Blog

Now through December 31st, enjoy 25% off these selected titles when you order directly through the OSU Press website. Enter the promotion code 16HOLIDAY at checkout. This special holiday discount is valid on these titles:

Building a Better Nest: Living Lightly at Home and in the World by Evelyn Searle-Hess; Regularly $18.95 – SALE PRICE $14.21

The Color of Night: Race, Railroaders, and Murder in the Wartime West by Max G. Geier; Regularly $24.95 – SALE PRICE $18.71

Guest post by Marcy Houle, author of One City's Wilderness: Portland's Forest Park

Last September, something truly amazing happened in Portland’s Forest Park. It was an achievement never before attempted. And, at its conclusion, it stands as an inspiration for many more to follow.

On September 4 and 5, Alex Schay, set out to do a goal he had made for himself. He wanted to hike the entire Wildwood Trail, that winds 30 miles through the largest urban wilderness in the United States, and do it in two days. 

Dr. Robert Michael Pyle, author and lepidopterist, shares with us today an essay that wasn't selected for the final draft of his new book, Through a Green Lens. With the book spanning his entire career as a writer, difficult decisions had to be made concerning which pieces would and would not reach republication through the Press. The piece we share with you today, Ripples Through a Pool of Meltwater, explores his experience with the Northwest Forgotten Language tour in the Columbia River Gorge. Pyle provides readers with insight into the choice not to include Ripples Through a Pool of Meltwater and a reflection on the essay itself.

Tim Palmer, author and photographer of OSU Press's new book, Rivers of Oregon, joins us today to share a brief interlude from his time exploring Oregon's Willamette River. Rivers of Oregon contains beautiful photos of the scenery on and around Oregon Rivers -- both east and west. The photographs allow readers to look beyond themelves and into the landscape they inhabit. How has the landscape changed? What have we done with it? What has become of the vastly wild and beautiful land that was here before us? In today's blog post, Palmer provides vivid imagery, helping the reader to see what he saw and to feel what he felt on his journey down the Willamette.

Today, Dr. Ellen Eisenberg will share an excerpt from Chapter Six in her new book, The Jewish Oregon Story, 1950-2010. Religion may not be the first thing a person thinks of when they think about Oregon. However, Dr. Eisenberg has provided an eye-opening, thought-provoking book, allowing readers to delve into the history of Judaism in Oregon and how Jewish identity has been affected by the progressive ideas in this ever-changing state.

Whatever your favorite outdoor recreation is, we’ve got a book for you! Check out our hiking books, field guides, memoirs by trail builders and wilderness advocates, a collection about fishing the Northwest, and many more.

Birds of Lane County, Oregon (describes the 100 best birding sites in Lane County, with maps, directions, etc.)http://osupress.oregonstate.edu/book/birds-of-lane-county-oregon 

In today's blog post, Scott Slovic, co-editor of Numbers and Nerves, writes about his encounter with an Allen Ginsberg poem at a museum in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Among the most ecologocially vulnerable places on the planet, Bangladesh also bears the devastating scars of its 1971 civil war, the scale and brutality of which is hard for the human mind to fathom. How can poetry make emotional sense of vast statistics? Read on. 

 The Oregon Historical Quarterly features the scholarship of OSU Press author Michael Helquist with two contributions in its Special Summer Issue on Birth. Helquist analyzes the 1916 visit to Portland by birth control advocate Margaret Sanger and he collaborates with Portland graphic artist Khris Soden to present a graphic comic account of the occasion. Titled “Family Limitation,” the collaboration is the first time the journal has published a history comic. Helquist and Soden wrote the comic narrative, and Soden drew the four pages of comic panels.

I returned to Kauaʻi from my three-week stint at Midway Atoll.  In the end, the Survey Team had counted nests representing more than a million albatross, not including at least another million untallied non-nesters. A week after I got home I was invited to a small social function on a bluff where a few mōlī nested. At the event, the property manager introduced me to his daughter Talia. She read me like a book.