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Just Big Enough

Portland was a promising and livable city when I arrived in 1978. In 2011, it's an exciting and livable city. It helps that it's bigger. When we got here, I offended people by telling them that I liked...

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Tamora Pierce

Hello, Portland! I suck. I won't be coming there on this book tour. Believe me; this hurts me as much as it does you. I love Portland. I tell everyone who would know what I'm talking about that I...

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Paradise Found

Paradise Found: Nature in America at the Time of Discovery is a thorough and exhaustively researched work chronicling 500 years of natural history on the North American continent. As a writer,...

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Shade It Black: Death and After in Iraq

I first heard Jessica Goodell's haunting voice on NPR and immediately knew I had to read her book. Goodell served in the Marines in Iraq in the Mortuary Affairs Unit and was responsible for retrieving...

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Venus of Longitude

On Tuesday, June 5, 2012, people across the world get to witness a rare, celestial shadow play. The planet Venus will, for about seven hours, cross the disk of the sun, a "transit" that happens less...

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David Douglas and Deep Time

When we were growing up, my brother and I devoured all kinds of science fiction. One moment we were waiting at the comic book store for the new pulp installment of the "slow glass" series; the next we...

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History, History Everywhere

In the mid-18th century, my great, great, great grandfather, the poet Sa'duddin, was living in a little village north of Kabul. Sheikh Sa'duddin was a pantheist who claimed to see God in everything,...

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Ghost Milk

London's greatest modern chronicler-poet takes on the propaganda parade of the London Olympics. Books mentioned in this post Ghost Milk: Recent Adventures Among... Iain Sinclair Used Hardcover $19.50

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The Desire of Objects

It was in the middle of a gray and brittle February when I approached the wrought-iron gates of the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. I was already elbow-deep and several months into researching my book, A Grand...

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The Art of Popular History

Writing popular history is a balancing act, and the people who do it most successfully get the balance right: Max Hastings in All Hell Let Loose, Dominic Sandbrook in Never Had It So Good. Part of the...

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The Blood Telegram

One of the Financial Times picks for best political books of the year, The Blood Telegram is a horrifying and shocking story of the birth of Bangladesh and the terrible part that Nixon and Kissinger...

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A Mad Catastrophe: The Outbreak of World War I and the Collapse of the...

Readers trying to understand the complex origins of World War I must begin in the Balkans, and in the fading, somnolent court of Austro-Hungarian emperor Franz Joseph I. Why? Because the Great War — as...

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Beyond the Headlines: Reading Russia, Ukraine, and the West

If you're a news junkie like me, there are times when even the cornucopia of journalism available isn't enough to sate your curiosity or answer all of your questions. It's just too hard to fit the...

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Powell’s Q&A: Geoff Dyer

Describe your latest book/project/work. Another Great Day at Sea is an account of my experiences aboard the USS George H. W. Bush. It's a masterpiece of the form, widely hailed as the best book ever...

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Lawrence in Arabia

In Lawrence in Arabia, Anderson masterfully separates fact from fiction, revealing a truer version of T. E. Lawrence and his conquests than his 1962 portrayal by Peter O'Toole. An insightful glimpse...

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And So It Goes: Revisiting Iraq

Reading the newspaper these days feels a little like time traveling. After eight years of war in Iraq and (let's be honest) at least three years of societal amnesia, it's startling to wake up to...

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Maus

The twofold brilliance of Art Spiegelman's groundbreaking, autobiographical Maus is the graphic novel's lack of sentimentality and Spiegelman's self-portrait as a secondhand Holocaust survivor. The...

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In the Kingdom of Ice

Truly a great adventure story, Sides's thrilling tale of the 1879 polar expedition of the USS Jeannette left me slack-jawed and wide-eyed. Vividly experience the grim, harrowing journey into a frozen...

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Ask a Book Buyer: Exploring Europe Through Fiction

At Powell's, our book buyers select all the new books in our vast inventory. If we need a book recommendation, we turn to our team of resident experts. Need a gift idea for a fan of vampire novels?...

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Best Nonfiction of 2014

A lot is made of the romance of bookstores. The smell of paper! The joy of discovery! The ancient, cracking leather bindings of books with dated inscriptions! And it's true that bookstores are magical...

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