Poisoned: The True Story of the Deadly E. Coli Outbreak That Changed the Way Americans Eat by Jeff Benedict Lawyer Fights Fast Food Chains Over E. Coli A review by Lynne Terry A healthy 6-year-old girl dies five days after staying home from school with a stomach ache. Her doctors are mystified, her parents devastated. Soon clusters of kids across the West turn up in emergency rooms with similar symptoms: fever, cramping, bloody diarrhea. In the end, hundreds fall ill and three more die. Sound like script material for a Hollywood movie? Maybe, but it really happened and is recounted by Jeff Benedict in his book Poisoned: The True Story of the Deadly E. Coli Outbreak That Changed the Way Americans Eat. Today, after successive outbreaks involving everything from sprouts in Germany to strawberries in Oregon, E. coli is a household term. But nearly two decades ago, only a few scientists knew much about the virulent strain -- E. coli O157:H7 -- that contaminated the Jack in the Box burgers in 1993. The outbreak spurred tougher food safety regulations, changed the fast-food industry and thrust a Seattle attorney into the limelight as a food safety... Read the entire review More reviews from The Oregonian

Driving Home: An American Journey by Jonathan Raban

Jonathan Raban's new collection of essays, Driving Home: An American Journey, could easily have been titled "The Jonathan Raban Reader," as the brisk, smartly crafted pieces are just that representative of Raban's long and illustrative writing life. He is the author of 12 other books, fiction and...

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When you're familiar with someone's work, it can be difficult to separate it from what has come before, to let it stand -- or stumble -- on its own merit. But this challenge, in the end, is what makes Birds of Paradise so remarkable. Because while Portland writer Diana Abu-Jaber has always...

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When George Pelecanos is at the top of his game, you get early jolts of The Wire, Emmy nominations, The Turnaround and Stephen King crooning about "perhaps the greatest living American crime writer." When Pelecanos is not, you settle for The Cut. In his 17th novel, Pelecanos introduces us...

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Alexandra Fuller returns to the African landscape in her memoir, Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness. It accepts the curious task of being both a prequel and a sequel to her 2001 debut, Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood. With a love of landscape, a historian's lens...

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I used to live in Fresno, Calif., a red city in a blue state, and during my years there I belonged to a gym where I once overheard a conversation between two young people about whether or not "intervention" was in order when you learned that a Christian brother or sister had out-of-wedlock sex. I...

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On Nov. 24, 1971, a man who gave his name as Dan Cooper entered the Portland airport to board a Northwest Orient Airlines flight to Seattle. Nobody involved in that seemingly routine journey, just 28 minutes aloft, understood during the boarding process that they would be witnessing a legend. As...

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Joseph Heller assembled the manuscript for Catch-22 from a collection of notes on index cards. The novel began to spring forth, Heller recalled, "when suddenly this line came to me: 'It was love at first sight. The first time he saw the chaplain, Someone fell madly in love with him...

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Ron Strickland is the father of the 1,200-mile Pacific Northwest Trail. He is a latter-day trailblazer, author and the paterfamilias of the nation's newest national scenic trail. Pathfinder is Strickland's eighth book, and for a zealot -- being "focused" alone doesn't drag a wild-dream mountain ...

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You've got to hand it to L. Ron Hubbard. He might have been relegated to the minor ranks of science fiction writers except that he figured out that spiritual seekers in post-nuclear America craved a personal understanding of the self and the universe -- and they would gladly pay for that knowledge...

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The Two Deaths of Daniel Hayes, the latest thriller by Marcus Sakey, aspires to be many things: a contemplation of the aftermath of a traumatic event (a "dissociative fugue"), a cat-and-mouse game between an extraordinarily evil villain and two (not particularly sympathetic) protagonists, both...

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Voodoo Vintners: Oregon's Astonishing Biodynamic Winegrowers by Katherine Cole

Wire to Wire (Tin House New Voice) by Scott Sparling

The President and the Assassin: McKinley, Terror, and Empire at the Dawn of the American Century by Scott Miller

The Murder of the Century Signed Edition by Paul Collins

The Late Interiors: A Life Under Construction by Marjorie Sandor

Second Fiddle by Rosanne Parry

The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt

Big in China: My Unlikely Adventures Raising a Family, Playing the Blues, and Becoming a Star in Beijing by Alan Paul

A Covert Affair: Julia Child and Paul Child in the OSS by Jennet Conant

News from the World: Stories & Essays by Paula Fox

Kapitoil (P.S.) by Teddy Wayne

Say Her Name by Francisco Goldman

Sex and the River Styx by Edward Hoagland

The Chronology of Water: A Memoir by Lidia Yuknavitch

Unfamiliar Fishes by Sarah Vowell

The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood by James Gleick

Endgame: Bobby Fischer's Remarkable Rise and Fall - From America's Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness by Frank Brady

The Foremost Good Fortune by Susan Conley

A Widow's Story Signed Edition by Joyce Carol Oates

The Terror of Living by Urban Waite

American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee by Karen Abbott

The Quiet World: Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 by Douglas Brinkley

The Panic Virus: A True Story of Medicine, Science, and Fear by Seth Mnookin

View from Lazy Point by Carl Safina

Vertical by Rex Pickett

As Always, Julia: The Letters of Julia Child and Avis DeVoto: Food, Friendship, and the Making of a Masterpiece by Joan Reardon

The Petting Zoo by Jim Carroll

Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot On and Never Will by Judith Schalansky

Compass Rose by John Casey

A Week at the Airport (Vintage International Original) by Alain De Botton

Saul Bellow: Letters by Saul Bellow

Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories by Simon Winchester

Life by Keith Richards and James Fox

River House: A Memoir by Sarahlee Lawrence

The Gun by C. J. Chivers

How to Read the Air by Dinaw Mengestu

Mariposa Road Signed Edition by Robert Michael Pyle

Acid Christ Signed Edition by Mark Christensen

The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival by John Vaillant

Scoreboard, Baby: A Story of College Football, Crime, and Complicity by Ken Armstrong

My Teenage Werewolf: A Mother, a Daughter, a Journey through the Thicket of Adolescence by Lauren Kessler

How to Become a Scandal: Adventures in Bad Behavior by Laura Kipnis

Bitter in the Mouth by Monique Truong

Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History by Yunte Huang

Composed: A Memoir by Rosanne Cash

Star Island by Carl Hiaasen

Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart

The Surf Guru by Doug Dorst

Fur, Fortune, and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America by Eric Jay Dolin

The Lost Cyclist: The Epic Tale of an American Adventurer and His Mysterious Disappearance by David Herlihy

Memory Wall: Stories by Anthony Doerr

The Real History of the End of the World: Apocalyptic Predictions from Revelation and Nostradamus to Y2K and 2012 by Sharan Newman

One Day the Wind Changed: Stories by Tracy Daugherty

Hardcourt Confidential: Tales from Twenty Years in the Pro Tennis Trenches by Patrick Mcenroe

Beautiful Maria of My Soul: Or the True Story of Maria Garcia y Cifuentes, the Lady Behind a Famous Song by Oscar Hijuelos

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender

The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century by Alan Brinkley

Going Through Ghosts (West Word Fiction) by Mary Sojourner

Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life: A Book by and for the Fanatics Among Us (with Bitchin' Soundtrack) by Steve Almond

Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin by Hampton Sides

The Dead Republic by Roddy Doyle

Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet by Bill McKibben

Lean on Pete (P.S.) by Willy Vlautin

Another Way the River Has: Taut True Tales from the Northwest (Northwest Readers) by Robin Cody

Kissing the Mask: Beauty, Understatement and Femininity in Japanese Noh Theater by William T. Vollmann

Backing Into Forward: A Memoir by Jules Feiffer

The Surrendered by Chang-rae Lee

The Man Who Ate His Boots: The Tragic History of the Search for the Northwest Passage by Anthony Brandt

Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature by Kathleen Dean Moore

Reality Hunger: A Manifesto by David Shields

Horns by Joe Hill

Just Kids by Patti Smith

Ransom by David Malouf

The Godfather of Kathmandu by John Burdett

The Unnamed Signed Edition by Joshua Ferris

The Farmer's Daughter by Jim Harrison

Day Out of Days: Stories and Journals by Sam Shepard

Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage by Elizabeth Gilbert

The Kingdom of Ohio by Matthew Flaming

Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession by Julie Powell

Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia by Mikhail Iossel

Footnotes in Gaza: A Graphic Novel by Joe Sacco

Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby

Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro

Gringa: A Contradictory Girlhood by Melissa Hart

Impossible Motherhood: Testimony of an Abortion Addict by Irene Vilar

The Opposite Field Signed Edition by Jesse Katz

The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis by Lydia Davis

The Collector: David Douglas and the Natural History of the Northwest by Jack Nisbet

Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America by Barbara Ehrenreich

Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son by Michael Chabon

Massacred for Gold: The Chinese in Hells Canyon by R. Gregory Nokes

Bicycle Diaries by David Byrne

The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown

Desert by J M G Le Clezio

Misconception by Ryan Boudinot

Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took on New York's Master Builder and Transformed the American City by Anthony Flint

Confessions of a Teen Sleuth: A Parody by Chelsea Cain

Savages and Scoundrels: The Untold Story of America's Road to Empire through Indian Territory by Paul VanDevelder

Flotsametrics and the Floating World: How One Man's Obsession with Runaway Sneakers and Rubber Ducks Revolutionized Ocean Science by Curtis Ebbesmeyer and Eric Scigliano

The Signal by Ron Carlson

The Beats: A Graphic History by Harvey Pekar

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley

Accidental Billionaires: the Founding of Facebook: a Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal (09 Edition) by Ben Mezrich

Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World's Greatest Scientist by Thomas Levenson

Trouble by Kate Christensen

Plus: The paper's award-winning books section, published on Sundays, strips the buzz from national bestsellers and directs readers to little-known regional gems in a concise package.

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