Info
Catalogue #s: 508, 753
ISBN: 1-885942-50-8 paper $9.95
ISBN: 1-885942-75-3 cloth $19.95
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Description
Includes essays on carpentry: "Baby Job," "The Best Stuff," and
"The Day We Squished Phil."
Also, essays on traveling in Syria: "The Singing Boy," "Riding with the
Mukhabarat," and "Suzanne, Arabic for a Kind of Flower."
And essays on life in the Pacific Northwest: "The Motor that Brought Us to
Mike," and "I've Got to Vote Tonight."
Crystal-clear prose, simplicity, and depth--Lost Arrow is a
welcome change from the commercialism of the working press.
Davis presents the humor and politics of a construction jobsite, the edgy pleasures of a
rock climb in Yosemite, and the tourist's nightmare: a nighttime interrogation by third
world secret police.
Reporting on ordinary events, Scott C. Davis penetrates familiar surfaces. And he shows
how the ordinary can turn, suddenly, into something extreme.
The author's concluding essay defines Classic Journalism, the energetic successor to the
New Journalism of Tom Wolfe and John McPhee. Several of these essays have previously
appeared in The Christian Science Monitor.
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Quotes
"Scott C. Davis hit the Yosemite Valley climbing scene like a
whirlwind a quarter of a century ago, ascending El Capitan four times in one year. These
climbs, done in impeccable style, shook up the resident rock jocks, for Davis and his
partner were outsiders, supposedly incapable of such feats. His Lost Arrow climb,
described in this volume, is another epic adventure."
- Steve Roper, author of
Camp 4: Recollections of a Yosemite Rockclimber
"Scott C. Davis is a crisp, sane, honest, actual writer. I love reading him."
- John Felstiner, Stanford University
"The Syria sketches in Lost Arrow are meticulously observed."
- Talcott Seelye, Former U. S. Ambassador to Syria
Author's Bio
Scott C. Davis is a Seattle author and building contractor.
He has written two award winning books: The World of Patience Gromes: Making and
Unmaking a Black Community and Lost Arrow and Other True Stories. Davis founded
Cune Press in 1994 and conceived and edited An Ear to the Ground: Presenting Writers
from 2 Coasts.
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Comments from Readers
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Reviews
Clean and Lean
Lost Arrow and Other True Stories
by Scott Davis
Davis is a carpenter from Seattle, a mountain climber, a
traveler to so-called "terrorist nations," and he happens to be a White person
who has made a life-long study of African-American history which he reflected well in a
previous book: The World of Patience Gromes: Making and Unmaking a Black
Community.
In Lost Arrow Davis writes of
characters and incidents he encountered between his carpentry and travels. Davis' prose is
clean and lean and he utilizes short, succinct sentences, much like Hemingway in his
earlier work, and his style includes a dash of the New Journalism advanced by Tom Wolfe,
John McPhee and Hunter S. Thompson in the 70s. The pieces are divided into five sections:
Carpentry, the Middle East, Mountain Climbing, Life in the Fast Lane and African-American.
The best of the tales is "Charlie Barbour," a stunning study of the pain and
suffering a Black man encounters in urban society. The story reminded me of Stephen
Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets for its sense of raw
humanity and social injustice. Mr. Davis' talent peaked with this story.
---Nick DiSpoldo
Small Press Review - April 1996 |
