stories of a region. In Ancient Places, Jack Nisbet uncovers touchstones across the Pacific Northwest that reveal the symbiotic relationship of people and place in this corner of the world.
Jack Nisbet on PowellsBooks.Blog
"A London fog is as nothing compared with the dense cloud of smoke that envelopes us and makes existence almost unendurable,” wrote an August correspondent from the Idaho Panhandle. “No rain is due in this latitude for six weeks or more, so we have to suffer a while longer with red eyes, depressed spirits, etc.”...
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