Historic Photos of Seattle / text and captions by Walt Crowley. Nashville, Tenn. : Turner Pub. Co., c2006. x, 206 p.

This is a very disjointed book. Or maybe disconnected is a better word. Dis-something. Compared to Turner Publishing's other Washington State based photo works, this one feels rushed and unfinished. Somehow I sense the back story is more interesting than the product.

But let's focus on the product for now. This work features over 200 black and white photos of Seattle from the 1889 fire to a 1994 shot of the Space Needle and monorail. The photos are divided into chronological chunks, each introduced with an historical essay.

OK. Now I'll go good, bad, good. And the dips are deep.

The essay portions of this book are excellent. Put them together and you have a very nice summary of the history of Washington State's premier city. In the choice of photos for the early years, you do get a sense of how new and raw our corner of the United States is compared to the rest of the Lower 48. The rapid speed in which our Western Civilization has managed to screw up this beautiful corner of God's Country is staggering.

Walt Crowley didn't exactly send that specific message in this work, but I'm sure he would've agreed with me on the previous couple sentences. Walt and I both remember what it used to be like around here when Washington was an isolated outpost. Sadly, he died a year after this book was published, which might account for the terse captions and the haste-like sensations while reading this-- maybe he knew his time was limited.

He did not start covering Seattle history in this book, visually, until 1889. By that time the Emerald City was old by Puget Sound standards. I don't understand why the territorial period was ignored. And in the early statehood years he seemed to be fixated on Woodland Park to the exclusion of the rest of the city. Those who are familiar with Crowley's historical writings might not consider this work among the gems of his labor.

Seattle is more interesting than this book. Those of us who have lived there (me: 1977, 1979-1982) know better. The history of this city is a full torrent of stories, but Crowley's book just dribbles. This is not his best work. Plus, and this is a big one for us bibliographic people, there is no index. Turner really needs to employ an indexer.

In an indirect way, I find this book interesting since it is one of the very last books by this controversial figure in Washington State history. His autobiography, Rites of Passage : a Memoir of the Sixties in Seattle (1995) describes the history of Seattle from within. But somehow that spark from his personal experience was not communicated into this photo book.

Fortunately, this tome is not Walt Crowley's legacy. In terms of what he had left us for the immediate time, his HistoryLink.org site is superb. As a former academic, I'll tell you I regard Wikipedia as the junk food of information resources. Use that as a cited reference and I'd say you were on equal par with Elmer Fudd in terms of critical thinking. Wikipedia is-- and someone needs to say this out loud-- total crap. Walt was wonderful in countering this LCD of information bottom feeding by providing Washington historians with a reliable online resource.

So this book in short: Quality Crowley essays, yawning choice of photos with drab captions, needs index.