Louise Wagenknecht Volgorde van de boeken

In the 1970s, Louise Wagenknecht returned to the Klamath River country of her childhood to take a job with the U.S. Forest Service, only to discover that navigating the shoals of professional and personal relationships as an adult was much more challenging than she ever dreamed. Over the next fifteen years, as she acquired knowledge and skills and successfully performed an outdoor job long thought to be a man's work, she found friends and allies, experienced a life-changing heartbreak, and over time came to realize that what the agency and its professional foresters thought they knew about the workings of the forest ecosystem was not only mistaken, but doomed to catastrophic failure in a new and warmer century.

Growing up in one of the West's last company lumber towns, a small community called Hilt on the California-Oregon border, Louise Wagenknecht witnessed the dying years of a unique way of life. The lumber boom of the 1950s and 1960s would devastate the ancient old-growth forests of the Klamath Mountains as well as the people of Hilt, whose lives were inextricably tied to the company lumber mill. White Poplar, Black Locust is the story of that transformation, but it is also something more--a noteworthy addition to the literature of place, and a sensitive and richly textured family memoir. As Wagenknecht unravels the threads that still bind her to both Hilt's history and her own, unforgettable characters emerge, and what should have been the happy ending to this story, the marriage of her divorced mother to a forester working for the Fruit Growers Supply Company, becomes instead the end of childhood innocence, foretelling the demise of the mill and the end of Hilt itself. Originally published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2003, this first book in Louise Wagenknecht's trilogy about life in the Klamath Mountains is now available through Oregon State University Press, together with Light on the Devils (2011) and Shadows on the Klamath (2021).