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Voyage of a Summer Sun: Canoeing the Columbia River
by Robin Cody
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Sasquatch Books (2002-01-11)
ISBN: 1570610835
EAN: 9781570610837
Dewey Decimal #: 917.970443
Paperback: 320 pages
SKU: 91708000199
Condition: Very Good
Comments: 1570610835 New, never read, may have minor wear on cover.
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
At the center of Robin Cody's book is the great river -rich with history, myth, riverfolk, salmon and the effects of progress. Winner of the Oregon Book Award and a PNBA Book award, Voyage of a Summer Sun is the account of a fascinating, personal odyssey: a modern-day expedition down the length of the Columbia River.
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Amazon.com Review
The beautiful Columbia River can be wild and unpredictable, which means it's perfect for an epic North American canoe adventure. From Columbia Lake (its source in the Canadian Rockies) all 1,200 miles to the Pacific Ocean, Robin Cody finally takes the 82-day trip that started with an idle but persistent thought: "a guy could probably canoe it." And Cody has all that's required (love of river, canoeing know-how, writing ease, and self-effacing humor) to take the trip and tell the tale.
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Customer Reviews
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Classic adventuring, voyaging, sense of place, traveler
Rating  (5)
Date: 2003-05-17
4 out of 4 customers found this reveiw helpful
Of the hundreds of books I have on the Pacific Northwest, this is easily one of my favorites. Aside from Robin Cody simply being an excellent writer, enjoyable to read, easy to follow, this book specifically invokes a true sense of place of the Columbia. It has a flavor of the classic Farthest Frontier, adventure, outdoors, wide open Northwest in the spirit of David Thompson, Theodore Winthrop, James Swan and the like (not to mention Lewis & Clark). Robin Cody evokes a sense of place right up there with the best like Stewart Holbrook, Murray Morgan, Ivan Doig, etc. The books touches on places here and there along the Columbia giving the reader a good feel for not only the Columbia of today, but in the past, before the Damns! Man thinks he's "tamed" the Columbia, but the majesty & power is still there and Cody conveys some of it. The main problem with the book is that it is much too short, I wanted more - I'd like to see the full journal of his travels. You couch potatoes (ok me too) dont really understand what it really means to spend nearly 3 months and 1200 miles in a itsy bitsy canoe on one of the world's biggest river. Clearly the mighty Columbia spoke during his journey, Cody listened well, and did a good job telling us about what the River said. A must read, along with the similar flavored The Good Rain by Timothy Egan.
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Good... but aging.
Rating  (4)
Date: 2002-02-03
3 out of 4 customers found this reveiw helpful
It's obvious from Voyage of a Summer Sun that Robin Cody loves the wilderness and the river, but he does an excellent job of presenting its importance without sliding very far into environmentalism per se, by which I mean he also shows the people and projects that have tampered with the Columbia, sometimes drastically, and he shows them with a minimum of slant.Cody's prose is easy to read, and his focus shifts pleasantly between the people he meets, the river itself, the issues surrounding it, and the workings of the canoe trip. The real problem I see is that Cody took his trip in 1990. Some of his information, obviously, is still solid, but in other areas, Voyage is getting dated. There's been a whole new round of power generation arguments, salmon policy changes, and weather shifts since then. The Hanford tank farms, in particular, have completed a major cleanup project, and a lot of the menacing toxic-waste threats he announces have been solved, softened, or shown to be less dangerous than thought. So it's a good book, but you have to read it with its age in mind.
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Wonderful and non-biased observations
Rating (5)
Date: 2000-08-26
2 out of 2 customers found this reveiw helpful
I thoroughly enjoyed this read. Cody's observations on the impact of technical advancement on an ecosystem were candid and not overly political or strident. This would be an excellent book for students of atmospheric and earth sciences. Robin Cody is a gifted story teller and narrator.
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Great book for anyone interested in the Columbia River.
Rating (5)
Date: 1997-02-14
1 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
Voyage of a Summer Sun is more than a book for canoeing the Columbia River. It is for everyone who wants to know and understand each stretch of the Columbia River better. History, landmarks, points of interest, characteristics, and nature of the river are thoughtfully and colorfully experienced from the author's excellent documentation of his 82 day canoe trip down the mighty Columbia
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Voyage through the issues surrounding the Columbia
Rating (4)
Date: 1997-01-04
2 out of 2 customers found this reveiw helpful
From Canadian wilderness to Longview smelters, the book introduces all the issues that embroil the Columbia: from hydropower to nuclear waste to logging to salmon to treaties.
Unable to dwell too long on any particular issue, Cody doesn't try to draw specific conclusions from his journey. His focus on the geologic timescale of the river leaves the impression that time will smooth the ripples of human folly. The down-to-earth stories of the people he meets argues that although the collective results might have been foolish, the participants were/are hard-working, well-meaning, humans.
Beyond politics then, Voyage does a wonderful job of stirring the restless energy to explore and experience that wells up from the constraints of two weeks of vacation a year
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