Books with author James Houston

What could be more different than the icy arctic landscape and the hot blast of a glass furnace? James Houston, explorer, artist, and writer, draws the inspiring connection in this fascinating introduction to one of the world’s most ancient – and most beautiful – arts.During the years that James Houston lived in the Arctic, he was above all impressed by the resourceful people. But he also fell in love with the rugged treeless land, the winter moonlight shining off the snow and ice, the majestic ever-changing shapes and great sighing of new-formed ice.When asked to design glass sculptures for Steuben, he, with some misgivings, left his isolated arctic home to move to the heat of a crowded New York summer. As he learned the art of glass sculpture, he found an affinity with life in the Far North. After all, glass is a liquid that hardens, much like ice. The jagged shapes reflect the arctic landscape. Glass making depends on small teams of cooperative craftspeople, much like the Inuit families as they hunt and create their art together.This very personal story is a stunning introduction to glass making, and to an extraordinary individual.

Jeanne Wakatsuki was seven years old in 1942 when her family was uprooted from their home and sent to live at Manzanar internment camp--with 10,000 other Japanese Americans. Along with searchlight towers and armed guards, Manzanar ludicrously featured cheerleaders, Boy Scouts, sock hops, baton twirling lessons and a dance band called the Jive Bombers who would play any popular song except the nation's #1 hit: "Don't Fence Me In."Farewell to Manzanar is the true story of one spirited Japanese-American family's attempt to survive the indignities of forced detention . . . and of a native-born American child who discovered what it was like to grow up behind barbed wire in the United States.From the Paperback edition.

These memoirs of James Houston’s life in the Canadian Arctic from 1948 to 1962 present a colorful and compelling adventure story of real people living through a time of great change. It is extraordinarily rich material about a fascinating, distant world.Houston, a young Canadian artist, was on a painting trip to Moose Factory at the south end of Hudson Bay in 1948. A bush pilot friend burst into his room with the news that a medical emergency meant that he could get a free flight into the heart of the eastern Arctic. When they arrived, Houston found himself surrounded by smiling Inuit – short, strong, utterly confident people who wore sealskins and spoke no English. By the time the medical plane was about to leave, Houston had decided to stay.It was a decision that changed his life. For more than a dozen years he spent his time being educated by those kindly, patient people who became his friends. He slept in their igloos, ate raw fish and seal meat, wore skin clothing, traveled by dog team, hunted walrus, and learned how to build a snowhouse. While doing so, he helped change the North.Impressed by the natural artistic skills of the people, he encouraged the development of outlets in the South for their work, and helped establish co-ops in the North for Inuit carvers and print-makers. Since that time, after trapping as a way of gaining income began to disappear, Inuit art has brought millions of dollars to its creators, and has affected art galleries around the world.In the one hundred short chapters that make up this book, James Houston tells about his fascinating and often hilarious adventures in a very different culture. He tells of raising a family in the Arctic (his sons bursting into tears on being told they were not really Inuit), and of the failure to introduce soccer to a people who refused to look on other humans as opponents. He tells about great characters – Inuit and kallunait – who populated the Arctic in these long-lost days when, as a Government go-between, he found himself grappling with Northern customs that broke Southern laws.A remarkable, modestly told story by a truly remarkable man.

Running West, James Houston’s fifth novel, is an epic tale of harrowing adventure in the North of the early 1700s, which has at its heart one of the most unusual and compelling love stories ever told.Based on historical fact and real people, the story has its beginnings in the Highlands of Scotland and the treacherous world of Queen Anne’s London, then moves across the Atlantic to the desolate west coast of Hudson Bay. There, William Stewart, a Scottish clerk banished from his homeland, meets the extraordinary Thanadelthur – a young Indian woman of the Dene Nation, who had been taken into the Hudson’s Bay Company’s York Factory after her family was massacred.When the Company’s Governor, James Knight, interested in expanding the fur trade, sees the elegant “yellow” knife that had belonged to Thana’s mother, he sends the resourceful William and the indomitable Thana to find their way back to her homeland to bring back fur and valuable metals.Thus begins a heroic trek into uncharted wilderness, on which the courage and growing love between William and Thana is tested as they, accompanied by a dwindling band of Cree, endure deprivation, violence, and near starvation.Told in a rollicking historic style resonant of the period, Running West is peopled by memorable characters, and is enriched by James Houston’s wide knowledge of the North – its landscape, its native peoples and lore. This is gripping adventure in which James Houston’s narrative skills and meticulous research blend potently. Running West is a book to treasure.