100 Voices from the Little Bighorn Deluxe CD-ROM Bundle Edition by Bruce Brown

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Bruce Brown by Mary Randlett, fall 1980

General Journalism

* Filming 'Never Cry Wolf'
From the New York Times

* Baseball in Cuba
From the Atlantic Monthly

* Lost in the Woods
From the New York Times

* The Karen Silkwood Finale
From the New York Times

* Gone Fish Watching
From Audubon Magazine

* The Gary Little Story
From Science Writers

* Skagit River Reverie
From the State Magazine

* Mutual Bond Fund Fun
From Kiplinger's Magazine

* Crashing the OS Party
From Byte

* BugNet
From Astonisher.com

* Why America Drinks Bad Water
From Astonisher.com

* Sumas Astonisher
From Astonisher.com

* At Play In Harm's Way
From Astonisher.com

* Homage to Smokey
From Astonisher.com

Environmental Journalism

* Heart Stopping Sturgeon
From the Field & Stream

* Shedding Light on the Aurora
From the New York Times

* Wildlife Tracking By Transmitter
From the National Wildlife

Literary Jouralism

* Vernon Louis Parrington
From American Heritage (not)

* Resdiscovering Opal Whiteley
From the Washington Post

* Edward Abbey's Desert
From the Washington Post

* The Empire that Morgans Built
From the Washington Post

* The New Literature of the West
From the Washington Post

*Writing in the Rain
From the Washington Post

Map Journalism

* News Mapping News
From Astonisher.com

* Malasian Airlines Flight MH370
From Astonisher.com

* ISIS and the War of the Caliphate
From Astonisher.com

 


General Journalism by Bruce Brown
Never Cry Wolf

Filming 'Never Cry Wolf'

Derided as "Never Cry Wrap" by critics inside Walt Disney during its seeemingly interminable gestation, Carroll Ballard and John Houston's film of Farley Mowat's autobiographical classic, Never Cry Wolf, turned into a classic of its own sort. This story by Bruce Brown about how the film was made originally appeared in the October 16, 1983 issue of the New York Times Magazine.

Left -- Charles Martin Smith as Farley Mowat in Carroll Ballard's film of "Never Cry Wolf."


Fidel Castro

Baseball in Cuba

Baseballs ricochet off everything in sight in "Baseball in Cuba" by Bruce Brown. Originally published in the July 1984 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, it remains the best history of Cuban baseball available in English.

Left -- Fidel Castro pitches for Los Barbudos in Havana on July 24, 1959.


Kloochman

Lost in the Woods

Bruce Brown and his ex-wife, Lane Morgan, lose their way on the dangerously metaphoric terrain of Kloochman Rock in the Olympic Peninsula rain forest. Originally published in the New York Times Magazine in August 1985, this story was later anthologized in Island of Rivers.

Left -- "as the afternoon shadows began to lengthen, we entered a deep dell..."


Silkwood

Silkwood Finale: The Fuel Rods Are OK

The Karen Silkwood nuclear fuel safety controvery takes an unexpected turn at the end, which you won't find in the movie. This investigative piece by Bruce Brown originally appeared in the December 7, 1985 New York Times.

Left -- Meryl Streep in her Oscar-nominated portrayal of Karen Silkwood.


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Gone Fish Watching
(There's a Sign upon the Door)

Bruce Brown chronicles the birth of a new sport -- fish watching. This story originally appeared in the September 1986 issue of Audubon magazine.

Left -- "Pacific salmon characteristically put on a prolonged dance of prowess that illustrates their mastery over moving water..."


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The Gary Little Story

How a very clever and well-connected man was able to continue raping children who came into his charge for decades -- both as a teacher and as a judge -- is examined by Bruce Brown, who as a high school student was co-editor of the Lakeside Tatler when Gary Little taught at Seattle's prestigeous Lakeside School.

Left -- "The Gary Little story runs like a radioactive tracer through the Seattle power structure, exposing the old-boy network that connects many of the best law firms, local government, the old media families, and local barons of industry and retailing."


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North Fork Skagit River Reverie

Bruce Brown tours legendary Northwest literary ground -- or water -- via kayak in this visit to LaConner and Fishtown, the bohemian writers' community at the mouth of the North Fork Skagit River. This story originally appeared in the July 1988 issue of State magazine.

Left -- "Here time runs on the tides, the seasons and the salmon. A friend is someone who will bail your boat when you are stuck in town, and a funny stanza on 'The Parable of the Three Sages Tasting Vinegar' is worth more than a Volvo."


Mutual Bond Fund Fun

Bruce Brown delves into the mysteries of mutual bond fund performance metrics in this piece from the September 1994 issue of Kiplinger's Magazine.

Left -- "The oft-quoted 'SEC 30-day yield' may do a lot of things, but telling you the actual yield of a bond fund isn't one of them."


Crashing the OS

Crashing the Party:
How to break the major PC OSes

Bruce Brown explores the dark reality of PC operating systems -- and details how to crash them all -- in this piece from the August 1995 issue of Byte

Left -- "Sys! Boom! Bah!"


BugNet

BugNet

From late 1994 through late 1999, Bruce Brown wrote more than 100 influencial and widely read pieces for BugNet, which he founded and built into the world's leading supplier of PC bug fixes.

Left -- "The World's Leading Supplier of PC Bug Fixes."


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Why America Drinks Bad Bottled Water

The best selling brands of bottled water in America are also among the worst tasting and least local. Here's why!

Left -- "Choice is an illusion perpetrated by those with power upon the powerless," spake the Mergovinian in The Matrix Reloaded.


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Sumas Astonisher

Controversial and quixotic, the Sumas Astonisher was founded by Bruce Brown as a "Flood Lost and Found List" to catalogue flotsam found around the little border town of Sumas, WA, after an exceptionally bad flood in late 1990.

Left -- "Sumas Quo Sumas"


At Play in Harm's Way

At Play In Harm's Way

The private heart of one of the new extreme sports -- mountain biking -- is examined in this 2002 essay by Bruce Brown, who holds the world record for climbing on a mountain bike.

Left -- "This morning we are like a Paleolithic band on the hunt. We vie for the lead, but we also share it, and for the good riders there is plenty of game to go around."


Smokey in Sumas

Homage to Smokey

THERE ARE MANY dogs in the world, but as with people, only a few good ones. This is about a very good dog named Smokey, who died on January 29, 2006.

Left -- "I buried Smokey under the two big old filbert trees on the edge of the north pasture because she loved walking there, and considered all the field mice there to be her personal posession."


Environmental Journalism by Bruce Brown


Sturgeon

Heart Stopping Sturgeon

This true fish story by Bruce Brown originally appeared in the June 1984 issue of Field & Stream.

Left -- "Within the last year, the single greatest spur to West Coast sturgeon fishing has undoubtedly been the 9-foot-long, 468-pound white sturgeon caught by 21-year-old Joe Pallotta in the Sacramento River July 12."


Aurora borealis

Shedding Light on the Aurora

Bruce Brown explores the literature and science of the aurora in a piece that appeared (in somewhat different forms) in the New York Times Magazine and the March 1985 issue of National Wildlife. Remember: when the big one hits, you heard it here first.

Left -- The auroral "ring of fire" over North America, as seen from space...


Wildlife tracking by transmitter

Wildlife Tracking By Transmitter

Bruce Brown encounters David Beaty, the father of wildlife radio telemetry, in Seattle in 1984. This piece originally appeared in National Wildlife, and then was published again in the form you see here in the May 9, 1984 Seattle Weekly.

Left -- "It's 11 o'clock at night. Do you know where your wombat is?"


Literary Journalism by Bruce Brown


VL Parrington

Vernon Louis Parrington --
America's Greatest Literary Historian (& Founder of Oklahoma Sooner Football)

The man who put American literature on the academic map -- and founded the Oklahoma Sooner football program -- takes a bow. Bruce Brown's 1985 profile was rejected by American Heritage magazine because it wasn't hostile enough to the liberal Parrington.

Left -- "a reclusive figure, but good company if you could smoke him out..."


Opal Whitely

Resdiscovering Opal Whiteley's
The Journal of an Understanding Heart

An intriguing -- and nearly forgotten -- American classic is reconsidered by Bruce Brown. These two reviews of Opal Whiteley's The Journal of an Understanding Heart appeared in the Washington Post Book World in 1985 and 1986.

Left -- "a seventeen-year-old mountain girl, hair down her back, has opened the eyes of the Eugene teaching profession and left it gasping for breath..."


Edward Abbey country

Desert Dispatches

Bruce Brown praises Edward Abbey's Beyond the Wall and gets hate mail from the irrasible Abbey in return! This review originally appeared in the April 1, 1984 Washington Post Book World.

Left -- "The heart of Abbey Country is somewhere in a canyon along the Colorado River or a tributary like the Green or Paria rivers, although for literary purposes he lists his address as Oracle, Arizona."


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The Empire that Morgans Built

Ron Chernow's sprawling, National Book Award-winnning portrait of America's pre-eminent merchant banking empire, The House of Morgan, is reviewed by Bruce Brown. This piece originally ran in the March 18, 1990 Washington Post Book World.

Left -- "I owe the public nothing..."


The New Literature of the West

Bruce Brown reviews Lawrence Thornton's Ghost Woman. This piece originally appeared in the June 1992 issue of Washington Post Book World.

Left -- "A new kind of coastal western in which no doggies are punched, nary a sidewinder slaps leather, and discouraging words most definately are heard..."


Sumas rainbow

Writing in the Rain
(And Immediately Thereafter)

A literary snapshot of Washington in 1984 when Raymond Carver, Frank Herbert and Tom Robbins were in their prime, this piece by Bruce Brown originally appeared in the May 16, 1984 Washington Post Book World.

Left -- Rain and rainbow over Bruce Brown's writing retreat on the Canadian border.


Map Journalism by Bruce Brown


Sumas rainbow

Brave New World of News Mapping

Maps have always been uniquely powerful means of revealing relationships in a story, but they have tradtionally functioned in a supporting, illustrative role. In today's online publications, however, interactive maps have become the way to tell the story like never before.

Left -- Google developed much of the underlying technology that enables modern online mapping -- called AJAX, an acronym for asynchronous JavaScript + XML -- shortly after the turn of the century, and first implemented in it Google Maps in 2005.


Sumas rainbow

Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 Mystery

Following its sudden and mysterious disappearance on the night of March 8, 2014 during a regularly scheduled flight from Kuala Lumpar, Malaysia to Beijing, China, with 224 passengers and 12 crew mwmbers aboard, Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 became the focus of the largest and most expensive search ever conducted for a missing airplane. The offical search proved fruitless, but wreckage believed to be from the missing plane was found off Madagascar two years later. This interactive javascript map, created by Bruce Brown, allows you to trace the entire story -- as well as the many theories about what happened to MH370 -- across across nearly 10,000 miles of the earth surface.

Left -- "A fragment of plane wing discovered in Mauritius in May has been confirmed as coming from missing plane Malaysia Airlines MH370, Australia's Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) said in a statement on Friday."


Sumas rainbow

ISIS and the War of the Caliphate

In early 2014 the radical Islamic group known variously as Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, ISIL, ISIS, Daish and Dahesh drove out of Syria and overran nearly one third of neighboring Iraq in a blitzkreig war that startled much of the world. There is no entry for the War of the Caliphate in Wikipedia, and most of the Western World would prefer to forget the whole episode, but this interactive javascript map by Bruce Brown allows you to follow ISIS's rise across thousands of miles of terrain and brings back the desparate flavor of the time.

Left -- BATTLE OF DHULUIYA, 2014
ISIS captured Dhuluiya, Iraq, on June 12, the third day of the war. The Iraqi government recaptured the town on June 14, but ISIS took it back on July 13. Prominent Sunni tribes, including the Al-Jabour, subsequently drove ISIS out the town. On September 7, an ISIS suicide bomber detonated an explosive-laden Humvee that had been captured from the Iraqi Army at the gates of Dhuluiya, killing 17, as ISIS attacked and captured Dhuluiya again. On September 14, Iraqi warplanes carried out an airstrike on the house of Abdullah al-Annag, a senior ISIS leader during a meeting of ISIS local leaders in his house near Dhuluiyah, killing nine ISIS commanders. On December 30, Iraqi government forces recaptured Dhuluiya, killing nearly 300 ISIS fighters in the two day battle.

 

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