November 15, 2007
|  |  | phone: 541-754-7668 address: 227 SW 2nd Street, Corvallis, OR
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| | A Special Thank You
| | | | | Friends: We were recently honored in the November/December issue of Via, the AAA Traveler's Companion magazine. Grass Roots was one of just seven "Amazing and Unusual" Northwest bookstores that were profiled. I suppose that makes us an "official" travel destination! "A book lover's bookstore," writes Carol Brown of Corvallis. "There's a wide range of literature for the entire family, and the knowledgeable staff has a passion for service. With a cozy loft and a remarkable collection of Celtic CDs." Thank you, Carol, for your warm words and for taking the time to write to the magazine. My initial response when friends showed me the article was to personally thank them for sharing it with me and to let them know my appreciation for their ongoing support during the past 36 years. But, so many people now have given me copies of the article that I realize a community "thank you" is in order. We're proud to be the type of store that gets interviewed by Publishers Weekly, Bookselling This Week, and the New York Times. But, even more important to us is our realization that our friends and customers feel they are an integral part of GR. They take what is said about Grass Roots personally. They invest themselves in keeping us healthy so we can, in turn, help nourish and support them. This is what a community resource means. I sincerely thank every one of you for your indispensable part in this honor. With gratitude, Jack
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| Five Good Books
| | | | Listening Is an Act of Love: A Celebration of American Life from the StoryCorps Project
The Fall of the House of Bush: The Untold Story of How a Band of True Believers Seized the Executive Branch, Started the Iraq War, and Still Imperils America's Future
Mountain Rescue Doctor: Wilderness Medicine in the Extremes of Nature
The Next Rodeo: New and Selected Essays
Futures from Nature: 100 Speculative Fictions from the Pages of the Leading Science Journal
| | Listening Is an Act of Love: A Celebration of American Life from the StoryCorps Project Dave Isay
Since its launch four years ago, StoryCorps has gathered the largest oral history ever created in the U.S. In its five booths (two permanent booths in NYC and three mobile touring booths), this remarkable project has recorded 10,000 stories of everyday Americans. Dave Isay has selected some of the most remarkable stories and arranged them thematically into a moving portrait of American life. Hardcover, $24.95
Publisher: Penguin Group (USA), ISBN-13: 9781594201400
| | | | | | The Fall of the House of Bush: The Untold Story of How a Band of True Believers Seized the Executive Branch, Started the Iraq War, and Still Imperils America's Future Craig Unger
Craig Unger ( House of Bush, House of Saud) has written a comprehensive, deeply sourced, and chilling account of the secret relationship between neoconservative policy makers and the Christian Right. An award-winning investigative reporter connected to many political and intelligence sources, Unger knows how to get the big story. This one is his most explosive yet – how the current administration assaulted the most vital safeguards of America's constitutional democracy while pushing the country into the catastrophic quagmire in the Middle East. Hardcover, $27.00
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group, ISBN-13: 9780743280754
| | | | | | Mountain Rescue Doctor: Wilderness Medicine in the Extremes of Nature Christopher Van Tilburg
Van Tilburg ( Emergency Survival: A Pocket Guide ) is an emergency room physician and a member of the Hood River Crag Rats, the oldest mountain rescue team in the country. In Mountain Rescue Doctor, he shares personal stories of harrowing rescues and recoveries. We learn about the tools and techniques of emergency wilderness medicine, the strength and delicacy required to treat patients under extreme conditions, and the ethical challenges a wilderness physician faces in deciding who can be saved and at what cost. Hardcover, $24.95
Publisher: St. Martin's Press; ISBN-13: 9780312358877
| | | | | | The Next Rodeo: New and Selected Essays William Kittredge
William Kittredge’s relationship to the Western landscape is fraught with contradictions. Having grown up on a cattle ranch in Oregon, he has an intimate connection to the land that was once vital to his family’s trade. He has also witnessed, over many decades, the depletion of the West’s natural resources due to overuse. These luminous essays move effortlessly from the personal to the political. With grace and integrity, Kittredge confronts the myths of the Western experience: male freedom and female domesticity, the wild and the tame, self-interest and the love of the land. New in Paperback, $15.00
Publisher: Graywolf Press; ISBN-13: 9781555974794
| | | | | | Futures from Nature: 100 Speculative Fictions from the Pages of the Leading Science Journal edited by Henry Gee
Appearing in book form for the first time, these 100 very short stories on the subject of the future were originally published in the science journal, Nature. The authors include scientists, journalists, and many of the most famous SciFi writers in the world. Futures from Nature includes satires and vignettes, compressed stories, fictional book reviews, science articles, and journalism. All of them are entertaining, and as a group they present a wide array of ideas about the future. Hardcover, $24.95
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates, LLC (A Tor Book); ISBN-13: 9780765318053
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| Music
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David Gray $15.95
Genre: Folk/Rock
Here are the highlights from his seven previous albums of contemporary piano-based pop. The album includes the songs "Babylon," "One I Love," "Please Forgive Me," and more, as well as two new pieces.
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John Sebastian & David Grisman $17.95
Genre: Folk/Rock
Since acoustic music has been the base of their respective work, it seems natural for Lovin' Spoonful's John Sebastian and mandolin-master David Grisman to cut an album together. Sebastian is in good voice, and the acoustic interplay between his guitar and Grisman's mandolin is relaxed. Sebastian and Grisman once shared the stage in an early 60s group called the Even Dozen Jug Band.
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James Taylor $23.95
Genre: Folk/Rock
This concert CD/DVD set features James and his guitar with keyboardist Larry Goldings, whom Taylor dubs his "one-man band." This is an intimate album, recorded at a three-night stint at the Colonial Theatre in Pittsfield, MA during July 2007. The 19-song set include Taylor's best-loved standards.
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PDQ Bach $17.95
Genre: Classical
Peter Schickele ( PDQ Bach) both embraces and lampoons traditional classical music. In his seventh album, The Jekyll & Hyde Tour, the professor picks up where he left off in album #6 ( P.D.Q. Bach And The Short-Tempered Clavier). He has returned for another year at Hoople’s school of music and musicolology to finally uncover the mystery of the most misunderstood composer of all time, He-Whose-Music-Must-Not-Be-Played.
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Kevin Johansen $16.95
Genre: World
This excellent, Argentinean songwriter spans several Latin genres, including salsa, cumbia, tango and more. Like Manu Chao, Johansen incorporates elements of rock, hip-hop and reggae for a metropolitan-world flavor.
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| Next Event: Nov. 17 - Local poets read their work
| | | | | Saturday, November 17, 7pm, Grass Roots
Local authors read their work Three Oregon originals read together for the first time.
Charles Goodrich - Heavy Mulching Charles Goodrich is the author of a volume of poems, Insects of South Corvallis, and a collection of essays about nature, parenting, and building his own house, The Practice of Home. His essays and poetry have appeared in magazines such as Orion, Open Spaces and The Sun. A number of his poems have been read by Garrison Keillor on "The Writer's Almanac." He is presently program director for the Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature, and the Written Word at Oregon State University. Eleanor Berry - Green November Eleanor Berry lives in rural Lyons, OR. Her poems have also been published in anthologies and literary magazines, including CALYX, Comstock Review, Crab Orchard Review, Dogwood, Hawai'i Pacific Review, Nimrod, Spoon River Poetry Review, and Windfall. Her essays on poets and poetry have been published in journals and edited collections, most recently, Reading the Middle Generation Anew. Since 2002, she has coordinated the Second Sundays Series of Poetry Readings in Stayton. From 2004 to 2006, she served as president of the Oregon State Poetry Association, and she currently chairs the Stevens Poetry Manuscript Competition, conducted annually by the National Federation of State Poetry Societies.
Gary Lark - Men at the Gates
Gary L. Lark has been a librarian, carpenter, janitor, salesman, hospital aide. He is a graduate of OSU and worked at the Corvallis Public Library for 11 years. He is the former editor of the much-admired poetry journal, Luckiamute. Two poems from Men at the Gates were recently featured on Garrison Keillor's "The Writers Almanac." Of Men at the Gates, Oregon Book Award Recipient Clemens Starck says: "Blunt, plain-spoken, no-frills anecdotal accounts of a back-country Oregon boyhood and a working life lived as a laborer, janitor, hospital orderly and rural librarian - these are poems from and to the heart, fierce and unflinching. Peopled by loggers, Cat skinners and out-of-work mill hands, by prison inmates and war-ravage veterans in a VA hospital, Men at the Gates also includes a lovely valentine for a teenage prom date. Strong, simple and deeply engaging, it is even what is more rare: an uncommonly gentle book."
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| Plan Ahead - Special Events
| | | | | Saturday, December 1st, 4pm, Grass Roots
The Art of Travel with a Sketchbook : Six Steps to Get Started by Mari Le Glatin Keis Mari Le Glatin was born and raised in Brittany, France. She studied printmaking before traveling around the world with her sketchbooks and pencils, filling up pages with her sketches. "Seeing and recording has become my life. My sketchbook pages are my artwork. I seldom come back to a page to adjust or finish it. I know that the emotion I have at that very moment happens only once." For the past 13 years, she has been leading travel workshops. You can visit Mari's web site at: artraveljournals.com
Monday, December 3rd, 7pm, Grass Roots
More Sand in My Bra : Funny Women Write from the Road, Again! with contributions by Corvallis' own C. Lill Ahrens Lill will be joined by several friends (including members of the Red Hat Society) for an evening of hilarious travel woes:
- Make breast (not a typo!) friends with Julia Weiler in Thailand.
- Shed your inhibitions Eugene-style with Betsey Lorenzen.
- Join Shelley Hughes on her hunt for a "Little John" in Great Britain's Sherwood Forest.
- Play meat market charades with Alethalou Harmon in Germany.
- Camp out on Catalina Island with Sharon Ashley and her herd of hairy friends.
- Survive a lion attack with C. Lill Ahrens in Seoul, Korea.
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| Book Club News
| | | | | The Samurai's Garden: A Novel by Gail TsukiyamaPaperback, 15% off regular price of $13.95 Tuesday, December 4, 6:30-8:00pm
Grass Roots loft On the eve of the Second World War, a young Chinese man is sent to his family's summer home in Japan to recover from tuberculosis. He will rest, swim in the salubrious sea, and paint in the brilliant shoreside light. It will be quiet and solitary. But he meets four local residents - a lovely young Japanese girl and three older people. What then ensues is a tale that readers will find at once classical yet utterly unique. Young Stephen has his own adventure, but it is the unfolding story of Matsu, Sachi, and Kenzo that seizes your attention and will stay with you forever. Tsukiyama, with lines as clean, simple, telling, and dazzling as the best of Oriental art, has created an exquisite little masterpiece.
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| On Our Nightstands - What We're Reading
| | | | | - Jack - The King's English: Adventures of an Independent Bookseller by Betsy Burton
Paperback $15.95 - Sandy - The Garden in Winter: Plant for Beauty and Interest in the Quiet Season by Suzy Bales
Hardcover $34.95 - Tiffany - The Solitudes (The Aegypt Cycle) by John Crowley
Paperback $15.95 - Melody - Holidays on Ice: Stories by David Sedaris
Paperback $8.99
- Deborah - The Samurai's Garden: A Novel by Gail Tsukiyama
Paperback $13.95
- Anna - The Secret Life of Ceecee Wilkes by Diane Chamberlain
Paperback $13.95 - Michael - Seizing Destiny: How America Grew from Sea to Shining Sea by Richard Kluger
Hardcover $35.00
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