Reviews Lost in Coos: “Heroic Deeds and Thrilling Adventures” of Searches and Rescues on Coos River, Coos County, Oregon 1871 to 2000 by Lionel Youst Golden Falls Publishing, Allegany, Oregon, 2011. Photographs, maps, bibliography, index. 142 pages. $15.00 paper. The northern part of Coos County, Oregon, still has some 960 square miles of mostly uninhabited rainforest. The area has steep, vertical slopes reaching 2,000 feet in elevation. Dark canyons are choked with tall trees, brush, and windfalls. Sixty to a hundred inches of annual rainfall have created dense forests with fastmoving rivers and streams. Lionel Youst has lived on the periphery of this wild land most of his life and has previously written several books about Native Americans, pioneers, and gyppo loggers who carved out an existence among the Douglas fir giants of the Coast Range. In Lost in Coos, Youst weaves together the legends and evidence surrounding episodes when humans became stranded in the Millicoma and Elliot forests and fellow humans made valiant efforts to get them out. Youst was twelve years old in 1945, when an Army C-46 aircraft with a dozen veterans ran out of fuel in a horrific November storm in the deep forest miles beyond his home. With no place to land, the soldiers bailed out, just at sunset, before crashing. One soldier’s parachute tangled in the top of a 250-foot fir. For thirty-six hours, in wind and rain, the private held on until he was found by a fifty-year-old logger who used his climbing gear to make a sensational rescue.Other members of the crew did not fare as well. Youst knew members of the rescue party intimately,heard the thrilling stories first-hand, and even possessed one of the propellers from the downed plane.He was personally involved, later in life, in several other rescues described in the book. And he knows the forest well. As a result, readers of Lost in Coos get a wonderfully emotional first-hand account of what it was like to be both a confused and bewildered accident victim and a daring member of a rescue team.The author says he desired to“tell engaging stories that will hold interest”(p.xii). He succeeds. Vivid prose puts readers right at the scene. One can almost feel the ceaseless rain and the hunger pangs of victims trapped in a forest maze. Lost in Coos is an anthology divided into two sections. Six chapters are devoted to rescues that took place before roads penetrated the forests (1870s to 1950s). They involve lost hunters, trappers, loggers, and even a pilot. Six additional chapters involve incidents after roads were punched into the forest to salvage downed timber following the Columbus Day Storm of 1962. Mainly, these chapters involve car accidents on the area’s lonely logging roads. The author has relied heavily on first-person accounts of survivors and rescuers and stories reported in local newspapers. Along the way, Youst describes the typical behavior of lost persons and how the methodology of rescuers has evolved over the decades. Youst has a deep commitment to preserving local history,and his latest book keeps alive the memory of a dozen interesting local stories that otherwise would have been — lost. Steven Greif Coos County Historical Society Drylands, a Rural American Saga by Lionel Delevingne and Steve Turner University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln and London, 2011. Photographs. 144 pages. $27.95 cloth. Tributes to rural America tend to romanticize life on the land and in small towns. If writer Steve Turner and photographer Lionel Delevingne , in their book Drylands, a Rural American Saga, occasionally give in to this tempta- OHQ vol. 113, no. 1 tion, they also show a keen understanding of the history and dynamics of farming in one small region of eastern Washington — Adams County — and an honest affection for the communities that sustain rural life. The authors see Adams County as a perfect example of “the collective pressures of rural change” (p. xii). As such, it is the victim of several ironies. First, mechanization has led to reduced population and, with fewer people around to patronize small businesses, a depletion of services.In addition,in...