Eccentric Seattle: Pillars and Pariahs Who Made the City Not Such a Boring Place After All

by J. Kingston Pierce

Book Overview

In Eccentric Seattle, readers explore the Emerald City's troubled, tragic, and bawdy past rather than familiar, rosy portrayals. A visitor in 1897, at the height of the raucous Klondike gold rush, called the Pacific Northwest's most ambitious city "more wicked than Sodom." Just over a decade later, President William Howard Taft--speaking with greater generosity, or perhaps less skepticism--declared the town to be "one of the most magnificent...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0874222699
• ISBN13: 9780874222692
• Release Date: September 2003
• Publisher: Washington State University Press
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.1" x 8.8"

Customer Reviews

Brilliant & entertaining history

An engaging and captivating read. I sure wish someone like Mr. Pierce had taught history at my high school! This guy breaths life into history with humor, passion and brilliant insights. Pierce obviously loves history and manages to make it all come alive through his deft wordsmithing. As I delved deeper into the book, it became obvious that before ever writing a word, Pierce must have spent many months doing his research (including tracking down, across the Northwest and around the country, living descendents of his historic, eccentric characters.It is also a friendly read. Each eveninig before bed I'd devour another chapter. Sadly, after I finished the book I found myself foraging through the table of contents, like a depleted tin of almond roca, in hopes that just possibly I had overlooked a morsel or even a crumb of his delightful tales of Seattle's historic characters, charlatans, swindlers, realtors and hustlers. Bravo Mr. Pierce!

A fun and informative collection for tourists

Eccentric Seattle: Pillars And Pariahs Who Made The City Not Such A Boring Place After All by longtime Seattle editor and author J. Kingston Pierce is an engaging regional history of the great city of Seattle, Washington. Kingston Pierce's keen interest in unusual aspects of history are reflected in the sometimes bizarre anecdotes (mothers urging their children to stuff salt up their noses, scores of proper Victorian ladies forced to climb 8 to 30 foot high ladders) he's gathered and included in Eccentric Seattle, stories stretching through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to present a rollicking composite picture. Eccentric Seattle is a fun and informative collection for tourists or residents of Seattle to read through, and a highly recommended contribution to American Regional History.

A history recalled with wit and wonder

January Magazine crime fiction editor J. Kingston Pierce takes us on an effervescent journey through Seattle's ... er ... eccentric history in his latest history-related book, "Eccentric Seattle." In his introduction, Pierce describes how Seattle came to be. "Thus the city was born," writes Pierce. "It would prove to be a fast-growing but troubled child, which didn't always play well with others." This troubled-child aspect is where Pierce leads us. We learn about mail-order brides, a nutty Pulitzer Prize-winning Seattle poet; anti-Communist witch hunts in McCarthy-era Seattle; the first woman mayor of a large American city; rumrunning during Prohibition and so much more. Pierce, the author of "America's Historic Trails with Tom Bodett" and "San Francisco, You're History," has written extensively on history in general and the history of Seattle in particular, so, in "Eccentric Seattle," we believe him when he tells us that he learned "long ago that history isn't merely about dates, places, and statistics; what gives it life are the people who charted its course, whether they were empire builders or avaricious businessmen, eristic newspaper editors or erratic preachers, artists or murderers." In "Eccentric Seattle," Pierce introduces us to all of them. -- from January Magazine, December 2003

The stories that made Seattle

Seattle's current self-indulgent concept of itself is of a comfortable, jets-rain-and-flannel-shirts backwater now finally being forced to wrestle with the fact that it's become a "big city." But as J. Kingston Pierce's subtitle suggests -- and his interesting and entertaining history reveals -- that vision of Seattle's past, if it was ever accurate, was at best only an interlude between the Emerald City's rowdy origins and the fast-paced *urbs* we are today.For much of its early history, Seattle was a quintessential frontier town. And from that standpoint, many of the people to whom the author introduces us didn't really strike me as that "eccentric" at all. On the contrary, they seemed like the fairly standard character types one found in many American frontier settlements: the brothel keepers, the moralists, the criminals on the lam, the get-rich-quick artists, the Horatio Algers determined to make a fortune through hard work, the people who failed Back East and came west to start over, and, inevitably, the politicians. Though these characters are familiar, Pierce does a fine job weaving them into the interesting tapestry that is Seattle history, and showing how they continued to affect the city even after its frontier days were long dead.I for one can hardly wander through a city without wondering what kind of history took place there, what it looked like 100 years ago, and how it became what it is. The "sense of place" is very important to me. I understand Seattle a lot better for having read this book. Pierce has given faces and stories to many of the names that stare back at us from building fronts and street signs, uncovered important landmarks (literal and figurative) in the city's history, and generally done a good job proving the argument his subtitle asserts.If, as Winston Churchill suggested, how clearly you see the past shapes how clearly you'll see the future, anyone interested in the future of Seattle (or, less pretentiously, anyone simply interested in some entertaining true stories about places that may already be familiar to you) should definitely get to know this book.