Where Light takes its Color From the Sea - Hardcover

Born in San Francisco, James D. Houston has lived for many years in Santa Cruz. From this vantage point he has explored, both in fiction and nonfiction, the western U.S. and the Asia Pacific region. He has written eight novels, the most recent including Bird of Another Heaven and Snow Mountain Passage, the latter named one of the year s best books by the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post. With his wife, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, he co-authored Farewell to Manzanar, a novel about the Japanese American internment. Among his numerous honors are a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio residency program, two American Book Awards, and the Humanitas Prize.

Born in San Francisco in 1933, James D. Houston grew up in the Bay Area and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford. After he married Jeanne Wakatsuki, the couple bought a Victorian fixer-upper in Santa Cruz in 1962. It's strange, Houston writes in his opening essay, "to be rooted in the land of the rootless." Yet both he and his work - nine books of fiction and more than a dozen of nonfiction written, edited or collaborated on - found inspiration in California. "Where Light Takes its Color From the Sea," a welcome retrospective sampler from Houston's prolific career, comprises pieces published during the past 40 years. "The View From Santa Cruz" (1964) introduces his love of place, "this curve of coast" where the sea is ever present and the town's "turrets and cupolas and bungalows and fleet of fishing boats" have been "a refuge from change itself." In "Loma Prieta, Part One... he admits the addition of a University of California campus, small-craft harbor, bigger highways, more tourists and development remade Santa Cruz from a slumbering resort town to "New Age headquarters." Just as quickly, however, the Bay Area's fabled earthquakes unmade almost everything. ... Both parts of Houston's "Loma Prieta" essay follow October 1989's "ruinous disaster" that left locals wondering if the town (never mind its unique spirit) would survive. Survive, they did, Houston shows, despite the fact that California's virtues "seem fated to bring about the state's undoing." The climate he so loves, the mountains, the sea, the "natural blessings" are all pressured by a seemingly endless flood of new pioneers seeking the very amenities that always attracted immigrants. In "Coast Range Sutra" (1995), the couple visits Tassajara canyon. Houston's prose on a Zen center evokes the place's attention to contemplation and respite from busy lives. ...Houston's half-dozen pieces about his admiration for his chosen world are followed by a section called "Kinship." In these selections, he reminisces about family history and a black-sheep uncle. "Houston and his wife team up in a marvelous piece called "Another Kind of Western" (1976), which describes making the film of the book they co-wrote, "Farewell to Manzanar." In 1942, Wakatsuki was 7 when her family was relocated to a Japanese internment camp. The film set brought everything back to her: the dust, the heat, the exile. Everything was so attentively re-created, she found herself "close to tears most of the time." Houston's California notebook wraps up with four short stories. Among them, "A Family Resemblance" (1989), which tells of a young Californian selling a car to a Chinese medical student. (Houston applies here an approach he credits to Grace Paley, who advised him that "to get the story told you have to tell two stories.") And "Gasoline" (1980), which recounts the struggle of a "gasoline junkie" to fill his car's tank during the Arab oil embargo, couldn't be more timely. Happily, all the pieces in this collection are a delight, whether you're reading them the first time or coming back for seconds. --San Francisco Chronicle E5 4/22/08 Irene Warner