You are here
Back to top10/22 Les AuCoin
Les AuCoin presents
Catch and Release: An Oregon Life in Politics
Tuesday October 22nd at 6pm
This collection of life stories traces much more than a fatherless Redmond, Oregon boy’s unlikely rise to national political power followed by loss, at the age of 50, in perhaps the most controversial race in modern Senate history. It is also an allegory about letting go in defeat, with equanimity and dignity. As might befit an avid fly fisher, the author, former Oregon Congressman Les AuCoin, chooses “to catch and release” as the metaphor that binds his memories, poignant and hilarious alike, into a readable whole.
The memoir lifts the curtain on the almost never seen human side of the Congress and the 545 souls who inhabit it. These include the author, whose frank assessment of his own strengths and foibles is refreshing in an age of political spin. Reading the book is to step into the same shoes and walk the same miles as one of Oregon’s most influential congressional leaders. The experience gives the reader a telling look at such figures as Mikael Gorbachev, House Speakers Tip O’Neill and Jim Wright, Oregon Governor Tom McCall, Senators Mark Hatfield and Bob Packwood, and many other Oregonians, officeholders and citizens alike, who shaped Oregon history in the ‘70s, ‘80s, and early ‘90s.
Readers will follow the author through the halls of the Kremlin, across the tundra of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, into a U.S. Army barracks in West Germany on the date of John F. Kennedy’s murder, and into a packed Sheridan, Oregon, gymnasium during a congressional hearing on the creation of a bitterly-contested reservation for the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde. Here also is the inside story of how Oregon’s iconic Republican Governor Tom McCall came within a whisker of becoming a Democrat in the ‘70s, and the tortuous intrigue and politics of the Spotted Owl crisis in Northwest forests in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s.
A former journalist (and acting editor of the Redmond Spokesman, Les AuCoin’s writing is strong, clear and lyrical. The result is fascinating reading for casual readers, lovers of Oregon history, and, for government students, a good candidate as a supplemental reader.
Event Date:
Tuesday, October 22, 2019 - 6:00pm
Address:
422 SW 6th St.
Redmond, OR 97756