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Years ago, Steve Hannah’s chance detour through the Midwest cut short a planned cross-country trip. He found himself in Wisconsin, a distinctly different place from the east coast where he was born and raised. Charmingly beautiful and full of welcoming people, America’s dairyland would soon become his home.
Dairylandia recounts Steve Hannah’s burgeoning love for his adopted state through the writings of his long-lived column, “State of Mind.” He profiles the lives of the seemingly ordinary, yet quite (and quietly) extraordinary folks he met and befriended on his travels. From Norwegian farmers to rattlesnake hunters to a woman who kept her favorite dead bird in the freezer, Hannah was charmed and fascinated by practically everyone he met. These captivating vignettes are by turns humorous, tragic, and remarkable—and remind us of our shared humanity.
 

Oregon Book Award Winner for General Nonfiction

Dispatches and Dictators uncovers the fascinating story of Oregon native Ralph Barnes, the New York Herald Tribune’s European correspondent, who served in Paris, Rome, Moscow, Berlin, and London in the years between the two world wars. Barnes has been praised by colleagues and competitors alike as one of the best reporters of that pivotal era. But since his death in the 1940 crash of a British bomber in Yugoslavia, he has been largely forgotten.

With persistence and unusually keen insight, Ralph Barnes reported on Fascism, Communism, Nazism, and the events leading to World War II. Stalin confined Barnes to Moscow for disclosing that millions were dying during the Soviet collectivization of agriculture, and Hitler expelled Barnes from Germany for predicting the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union.

In Dispatches and Dictators, historian Barbara Mahoney chronicles the short life and brilliant career of Ralph Barnes. Her biography of this extraordinary reporter provides new insights into the tumultuous decade leading up to World War II.
 

Named one of Lit Hub's most anticipated books of the year.

A searing reflection on the last day of the Vietnam War and the beginning of the end of foreign reporting in the nation’s daily newspapers. 

Done in a Day turns on a single event: the April 30, 1975, departure of the last helicopter evacuating civilians from the rooftop of the US embassy in Saigon. Elisa Tamarkin’s interest in that helicopter begins with the fact that her stepfather, the Saigon bureau chief for the Chicago Daily News, was on it—the last American correspondent to leave Saigon as it fell. His report was filed from a naval ship on the South China Sea at a time when no other telexes were going through.

Now, more than fifty years later, Tamarkin offers a social and cultural autopsy of that moment, based in personal history but vividly unfolding amid the vast documentation of America’s obvious defeat, which never seemed to register even as it got out, in the writings of journalists and essayists, in the backchannel cables between US ambassador Graham Martin and Henry Kissinger, in congressional hearings, and in photographs of the war’s end. The story is also set against the imminent disappearance of war coverage in city newspapers—and of the newspapers themselves—once proud, in the words of the Chicago Daily News, of bringing readers the “literature of the day” that was “done in a day.”

Done in a Day braids history, criticism, and memoir to tell the paired stories of Saigon’s liberation and the demise of the news. The result is a haunting essay about all that ended in a day—and about what it means to recognize and to write about endings even as we live through them.