OUR PROMISED LAND

I found this extraordinarily good reading. For easterners, it opens up a whole new world, of which we know singularly little. The modern picture of our great northwest reveals it as a frontier of today, with the opportunities, the uncertainties and the contradictions of all frontiers, exaggerated in terms of today. A refuge for over 200,000 dust bowl refugees, the theatre for the grimmest battle between unions, the background for dramatic figures in politics, the richest source of our national wealth, the center for some of our most dramatic engineering feats -- it is all there, in popular vein, sometimes to the point of cheapness (but somehow it fits the subject): -- Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Utah. There is even more adventure in the reading for people away from the west. It is not great literature -- but it is grand reading.