Staff Pick
His entertaining 14th book, The Great Birthright: An Oregon Novel, marks Matt Love's first foray into fiction. Self-described as "a work of pseudo pulp historical environmental detective socialist metafiction" or "a quasi pulp fiction historical polemical class-warfare thriller" or a "supposedly pulp historical detective work of 90-percent real-life environmental Marxist crime fiction" or "a pulp environmental historical crime regional revenge thriller" or "an ersatz Oregon-centric historical conservation-themed political playback thriller that no one's going to read!" or an "ostensibly pulp historical detective novel [come] quasi historical inspirational utopian egalitarian fantasy fiction" or "so-called romance documentary Edward Abbeyesque fiction," The Great Birthright melds all of the elements that have long made Matt Love's non-fiction writings so ardent, educational, and rousing.
As has been his career-spanning ethos, Love celebrates The Great Birthright that is every Oregonian's "free and uninterrupted use" of our public beaches. Imagining a grave, capitalistic, and not altogether fictional threat to Oregon's beaches, The Great Birthright unfurls into a detective thriller where a pair of unlikely heroes (the author himself and the grandson of Governor Oswald West) battle the pernicious forces of greed, entitlement, and unfettered commercialism in an attempt to sustain the public-interest efforts spearheaded by some of the state's most revered figures. With all of the iconoclasm, probity, unabashedness, and biting humor that characterize his nonfiction, Love draws both a figurative and literal line in the sand, entreating his fellow Oregonians to never yield in their fight to protect what might well be the Beaver State's most enduring (and forever threatened) heritage. Recommended By Jeremy G., Powells.com