Besides CRR What Else Are You Reading?

Read a good book lately? To be mini-interviewed by CRR Book Reviewer Alan Rose for a future “What Are You Reading?”spotlight, please contact him at alan@alan-rose.com or the publisher/editor at publisher@crreader.com.

BESIDES COLUMBIA RIVER READER...

What are you reading?

Monthly feature coordinated by Alan Rose

Storytellers at the Columbia River

By Michael Perry

I’ve read several books about the Manhattan Project and how the United States created the atomic bomb. Very little is ever included about the plutonium factory built at Hanford in Washington State. So I looked forward to Storytellers at the Columbia River, by Nancy Danielson Mendenhall, since it was based on the story of how the settlers who first came in 1906, the Japanese Americans who planted fruit orchards, and the Wanapum Indians who never signed a treaty with the United States were all evicted by the federal government around White Bluffs and Hanford in 1943. This novel is set in 1998 at one of the annual Settlers’ Reunions held near Hanford on the Columbia River between 1965 and 2005. Mendenhall created a multicultural cast of characters to represent the various groups of people impacted in 1943. The story focuses on the passions of these representative characters more than on the actual history of what happened at Hanford. She tries to make connections between their different points of view, but I found her story often repetitive

and disjointed, covering the same issues several times while ignoring things that might have made the novel more readable.

The main takeaway for me was the glacial pace of our government on the major issues of nuclear waste and the loss of native and hatchery-raised salmon due to dams and warming river and ocean temperatures.

Many people are still waiting for the government to acknowledge the wrongs they believe were done to them or their ancestors. Such an apology may never come, but even if it does, I wonder how that would change anything. The genie can never be put back in the bottle. The big dams are here to stay, and Hanford will never be returned to its pre-1942 condition.

Mike Perry is author of “Dispatches from the Discovery Trail,”the 33-month series published on an ongoing basis in CRR since 2004, and the book by the same name published by CRRPress in 2021. He lives in Kelso Wash.

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