No comments about Rand Mcnally Detroit Metro Street Guide (Rand Mcnally Detroit Metro, Michigan Street Guide).

No comments about Lake Michigan: A Photographic Portfolio.

3 comments about Fresh Water: Women Writing on the Great Lakes.

1. Edited by award-winning environmentalist Alison Swan, Fresh Water: Women Writing on the Great Lakes is an anthology of brief yet contemplative reflections upon the Great Lakes, all written by women. The essays are contemplative rather than scholarly in nature, dwelling upon emotion, history, the beauty of the Lakes and the need to preserve them. A deeply moving compilation filled with passion and respect for the spiritual bounty of nature.



2. Having grown up on Lake Ontario, living now in high desert country, I was longing for the big vista of "my lake". Fresh Water is full of well written strong experiences and images that vividly recalled my years on the lake. I could almost smell and feel that big body of fresh water, remember the intensity of storms and forgotten mystery, as well as the joy of quiet early morning swims. Gifts from Alison Swan and all the contributors!



3. I love the Great Lakes. My great-great-grandparents were pioneers in Manistee. I live close to the lake in Chicago. Our family is tied to water from the 1600s of the West coast of France. Fresh Water was on my wish list for a long time. I asked for it for Christmas. Now I can't give it away. The Notes on the Contributors has too many references to other literature the authors have written and ecological societies around the Great Lakes. The stories vary from personal to purposeful.

No comments about Great Lakes, Great National Forests: A Recreational Guide to the National Forests of Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania and New York.

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

No comments about Shipwrecks Along Superior's North Shore: A Diving Guide.

1 comments about Mountain Biking Michigan.

1. This is the only mountain biking guidebook that I could find that covers the entire state of Michigan. An excellent resource.

1 comments about Foghorn Outdoors Great Lakes Camping : The Complete Guide to More Than 750 Campgrounds in Minnesota Wisconsin, and Michigan (Foghorn Outdoors Series).

1. I eagerly opened this book after buying it, only to be very disappointed. Looking at the maps, the index, and the references to the national park system, I could find no mention at all of the Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore. That seems very odd, because Pictured Rocks has several campgrounds, and one might think a "complete" guide would at least cover what the NPS has to offer. Other errors and omissions include maps that incorrectly identify the locations of Twin Lakes State Park and FJ McLain State Park (the former is shown southwest of Mass City when it is actually 15 miles northeast, while the latter is shown at Copper Harbor when it is actually 50 miles to the southwest), as well as the absence of the Ottawa National Forest campgrounds directly accessible from US 45 north of Watersmeet. These are just a few problems in one limited geographical area of Upper Michigan with which I happen to have a little bit of familiarity. If I have to rely on my own travels and experiences to fill in the gaps and inaccuracies in this supposedly "complete" guide, how useful will it be with regard to those areas of which I have no prior knowledge?

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.