Twenty-five years ago, Jack Nesbit published Purple Flat Top: In Pursuit of a Place, a collection of weekly newspaper columns he'd written after he and a friend arrived in a remote area of northeastern Washington and began to build a home out of the natural stone they found there. Since then, Nesbit has become an award-winning author, a well-recognized naturalist and one of the great storytellers of the American Northwest. But Purple Flat Top fell out of print and became difficult to find--until this reissued edition from the University of Washington Press. (Apart from a new cover and a new preface, the contents are unchanged from the original printing.)
Nesbit writes with a simple and clear voice, but also with a powerful gift for observation and reflection. He is perhaps most eloquent when describing the landscape in which he works and plays. As he arrives in the Purple Flat Top region for the first time, Nesbit notes, "To our right a jumble of rocks marched uphill toward the blunt shoulder of the escarpment; to our left a brushy slope bursting with serviceberry and hawthorn blooms fell away to a noisy creek far below. A line of high mare's-tail clouds raced across the sky, and everything about the place seemed sharp and new." His skillfully shaped vignettes of the area's human and animal residents are filled with subtle humor. Purple Flat Top is worth revisiting if it has been read before or experiencing fully anew if it has not. --Roni K. Devlin, owner of Literary Life Bookstore & More