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Books by WSU alumni and friends |
| Autobiography, Memoirs |
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Dancing to the
Concertina’s Tune
By Jan Walker ’60
Jan Walker explores her unusual career in correctional education and seeks to give the reader an understanding of prisons and inmates. At bottom, the book is about how education can be used as a means toward transformation and, perhaps, redemption.
Read a review from WSM.
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By Paul A. Johnsgard ’55
From the publisher: Paul Johnsgard is one of America's most prominent ornithologists and a world authority on waterfowl behavior. In these popularly written, often lyrical essays, he describes some of his most fascinating encounters with birds, from watching the annual mating displays of prairie-chickens on a hilltop in Pawnee County, Nebraska, to attempting to solve some of the mysteries surrounding Australia's nearly flightless musk duck.
Reflecting his worldwide interests and travels, the birds Johnsgard describes inhabit many parts of the globe. Grouping the birds by the element they frequent most—earth, water, or sky—he weaves a wealth of accurate natural history into personal stories drawn from a lifetime of avian observation. And, as a bonus, Johnsgard's lovely pen-and-ink drawings illustrate each species he describes.
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Essie’s Story: The Life and Legacy of a Shoshone Teacher
By Esther Burnett Horne and Sally McBeth (’81 Ph.D.)
From the publisher: This is the spirited story of Esther Burnett Horne, an accomplished and inspiring educator in Indian boarding schools. Born in 1909, Horne grew up attending Haskell Indian Institute in Lawrence, Kansas, and often visited relatives on the Shoshone Wind River Reservation in Wyoming. Motivated by teachers like Ella Deloria and Ruth Muskrat Bronson, Horne devoted her life to teaching other Indian children. She began teaching at Wahpeton Indian School in Wahpeton, North Dakota, in 1930 and has remained active in education to the present day. Her experiences as student and teacher have enabled Horne to provide a detailed portrait of Indian boarding schools. We learn about daily life at Haskell and about the challenges and rewards of teaching for the Bureau of Indian Affairs at Wahpeton. Above all, Horne's life illuminates the ongoing struggle by Native teachers and students to retain their cultural identities within a government educational system designed to assimilate them. Esther Horne and Sally McBeth developed this life history in a truly collaborative manner. McBeth carefully documents both Horne's personal history and the creation of this work. What emerges is an engaging and informative narrative about education and identity.
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Growing Up After the Bomb: The Seeds of the Cold War 1945-1947
By Richard W. Rohrbacher (’68 M.A.)
A first-person account of what it was like to be an infantry trainee just prior to the end of World War II.
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Growing Up Before the Bomb: The Innocent Years 1935-1945
By Richard W. Rohrbacher (’68 M.A.)
Reader review: Growing Up Before the Bomb covers five years of the Great Depression and the United States involvement in World War II as lived by the author. A poignant insight into those tumultuous times. The chapters deal with the many trials of a young man who sent his father off to war in the South Pacific, loneliness, unrequited love, wrestling with the forces of puberty, and much more. This is a necessary read.
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Guests in the Land of Buzkashi: Afghanistan Revisited
By Miriam L. Stratton ’97
The decade of the ’70s in Afghanistan saw the end of a way of life as most of its subjects had known it. Women who in the ’70s were breaking free from the veil to work in offices and schools and many other occupations have now been denied basic human rights such as the ability to earn money to support a family or girls allowed to go to school. The author and her family lived in Kabul, Afghanistan from 1972 to 1974 through the period of the coup that overthrew King Nadir Shah. More than the politics, the author writes of their daily lives: learning language, missing cultural cues, devising their own entertainment, taking risky travel and other sometimes amusing, sometimes serious events.
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Heroes from the Attic
By Herman I. Neuman (’66 Arch. Engr.)
From the publisher: The author and his brother were born in Nazi Germany at the beginning of World War II. Heroes from the Attic recounts their childhood of danger, starvation, homelessness and ill-matched parents. Eventually, their mother sent them to relatives in America who immediately enslaved them on separate farms. At the age of twenty, Herman still lived in deep, isolated poverty. The boys eventually escaped and with courage, tenacity, self-discipline and backbreaking work, they put themselves through college and became Americans. Herman and his wife have traveled the world and some of their adventures are included.
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Home Stand: Growing up in Sports
By James McKean ’68
Jim McKean weaves together a series of essays about growing up in the Pacific Northwest in the late ’50s and early ’60s, coming to terms with his father and his family, and playing basketball at WSU, where his sensitive soul began to feel the cultural and political changes that swept across the U.S., including the Vietnam War protests and the civil rights movement. If you were a student at WSU in the 1960s, you should read this book. If your parents were students at WSU in the 1960s, you should read this book to understand the time they lived in. If you’re a sports fan, you should read this book. If you’re not included in those categories, read it anyway. Read it slow for its poetry, or read it fast for its prose. Read it at one sitting to absorb its overarching themes, or read it one chapter at a time to enjoy its story-telling qualities.
Read a review from WSM.
Read a chapter from the book.
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Hungry for Wood, An American Memoir from the Shores of Iwo Jima to the Tundra of Alaska
By C. Herb Rhodes ’47 Speech
From the depths of the Great Depression of the 1930's through the Battle of Iwo Jima to the settling of Alaska, this book is filled with the sights and sounds of an entire generation. Pathos and hilarity, mixed with tragedy and triumph, make this book a must read for fans of Saving Private Ryan and The Greatest Generation.
Read a review from WSM.
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By Kim Barnes ’85
From the publisher: From the author of the critically acclaimed In the Wilderness, comes a riveting new narrative of self-discovery and personal triumph. Hungry for the World is the story of how an intelligent and passionate young woman, yearning for an understanding of the world beyond her insular family life, found her way. . . . Hungry for the World is a classic story of the search for knowledge and its consequences, both dire and beautiful.
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In the Wilderness: Coming of Age in Unknown Country
By Kim Barnes ’85
From the publisher: Poet Kim Barnes grew up in Northern Idaho, in the isolated camps where her father worked as a logger and her mother made a home for her husband and two children. . . . In the Wilderness is the story of this poet's journey toward adulthood, set against an interior landscape every bit as awesome, as wondrous, and as fraught with hidden peril as the great Idaho forest itself. It is an examination of how both geography and faith can shape the heart and soul, and of the uncharted territory we must all enter to face our own demons. It is the clear-eyed and deeply moving story of a young woman's coming to terms with her family, her homeland, her spirituality, and herself.
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Margarita: A Guatemalan Peace Corps Experience
By Marjorie DeMoss Casebolt (’47 Home Econ. Ed.)
Margarita takes its readers down a road of many curves. The heroine is a courageous 62- year-old woman who joins the Peace Corps to teach nutrition to people whose language she barely speaks.
Read a review from WSM.
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On All Sides Nowhere
By William Gruber (’79 Ph.D. English)
Bill Gruber and his wife moved to rural Benewah County, Idaho, in 1972, inexperienced in all the necessary skills but filled with a desire for solitude, simplicity, and natural beauty. On All Sides Nowhere chronicles that time with gentle humor and grace.
Read a review from WSM.
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By Chris Volkmann ’70 and Toren Volkmann
Our Drink: Detoxing the Perfect Family portrays the choking of an adolescent by binge drinking and alcohol addiction. . . . Invincible Toren had a college diploma, a competitive spot in South America with the Peace Corps, spoke three languages, and could charm his way around the world. He didn’t think that drug and alcohol information applied to him. And the family missed it. If this family is the average family, and the addicted son represents a flourishing college graduate, then there must be millions more like them….and tens of thousands more who are or will be facing alcoholism. The voice of the story switches between mother and son to provide a dynamic combination of inner monologue, narration, and alcohol information. This patchwork disarms the reader by its honesty. Our Drink offers a genuine picture of what hard drinking does to a young man, a family, a society.
Read sample chapters.
Chapter 2
Chapter 4
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Sketchbook: A Memoir of the 1930s and the Northwest School
By William Cumming
From the publisher: William Cumming began as a self-taught artist who grew up in Tukwila, a small town outside Seattle. In 1937, at the age of 20, he met Morris Graves, who was at that time working in Seattle for the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration. Through Graves he soon became part of the circle of friends who came to be known as the Northwest School of artists: Mark Tobey, then nearing 50, the patriarchal leader of the group; Kenneth Callahan and his wife Margaret, a writer and critic who became Cumming's particular mentor; Guy Anderson, Lubin Petric, and others. He has taught for many years at the Art Institute of Seattle and Cornish College of the Arts.
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Staying Tuned: A Life in Journalism
By Daniel Schorr
The book follows the octogenarian Schorr through his divorce with CBS—over his 1975 release to another news organization of a House report on U.S. intelligence activities—and his brief stay at the fledgling Cable News Network, to his post at NPR. In it, Schorr recalls decades-old anecdotes with convincing clarity and comments on a trade and an industry that in many respects have lost their way.
Read a review from WSM.
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The Way It Was According to Chick: Growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation
Robert Wynecoop, '58
From the publisher: This is a charming book, full of amusing anecdotes and photographs. . . . Not only does it provide a glimpse of reservation life in the ’30s and ’40s, it regales the reader with the antics of how seven little boys creatively entertained themselves in the era before television and other electronic amusements, often with near disastrous results. It is a tribute to a loving mother, affectionately dubbed “Nurse Mom,” who patched many a wound, and a patient father who taught the boys responsibility and a strong work ethic, yet understood the value of play. . . . Bob Wynecoop has a wonderful delivery and this compilation of short stories is sure to provide countless hours of reading enjoyment.
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