2 comments about Strangers and Sojourners: A History of Michigan's Keweenaw Peninsula (Great Lakes Books).

1. I purchased this book after a vacation to the beautiful Keweenaw Peninsula where I toured one of the copper mines mentioned in the book.

   To enjoy this book it helps if one has a curiosity about the region's history it's industry and the melting pot of people that made up it's workforce.

   Although a dry history at times, I believe this book to be one of if not the best on the topic. An important contribution to Michigan History. It is my hope that upon reading it people will recognize this book as the labor of love it truly is.




2. I agree with another Amazon reviewer that the reading can be a tad 'dry' at times, quite uncustomary for the author.
   
   However, it still has that "Thurner style" fast, pleasing pace that precludes excess verbiage and allows for the covering of a rather-broad topic in a single, readable volume. Furthermore, the author is a native to the area, which doesn't hurt his case.
   
   For 'complete' coverage of the Copper Country, look no further than Mr. Thurner's three such books.

No comments about Lake Michigan: A Photographic Portfolio.

1 comments about Explore Michigan--Mackinac (Insider's Guide to Michigan).

1. Lots of information about what to see and different attractions. Includes short descriptions of different places to go and things to see. I'll be visiting Mackinac in September, so we'll see how much it helps then....

No comments about Explore Michigan--Traverse City (Insider's Guide to Michigan).

No comments about Snorkeling Guide to Michigan Inland Lakes.

2 comments about Historic Photos of Detroit (Historic Photos.).

1. I was born in Detroit in the 1950s before my family moved to Wayne, Michigan in 1958. We moved back for a year in 1962 and I attended third grade at Bow Elementary School. It was a thriving city with streets full of cared for homes with neat lawns. After decades of decline, it appears that Detroit is making a comeback and I find that encouraging. Nevertheless, Detroit has hundreds of years of rich history. This book covers a bit more than a century of that history through nearly two hundred beautifully presented photographs.
   
   One of the traps we fall into regarding photographs is that we tend to gravitate towards a small set of vivid photographs that become the standard for presenting the images of this event or that place or these people. This book is fresh and refreshing because it uses terrific images that are much less well known images of Detroit and its people. The author, Mary J. Wallace has made her selections from the Walter P. Reuther Library at Wayne State University and from the Burton Collection of the Detroit Public Library. She has worked as an audiovisual archivist at the Walter P. Reuther Library for several years and her familiarity with the material shows in the selections she has made.
   
   Wallace has divided the photos into four chronological groups. The first runs from 1860 to 1899 (from the Civil War until the arrival of the automobile), from 1900 to 1919 (the birth of the auto industry through the end of World War I), from 1920 to 1941 (the early boom of the auto industry through the Depression), and from 1942 - 1969 (from World War II through the 1967 riots and the aftermath).
   
   What I most appreciate is the balance she shows in showing us images of the development in architecture with the photos of real people at work, in their fashions, and some historical events. Even when she picks the historical events, she selects an image that gives us a different perspective on the event. We all know the images of the fight of the Battle of the Overpass at the Rouge Plant. Not many of us have seen the image she shows us here of the peaceful demonstration before the struggle began.
   
   The author has supplied about a page of text at the beginning of each section as well as captions for each picture, but wisely lets the images do most of the speaking. The credits for the photos are given in a list at the back. These are images that are worth lingering over. They are full of captivating details that will show themselves as you spend time looking into the pictures for things beyond the obvious main object of the photograph.
   
   If you have any interest in Detroit and its history, this is a fabulous book to own and refer to often. It is printed on great paper and bound handsomely.



2. I've always thought that it is very important to know the history of one's local area and have always loved to read books about regional history. One of the very best one's I've come across in sometime is "Historic Photos of Detroit" from Turner Publishing Co. Detroit was one of the most important early colonies due to its strategic location along Lake Erie and Lake St. Clair and was founded as a fort by French explorer Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac in 1701.
   
   The book covers four periods of Detroit history, 1860 - 1899, 1900 - 1919, 1920 - 1941, and 1942 - 1969. The photos date as far back as the 1860's, less than thirty years after Michigan became the 26th state. What first surprised me is just how busy and bustling Detroit was nearly 150 years ago. We tend to think of the 1860's in terms of the dusty old west but Detroit already had numerous multi-story buildings built including the massive Old Russell House Hotel on Woodward Ave. It's fascinating to just sit back and flip pages to "building watch" all of the types of businesses that were in operation back in the mid to late 1800's...Grocers, dry goods, shoes & boots, carpets, drug stores, furniture...in other words, it really wasn't much different than today. People are out and about on the town, working, shopping, or just enjoying a walk.
   
   These photos also serve as an important archive since most of these buildings are long gone today. For example there is the Old Federal Building, looking like a gothic French cathedral that was torn down in 1932. It's educational as well...even living my entire life in the Detroit area I never knew that Detroit once used street cars. Besides the architecture of the era one should also pay attention to the fashion of the day. Women stroll along the streets in their finest clothes: tailored dresses and their Sunday best hats, highlighting an era that was certainly more refined and cultured.
   
   Even in 1910 the Detroit Auto Show was one of the city's most important events. A beautiful photo shows off the brand new models, accented by bright lights, at the old Wayne Gardens. The photos range from the humorous of three boys holding on to the side of a car for dear life on a flooded West Grand Blvd. in 1925, to the tragic destruction of the riots in 1967. One wonderful photo that will surely warm the hearts of all Detroiters is Santa Claus waving to a crowd of thousands at the end of Detroit's annual Thanksgiving Day parade. For many residents of SE Michigan, a trip downtown to watch the parade and look at the Christmas displays in the old J.L. Hudson's department store windows was an annual rite of winter.
   
   It's a beautiful book from cover-to-cover highlighted by brilliant photography. I would have loved to had seen a photo or two of the old Olympia stadium but no Detroiter will be disappointed with this book. Hats off to author Mary J. Wallace for a wonderful job of research.
   
   Reviewed by Tim Janson

3 comments about Dinosaurs Destroy Detroit (Michigan Chillers).

1. Dinosaurs Destroy Detroit

   Dinosaurs Destroy Detroit is a great book! It's the story of dinosaurs destroying Detroit. Mike and Summer travel through the window through time and leave it open. I learned that the T-Rex is hatched from an egg. The main characters are Summer and Mike. I like the part where Summer and Mike go through the window through time. I like it when the dinosaurs are destroying Detroit!...




2. Dinosaurs Destroy Detroit Review

   Dinosaurs Destroy Detroit is an addictive book. I just could not stop reading it. I liked how sometimes the book is funny and sometimes it is serious. I especially liked the part where it says, "My face was planted firmly in the grass." It made me chuckle and just stuck in my head. This is a "Michigan Chillers" book; number eight to be exact. I have only read one other book of its kind. I liked this book a lot better and I would recommend it to anybody who can read.




3. 
   You will like the book "Dinosaurs Destroy Detroit" and here is why I think you will. This book is a great book as you can see I gave it four stars, which is a good rate. This book is one of his ten Michigan Chillers and it is the fourth best if you ask me. It is action filled with the dinosaurs taking over the Detroit areas. It is a great book for children and also adults but they're kind of short. It is a fun book with the key character Nick and his friend's trying to get ready for the new place they found in the portal. This book and basically all of his books are adventures. He is a great writer because of his imagination. One adventure is how Nick finds the secret portal in the park. I hope you get a chance to read this great book.

3 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.

5 comments about Legends Of Light: A Michigan Lighthouse Portfolio.

1. Legends Of Light: A Michigan Lighthouse Portfolio is a stunning, full-color photographic showcase of Michigan's lighthouses, inside and out. A brief introduction embellishes the compilation of full-page and some two-page spread photographs. From simple, cozy lighthouse interiors to panoramic scenes of the ocean shore at sunset, Legends Of Light is a very special tribute which is hallmarked by visual splendor and is a superb giftbook selection -- especially for lighthouse aficionados.



2. This is a gorgeous book, and the text nicely balances the photographs, tying in the meaning of the photographs with the stories of the lighthouse, and with Ed Wargin's endeavors to reach the lighthouses just to photograph them. Truly worth having.



3. Aficionados of lighthouses take note! Ed Wargin has photographed the lighthouses of Michigan and his work is impressive. His talent is evident as he is able to breathe life into his subject matter.
   
   Legends of Light contains lighthouses photographed from the inside and outside and various prospective of the surrounding area, including the environment. Wargin gives us a bonus because he lists all of the Michigan lighthouses and provides a map of their location in the back of the book. That added immensely to my enjoyment.
   
   Gull Rock on Lake Superior was established in 1867. The view from above of the lighthouse perched on its own tiny island is dramatic. You're alternately drawn to its beauty and repelled by the confinement.
   
   The internal photograph of Lake Michigan's St. Helena Island lighthouse is warm, cozy and ever so inviting. I wanted to snuggle up with a book by the stove and read while drinking a cup of hot tea.
   
   The stark reality of winter in a northland lighthouse is evident in Wargin's photograph of Cheboygan Crib Light on Lake Huron. As I gazed on the winter white, I found myself becoming chilled. It is extraordinary for a photographer to ellicit such strong feelings and emotions from a viewer.
   
   The interior of Whitefish Point on Lake Superior is a room that could be found in any home, yet it is in a lighthouse.
   
   The burial site near Rock Harbor is fascinating and evokes all sorts of questions like who, when, how?
   
   South Manitou Island lighthouse on Lake Michigan has my heart. Actually, I found myself studying the picture and returning to it repeatedly. I'd love to live there.
   
   Wargin has captured the flavor and the majesty of lighthouses with his wonderful images. My heart now belongs to the lighthouses and the Great Lakes region. I want to visit so many of them it looks like a road trip is in our future.
   
   Armchair Interviews says: Legends of Light is a book to savor and to live in the dream of the beauty of our northern Great Lakes Region. This is a wonderful gift book for someone who loves lighthouses. And maybe that's you.



4. I've known Ed for a few years and have come to respect and enjoy his images. He finds images that we as non-photographers can only dream about. Nice Work Ed and congrats on yet another super book!
   
   Dan McGuire, Roichester, NY



5. My dad, like many others, does the lighthouse thing with an emphasis on Michigan lighthouses. I wouldn't even think of getting him another book of lighthouse photos but I saw this in my doctor's waiting room and instantly knew I had to get it for him. The pictures are beautiful and the text interesting. Highly recommended.

1 comments about Michigan Trees & Wildflowers: An Introduction to Familiar Species (Pocket Naturalist - Waterford Press).

1. very limited in scope. The drawings are good enough for identification but they are common plants rather than some of the more unusual that are around.