Good Rain, The

In the valleys of the Olympic Mountains, it can rain six feet in two months and tree trunks can grow as wide as garaged doors. Some forty miles away, in Seattle, angry citizens are trying to prevent their town from becoming a second Los Angeles. The Pacific Northwest encompasses both frenzied bounty and frenzied exploitation, and its politics have pitted monopolies against Wobblies, and the latters' logger descendants against environmental monkeywrenchers.

This is the country that Tim Egan, the Seattle correspondent for The New York Times, ranges through in this eloquent and exciting book, which takes the reader from salmon fisheries to mountain camps, from an impoverished Indian reservation near Tacoma to the manicured English gardens of Vancouver.