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Reviews
READING PORTLAND: THE CITY IN PROSE
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edited by John Trombold and Peter Donahue
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| Oregon Historical Society Press, Portland, and University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2006. Photographs, bibliography. 570 pages. $26.95 paper. |
| The purpose of this book is to imagine a place. By presenting eighty-five readings of various times and places, divided into four roughly chronological sections of prose, Reading Portland plumbs Portland as a place, holding stories and images up to readers' imaginations. To get a sense of place, to visualize it, is to name it, to tell stories — fiction or nonfiction — in which the place can be imagined and the relationships felt. What this book offers is a collage of times and places, images and names, bound together by narrative. Sometimes readers get just an impression. Sometimes readers move in close. Sometimes readers see themselves as they were. Sometimes they see themselves in a new light. Sometimes they see themselves as they are. |
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The selections span time from Matthew Deady's 1868 essay "Portland-on-Wallamet," in which he opines that Portland "will never be the centre of fashion, speculation, or thought," to David Oates's 2006 rumination on Portland and the war in Iraq while walking the Urban Growth Boundary in "Boots on the Ground in Sherwood Forest" (p. 5). Other selections include the infamous Wobbly Joe Hill, who appears in James Stevens's Big Jim Turner, reminding readers of Portland's radical past. Particularly telling in terms of Portland's past is Kathryn Hall Bogle's "An American Negro Speaks of Color." Bob Dietsche's essay "When Jump Was a Noun" is a lively recollection of the 1940s, when jazz had a heyday — mostly on one Portland street near what is now the Rose Garden — which most people, I suspect, might never have known about. |
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A city becomes itself in certain locations and in the lives connected to certain names. Walt Curtis remembers Burnside during the 1970s in a piece from his novel Mala Noche. In her short story, "Buckskin," Elizabeth Woody remembers riding down "Sideburns" in her family's 1976 Galaxy 500. Two selections, Evelyn McDaniel Gibb's Two Wheels North and Paul Pintarich's History by the Glass, visit Erickson's Saloon. Richard Hugo mentions William Stafford in Death and the Good Life. Other selections tell stories about people such as C.E.S. Wood, Marie Equi, Harry Lane, Ruth Barnett, John Reed, Louise Bryant, Lola Baldwin, and animals such as Packy the pachyderm — reminding Portlanders of who they are by their deeds, admirable, nefarious, and otherwise. |
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A fresh light falls on Portland in the mouthwatering morsel from James Beard's Delights and Prejudices, in which he tells how his hotelier mother managed to find, often at the Portland public market, a stunning spectrum of foodstuffs — more, it would seem, than markets in Portland offer today. |
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These readings of Portland's character, of its quality as a place, become soundings in the hands of certain writers. Susan Orleans vividly renders the world around Tonya Harding in "Figures in a Mall." Perhaps the most thorough and insightful reading of Portland in the entire book is Sally Tisdale's essay "Portland from the Air." Tisdale concludes a detailed, perceptive retrospective on Portland written from high above with the thought that Portland, because of the trajectory of its development, must still be "something unduplicated" (p. 523). |
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The presence of so many fine writers in itself makes Reading Portland a delightful read. Collected also are Beverly Cleary, Steward Holbrook, Clyde Rice, Michael Munk, Gary Snyder, Kim Stafford, David James Duncan, Ursula LeGuin, Robin Cody, Mikal Gilmore, and William Least Heat Moon, among others. In the final entry, David Oates ponders the local and the global, something that reflects Portland's special understanding of itself, denying, I think, Deady's prediction and symbolizing Portland's complexity and originality. |
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Reading Portland's editors also created a supplementary CD (available at the Oregon Historical Society) that contains another selection of readings treating the area before it was Portland. It includes a fascinating set of seventy images that serve as a visual reflection on the readings. The index to the book is found on the CD, a poor decision because it physically separates it from the actual book, making its use somewhat difficult. Included also is a set of study questions for each selection that could be quite helpful to teachers. Study questions and pictures excepted, the CD reflects what might be a slight flaw in Reading Portland. It tries to be all things to all readers and splits at the seams a bit, as the flurry of typos in the Oates piece and the mispaginated table of contents for the pre-Portland section suggest. |
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Ambition aside, any literate person who loves Portland will enjoy and profit from the readings in this book. Reading Portland is an investigation of the nature of a place, an inductive exploration into the character of a city done with an instrument called prose. Any Portlander who loves this city should have Reading Portland on his or her shelf in order to read and reread tales of the tribe that lives at the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers. |
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| Tim Barnes
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| Portland Community College |
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