Books:
- The Mapmaker’s Eye: David Thompson on the Columbia Plateau- Sources of the River: Tracking David Thompson across Western North America
- Purple Flat Top: In Pursuit of a Place
- Singing Grass, Burning Sage: Discovering Washington’s Shrub-Steppe
- Visible Bones: Journeys through Time in the Columbia River Country
The Mapmaker’s Eye: David Thompson on the Columbia Plateau
Washington State University Press, Pullman WA 2005
I would like to point out also the very positive reaction that Jack Nisbet's extraordinary new book, The Mapmaker's Eye: David Thompson on the Columbia Plateau, is receiving in Canada. Any question about the need for an interpretative guide for David Thompson's activities has, in my mind, been made completely moot by this work. After reading Nisbet's book, I recognized within it all of the material, clearly and succinctly presented, that we need to build an interpretive case for Thompson's relevance anywhere from the Rockies west in North America.- Bob Sandford, chair, United Nations International Year of Fresh Water
The Mapmaker’s Eye’s interplay of talents shared by both Thompson and Nisbet makes this a special book. It is as though Thompson’s interests, abilities, and life have mentored Nisbet’s own development as a writer, naturalist, and educator. The abilities enable to book to go beyond illuminating the complex chronology of Thompson’s travels west of the mountains. Nisbet wants us to enter the world of Thompson through the explorer’s own eyes by providing reasoned understandings of the emotional texture of his life. Written as a companion piece to the Northwest Museum of Arts & Cultures exhibit of [the same name], the combination here represents a stunning achievement for author and museum alike.
- William Layman, Columbia Magazine
Awards:
American Library Association, Best of the Best University Publications of 2005
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Sources of the River: Tracking David Thompson across Western North America
Sasquatch Books, Seattle, 1994
[Sources of the River] is flat-out, one of the best-written and most fascinating books I’ve read about our particular corner of the continent. Nisbet’s style is smooth and graceful, and he has a gift for clarity. His occasional first-person accounts...serve a valuable purpose. They remind us that this book is not about a vanished land; it’s about a land that still lives and evolves.- The Spokesman Review
Nisbet’s writing style is lively and immediate, decidedly un-stodgy, displaying humor and sensitivity to nature that Thompson showed in his journals. Sources of the River is a ‘must read’ for anyone interested in Northwest history. this superbly researched, superbly written book resonates in the memory for a long time.
- The Third Age
Awards:
Murray Morgan Prize 1995
Idaho Library Book of the Year 1995
Washington Governor’s Award 1995
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Purple Flat Top: In Pursuit of a Place
Sasquatch Books, Seattle 1996 (out of print; copies available through JN)
In Jack Nisbet, an unsung corner of the West has found its troubadour. His north-of-Spokane tales of disgusted dairymen and hopeful miners, of white ravens and dancing grouse, ring with the spirit of the legend of the Sky People--”the time when men and animals lived together as equals.”- Ivan Doig
Purple Flat Top is everything a portrait of a place should be: intimately local yet completely universal, rich in the texture of people and other species, and spit-true...I doubt if a dozen living writers have portrayed slices of the Northwest with the grace, verve, and loving presence of Purple Flat Top.
- Robert Michael Pyle
[Purple Flat Top] is the most pleasurable reading I’ve come across in a long, long time. The humor is wonderful, but so accumulative and subtle that one almost constantly feels the urge to burst out laughing without quite knowing why.”
- Patrick F. McManus
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Singing Grass, Burning Sage: Discovering Washington’s Shrub-Steppe
A Nature Conservancy of Washington Book, Graphic Arts Center Publishing, Portland, OR 1999
[Singing Grass, Burning Sage] seeks to dispel the myth that without irrigation, The Columbia Basin is a barren land. Through Nisbet’s words, the words of tribal people and early visitors, and brilliant color photographs, readers discover a world filled with all kinds of birds, insects, plants and reptiles...teeming with life and natural value.- Pacific Northwest Inlander
This book is a remedy. It made me want to go out and walk along a sageland creek, and it made me want to do so as softly as possible.
- Jim Kerschner, Spokesman Review
Awards:
Silver medal in Environmental category of ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year 2000 Awards
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Visible Bones: Journeys through Time in the Columbia River Country
Sasquatch Books, Seattle, 2003
Nisbet’s “Visible Bones” fits perfectly into the category of place-based writing. In 12 exquisite chapters, he ranges across time and tierroty to introduce us to the Columbia River country, the more than 210,000 square miles of sagebrush, basaslt, and high mountains that drain tinto the West’s grandest river. It is clear that Nisbet not only kows this place but is passionate about its stories.What makes Nisbet’s story most appealing is how he weaves journal entries, century-old newspaper articles, personal reminiscences and biology, both modern and historical, to tease out the underlying tales of the land. By doing so he makes the modern terrain richer and more intriguing. His stories also make us realize what recent inhabitants have missed.
- David Williams, Seattle Times
The book resonates with history and place, and also with Nisbet’s crisp voice...lavish in detail but pleasantly clear in the telling.
- Portland Oregonian
[Nisbet’s] writing will pull you out of your chair and make you eager for a walk in the wild. Anyone who wants a true sense of place in the Inland Northwest needs to read this book.
- Spokesman-Review
Together, the stories these bones tell lay out a wholly original, hybrid history that connects nature with human endeavor, and geography with the passage of time.
- Washington Wildlands magazine
Jack Nisbet’s Visible Bones accomplishes the rare combination of delighting while it instructs. Combining a scientific eye for the world with a storyteller’s sensibility, Nisbet walks us (literally) through a landscape that he knows and loves. Further, the stories that he tells also immerse us in the history of the Columbia River and its surroundings. Perhaps there is no better way to praise this book than to say that it not only delights and instructs, Visible Bones forces a reader to look at his or her surroundings with a different eye – an eye more educated, curious, and engaged.
- Todd Marshall, Gonzaga University
Awards:
One of The Seattle Time’s Best Nonfiction books of 2003
Washington State Library Book of the Year award, 2004
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