Writing the Northwest ─ A Reporter Looks Back

Peripatetic reporter, Hill Williams, offers four decades of history, most covering the Pacific Northwest, scientific revelations, and world changes. He covers a wide variety of regional topics: the strangely aligned hills of the Palouse that appear to be laid out by a surveyor; the University of Washington’s personally created salmon run that returned to the campus to spawn each season; hot times at the Hanford nuclear facility; his trip to Taiwan for the Seattle Times in 1978, the search for early Chinese writing, among others. Also on his agenda is an interview with the irascible, 83-year-old Harry Truman before the grizzly caretaker and short-lived celebrity disappeared under 150 feet of Mount St. Helen’s volcanic debris. Eleven chapters are: introduction: all the birds in the sky; the Williams family arrives in Washington; growing up in Pasco; early journalism; Seattle and the Times; people; Cold War years; geology; at sea in the Pacific Northwest; on land in the Pacific Northwest; a northwesterner in the Far East; Japan and World War II. Annotation ©2017 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)