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Coming home to Oregon to reconnect with his aging parents, Daniel Dietz discovers the rhythms and relationships of a changing book world. As the internet pushes bibliophiles away from used bookstores and toward digital commerce, Dietz’s stepfather Michael, now nearing eighty, clings to the precarious trade of scouring thrift stores and library sales for rare books to sell. He explores the stacks, from garage sales in Eugene’s Whiteaker neighborhood to Portland’s Powell’s City of Books, for overlooked first editions and valuable rare books from the past.

With humor and tenderness, Rare and Used introduces us to Michael and to a dedicated and zealous community of book people, each with a grail book that they seek above all others. For Dietz, it’s Beat poet Diane di Prima’s debut collection This Kind of Bird Flies Backward—a book once owned by his stepfather. In his quest for the book, Dietz grapples with larger questions about possession, inheritance, and what we can hold onto. A tribute to books and booksellers as well as to family and place, Rare and Used explores what it means to return home to a community that shaped you.

    Trick-or-treating. Flower girls. Bedtime stories. Bar and bat mitvah. In a nation of increasing ethnic, familial, and technological complexity, the patterns of children's lives both persist and evolve. This book considers how such events shape identity and transmit cultural norms, asking such questions as:
 
    * How do immigrant families negotiate between old traditions and new?
    * What does it mean when children engage in ritual insults and sick jokes?  
    * How does playing with dolls reflect and construct feelings of racial identity?  
    * Whatever happened to the practice of going to the Saturday matinee to see a Western?
    * What does it mean for a child to be (in the words of one bride) "flower-girl material"?  How does that role
        cement a girl's bond to her family and initiate her into society?  
    * What is the function of masks and costumes, and why do children yearn for these accoutrements of disguise?

    Rituals and Patterns in Children's Lives suggests the manifold ways in which America's children come to know their society and themselves.

Tina Ontiveros was born into timber on both sides of the family. Her mother spent summers driving logging trucks for her family’s operation, and her father was the son of an itinerant logger, raised in a variety of lumber towns, as Tina herself would be.

A story of growing up in turmoil, rough house recounts a childhood divided between a charming, mercurial, abusive father in the forests of the Pacific Northwest and a mother struggling with small-town poverty. It is also a story of generational trauma, especially for the women—a story of violent men and societal restrictions, of children not always chosen and frequently raised alone.

Ontiveros’s father, Loyd, looms large. Reflecting on his death and long absence from her life, she writes, “I had this ridiculous hope that I would get to enjoy a functional relationship with my father, on my own terms, now that I was an adult.” In searingly honest, straightforward prose, rough house is her attempt to carve out this relationship, to understand her father and her family from an adult perspective.

While some elements of Ontiveros’s story are universal, others are indelibly grounded in the logging camps of the Pacific Northwest at the end of the twentieth century, as the lumber industry shifted and contracted. Tracing her childhood through the working-class towns and forests of Washington and Oregon, Ontiveros explores themes of love and loss, parents and children, and her own journey to a different kind of adulthood.