No comments about Spectacular Homes of Michigan (Spectacular Homes).

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1 comments about Mountain Biking Michigan: The Best Trails in Southern Michigan (Mountain Biking Michigan's Best Trails).

1. The most important part of this book is its completeness. Once you own it, you'll never get bored because of lack of trails to go on. It's very complete, giving you maps of the area, general difficulty, and things to watch out for when on the trails. The only thing they seem to fail to mention is the nearest hospital for some of the more extreme ones.
   
   They don't get a lot of the orth Country Trail on here, so if you want that get the book on the northern trails of Michigan.
   
   Good luck and good biking!

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5 comments about Weaving a Way Home: A Personal Journey Exploring Place and Story.

1. Leslie Van Gelder's fine collection of essays opens with a description of a prehistoric cave in France and the enigmatic finger marks on the cave walls ("finger flutings") that she and her husband are studying--the stories of which are sadly lost. A few pages later, she circles back to the experience of clearing out her dead parents' home. "Why are there greasy marks on the walls?" a baffled helper asks. The explanation requires a story. In fact, every object in the house is storied, Van Gelder writes. The house itself is a landscape filled with a cacophony of stories, many brought home by her father, a mammalogist who studied African wildlife; but like the marks on the caves, the stories will be lost when the people have passed on.
   
   An archaeological educator, Van Gelder is fascinated by the interaction between person, place, and story. "We are always somewhere," she writes, "and it is through place that we are able to root our sense of story and our sense of self." Each of the seven essays in her book explores this concept from a different point of view: questions of kinship, naming, journeying, homing. She explores these landscapes through story, discovering ways in which her own tale-telling changes the unknown wilderness into a more fully known wildland, rich with relationships, and then to home. It is through this internal evolution, she says, that we learn how to become at home in the world, that we learn to see our very selves "as evolving places."
   
   Van Gelder is at her best when she is telling intensely personal stories, like her tale of her father's instruction to her (she was four years old) to reach into the grass-filled stomach of a dead, still-warm impala to get him "a part so small it required a tiny pair of fingers to fetch it." She recalls with awe how it felt to connect so deeply with a wild creature. Or her story about "New Hamsterdamn," the imaginary place that she and her brother created, complete with its own language, Doodlish, named for their obstreperous hamster, Doodles McGurk. She and her brother have a "deeper sense of our historical home through the invocation of its language," she says, illustrating the connection between stories and home places. Also appealing is her sophisticated treatment of anthropomorphism, so often shunned by scientists as a projection of the human onto a non-human world. For Van Gelder, it is a way of knowing deeply a world in which all humans and non-human beings are intimately related in a landscape rich with significance.
   
   The conceptual terrain of Van Gelder's work is complex and sometimes daunting, but the tales she has gathered from her personal journey clearly illuminate the truth of her central argument: It is through story that we find our way in the wildness of the world, and through story that we create our homes. This book makes a substantive addition to the growing literature of place, home, and story.
   
   by Susan Wittig Albert
   for Story Circle Book Reviews
   reviewing books by, for, and about women



2. From the opening paragraph of "Weaving a Way Home, " author Leslie Van Gelder literally draws the reader into her narrative about place and story as she describes crawling through narrow passages of ancient caves to study prehistoric cave drawings. Van Gelder weaves her own story into her informed discourse of how individuals and cultures are shaped by place and story. With an engaging writing style, Van Gelder explores such topics as wilderness, home, and ruins. The author offers no prescriptions for what ails modern society, but her many insights into how humans are shaped by their sense of place and the stories those places evoke suggest ways we may more consciously participate in our own evolution. I didn't want to put this book down. I found it thought provoking. I came away with a deeper understanding and appreciation for the power of place and story in shaping who we are as individuals and as a culture. I highly recommend taking the time to read this delightful and informative book.



3. Having grown up in a military family and thus having moved about every three years for my entire childhood, I find books like this fascinating...partly as a glimpse into what experiences I might have missed out on having not grown up with a deep relationship to any given place or people and partly because I agree with the author when she says that place and our relationship to it (or lack thereof) can have a profound impact on who we are and how well we get along in life.
   
   First and foremost, Weaving a Way Home: A Personal Journey Exploring Place and Story is a personal narrative in which Gelder deftly utilizes beautifully descriptive personal reflections on place through the medium of story (storytelling). Here the author posits that the two (place and story) are, to her way of thinking, inseparable (or at least they should be). That is what really drew me in to this book...Gelder's many insights into how we (human beings) are (or can be) shaped by story and/or our sense of place and how a modern disconnection to both story and place is at the heart of a number of our current societal woes, it's a remarkable thing to accomplish in such a compact tome (coming in at 144 pages, not counting the notes and index).
   
   While Gelder doesn't offer any sort of plan or how-to guide to "fixing" what ails the world today, being that it is more of a microcosmic look at Gelder's personal little corner of the universe (how various kinds of stories drew her family closer despite her father's many absences in her childhood, how her own personal experiences with both place and story have helped to define her in childhood and beyond, etc.); much of what she writes about can be applied to the "big picture." That is to say that Gelder does expand (in places) her ideas about place and story to include what might be termed the human condition, particularly where she writes about the wild, wilderness, and wildness.
   
   Overall, I enjoyed reading Weaving a Way Home immensely and would recommend it in a heartbeat to anyone interested in the idea of exploring place and story...and how they relate to personal identity as well as where we (as individuals) fit into society and culture. I also like that this is the type of book I could read every so often and "get" something more or different out of it with each reading...books that give you little "ah ha" moments while you are reading them area always welcome in my world. I give it 4 stars, it's an interesting read and I think it would also make a great discussion group choice as there is plenty of food for thought here and loads that could be drawn out into extended discussion and debate.



4. This brief book is a deep, thoughtful look at the role of place in our lives. Leslie Van Gelder takes this simple idea and explores it from a multitude of angles. Part biography, part social science, part psychoanalysis and part revelations of the heart, this book touches on the meanings we give, and are given by our physical environment.
   
   This all may sound rather esoteric- rather like a self-help book or something you find on the metaphysics shelf at the local bookstore, but, in reality it is a careful philosophical analysis of the meaning of things such as wilderness, home, and ruins. To add heart to the philosophical discussion, which otherwise might seem rather academic, Van Gelder pours out her own experiences of loss, fear, comfort and bemusement. She also relates tales of her childhood experiences with her father in Africa and the mental illness and death of her mother.
   
   Gelder's concept of wilderness, as a place where we are completely detached from our civilized selves, uncomfortable and afraid, is fascinating. The wild, by way of contrast, is a place we have become acquainted with and enjoy. Gelder does much to dispel pastoral myths and romantic notions of "savage beauty". She generally breaks down such accepted romantic notions in favour of a more analytic, scientific approach to understanding our selves. For example, ruins are places that we can project our own ideas onto; too much knowledge or personal experience of a ruin prevents this; a recently abandoned house has little resonance, especially if we knew the owner, but a two-hundred year old house has history. She makes us aware of our tendency to project and cautions against such behaviour.
   
   While the book is neither pure philosophy nor biography, it works on a certain level. Many of the ideas are thought-provoking whether you agree with them or not. Gelder drops a lot of names - most are unknown to me - but there is an extensive bibliography at the end. It is difficult to know to whom one should recommend this book but I am sure that closet sociologists, anthropologists and the thinking woman or man will find it an intriguing read.



5. I SO wanted to love this book. I felt a great deal of kinship and share so much common ground with the author it's almost creepy. For example, I went to the University of Michigan and know the exact spot in Nichols Arboretum on the Huron River where Van Gelder sought solace, and it too gave me respite (albeit from the pain of a long-distance relationship rather than the death of a loved one). I recently lost my father, a larger-than-life person who was so vital in shaping my life that the world seems less solid without him. I understand how your life is separated into "before" and "after" in an instant. I am passionate about both the roots of place and the uprooting of travel. I grew up in a small town, where I lived for 18 years, only rarely leaving the state for vacations in Florida. I rebelled against that heritage by traveling ferociously around the world for many years before finally appreciating the gentle beauty and grace of my hometown that courses through my veins. I learned that "home" and "away" are not mutually exclusive, but blend together to create the fabric of a life. I even dated and loved a Greek Cypriot for goodness sakes! I've seen the Green line, Aphrodite's birth place, and understand first hand how bearing witness to your homeland being torn in two alters the entire course of your life in ways that could never be imagined by those of us who are fortunate enough to have escaped that experience.
   
   No matter how much I cheered for the author and hoped the book would win me over completely, I didn't love it. I only liked it, and I suspect the only reason why I liked it is because I shared so much of her experience. I do not think it was because the book was well rendered. Which is not to say that her writing does not achieve greatness at certain moments.
   
   In the end, this is a book that doesn't know what it wants to be. It is part academic - an anthropological study of place and its impact on human life, part memoir, part travelogue, and part exposition of the inherent spirituality in the wilderness. Each of these topics are valuable in their own right, but unfortunately the parts never come together in a cohesive whole, leaving at least this reader dissatisfied.
   
   Nonetheless, the beauty of Van Gelder's writing in certain passages kept me going, and the book was worth reading for that alone. A few of my favorite lines:
   
   When describing her father "...(H)is laughing eyes, warm hands, and broad mind had always been the place I had found home... At his funeral, the rabbi pinned black ribbons on us, which were then cut to symbolize the severing of the relationship. I did not need the symbolic gesture. I already knew what it felt like to have the material from which I was made suddenly ripped in half."
   
   On homeland (and Cyprus in particular): "But to be displaced, like water suddenly splashed from a glass, or suddenly driven from a place does not permit the process of transformation, grief, or separation. Instead, there are perhaps only holes, and those holes are easily filled with grief, anger, and a holy nostalgia for which there are few cures."
   
   "All stumble over language. All wish to be eloquent. All are still looking for a language for love. Reading them is to resonate with their struggle to articulate that which gives us solace, a sense of grace, beauty, shared grief, and access to the spiritual dimensions of our lives."
   
   "... (H)unter-gatherers recognize a similar internal spirit in all beings. They do not see otherness in nonhumans; they see in them a sameness in spirit and a difference in form."
   
   I would recommend this book to those who are passionate about wilderness, about travel and understanding other cultures, and who can appreciate a diamond of a sentence in a rough of a book. For the rest, I recommend tackling your burgeoning tbr pile with a selection that will likely be more fulfilling for you.

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