Post # 10

Friday, December 15, 2017
Quote of the Day: "Why would anyone build the most spectacular bridge in the world at the top of Michigan instead of at Detroit where everyone could see it?" From an irate taxpayer's letter to the governor in 1980.


Reviews

The Veteran by Frank P. Slaughter. Mission Point Press, 2016, $18.95

I simply can't understand why this fine historical novel hasn't gotten the recognition it so richly deserves. It should have earned a spot on the annual list of Michigan Notable Books, and belongs on the shelves of every mid-sized to large public library in the state. But a check of  MEL, or the Michigan eLibrary, which contains digital catalogs of 440 Michigan libraries, shows the novel is owned by a grand total of three of those 440. The author, the book, and Michigan's reading public deserve better. But to the book. 

Will Caster from Coldwater is a member of the 10th Michigan Artillery. The unit is in the thick of the fighting at the Battle of Chickamauga and the description of the small, violent corner of the battlefield held by the Caster's battery is masterfully drawn. Slaughter makes the chaos, horrors, and capriciousness of life or death within the maelstrom of battle palpable. When Caster's battery is overrun, he's badly wounded, and only survives because of an act of savagery he never thought was within him. His wound gets him discharged from the army, and Caster returns home haunted by nightmares and bouts of uncontrolled anger. A 100 years later his condition would be known as PTSD. Will only knows something is broken within him and he self medicates with alcohol.

After a couple of restless years on the family farm, Will travels to Saginaw determined to turn around his life and become a timber cruiser, or land looker for a lumber company. The owner  of one Saginaw lumber company is also a Civil War veteran and likes Will, but tells him he needs to learn all about lumbering before he can be a land looker. Will is hired with the understanding he will work in a lumber camp for a year absorbing all he can about how a camp is run and the particulars of the lumber industry in Michigan. Then they will talk about learning the art of land looking.

Slaughter paints an authentic and fascinating portrait of life in an 1860s Michigan lumber camp. Readers learn along with the sharp-eyed Caster how the men live and work in the north woods, as well as the odd assortment of men drawn to the camps. The author's description of a camp bunkhouse is so vivid readers will be holding their noses. Imagine a long, narrow, one-room building with floor to ceiling bunks lining both long walls. There's one door and a single window because the lumberjacks are hardly ever in the bunkhouse during daylight hours. So the room lacks ventilation and is dark and gloomy. A red hot wood stove in the center of the room gives off stifling heat with wet and smelly wool garments hung from every rafter and most bunk ends to dry. Pipe smoke forms a constant haze within the room and the tobacco's pungent odor is mixed with the smell of the wet clothes, and the unwashed bodies of 60 men. 

Will Caster thrives on the work, and spends the next summer learning the craft of a long looker. The long ongoing struggle to over come his PTSD is realistically drawn and hope of a normal life and family finally seem like a possibility. The book is full of great characters who come alive on the page whether it's a child, a dog, or any number of colorful lumberjacks.

This is one of the best historical novels I've read this year. It is based on the author's family history and is the first in a projected trilogy. Buy the book or demand your library buy it. 



Prohibition in the Upper Peninsula: Booze and Bootleggers on the Border by Russell M. Magnaghi. American Palate/History Press, 2017, $21.99

This brief but profusely illustrated history of prohibition north of the Straits of Mackinac makes for intoxicating reading. After a short review of the temperance movement, and the political and social forces that resulted in the Volstead Act, the book plunges into the impact of prohibition on law enforcement and Michigan society in Yooper Land.

Even though alcoholic beverages may have been a more popular thirst quencher than water in the U.P., going dry won the popular vote. But the public quickly decided they didn't like the law.  Magnaghi reports that in many U.P. counties the public voted sheriffs out of office who enforced the law, many local courts summarily dismissed prohibition violations, and community leaders withheld money for enforcement of the law. Police in some city's strictly followed the letter of the law and in other towns speakeasies operated openly in sight of the police station, and in Menominee in the same building. On the other hand, all the local breweries in the U.P had to close their doors, or tried unsuccessfully to stay afloat by making soda pop. The local breweries never recovered from prohibition and it wasn't until craft beer  began to flourish in the 1990s that breweries returned to the Upper Peninsula.  

The author writes that there were three main avenues through which Canadian booze arrived in the U.P. In the west, the Wisconsin town of Hurley, known as the wettest town in the country, lay just across the border from Ironwood. The Dairy State city poured so much booze into its sister city across the border a bottle of hooch was as common in an Ironwood home as salt and pepper. In the east, enough whiskey crossed from the Canadian Sault to Michigan's Sault Ste. Marie the booze could have raised an up bound boat in one of the smaller locks. And from the locks south on the St. Mary's River, to where it empties into Lake Huron it was impossible to shut down smugglers. Magnaghi stresses that the U.P. was both a transfer point from which liquor was shipped to Milwaukee, Chicago, and other Midwestern cities and a distribution center for the high class resorts in the U.P., Wisconsin's Door Peninsula, and northern Michigan resort towns like Harbor Springs.

Both The Purple Gang from Detroit and Al Capone's mob used Mackinac Island as a warehouse and transfer point. The famous Grand Hotel served liquor and reserved a large room for gambling throughout prohibition. To make sure high society was well aware of the hotel's always open bar, management arranged for the sheriff to stage raids to remind the wealthy they could always wet their whistles with the finest booze at the Grand. By 1927, the St. Ignace newspaper claimed illegal liquor shipments through the U.P. was,"out of control."

Throughout Michigan's northern peninsula making moonshine and home brewing became more than just commonplace.  Escanaba and Ishpeming reported their sewer mains had to be cleaned weekly because they were constantly clogged with mash from stills and home brewing. When a man, looking like a gangster, drove up to a group of boys in the town of Raymbaulton in the Keweenaw Peninsula, and asked the boys, "Who makes booze around here?" he got an unexpected answer.  A boy stepped forward, point to a home on the corner and said it was the only house that didn't make moonshine. 

By the mid 1920s, prohibition was simply ignored by most local police and the justice system in many counties and cities in the U.P. The commander of the Michigan State Police said it would take the entire United States standing army to keep Michigan dry.

Russell M. Magnaghi packs this slim volume with entertaining and eye-opening details of the years when the U.P. went dry. Pour yourself a craft beer, put your feet up, and take a sip of this book. It goes down easy. Cheers! 




  










0
Thursday, November 30, 2017


Post # 9

Quote for the Day: The Renaissance Center "Mayor Young's first brainchild and a paean to the parsimony of late-twentieth-century architecture, standing like a display of disposable plastic drinking cups."  Loren Estleman. King of the Corner, 1992.



Reviews


The Man in the Crocked Hat
by Harry Dolan

When this Ann Arbor author's first book, "Bad Things Happen," was published he was hailed as one of the new generation's masters of the mystery form. With each succeeding book it seems certain that Harry Dolan is destined to be included among the ranks of  Michael Connelly, Dennis LaHane, John Grissom, Robert Crais, and et al. This newest addictive page turner will only solidify his position.

The author introduces a new hero in a hopefully new series featuring ex Detroit Police Detective Jack Pellum. The ex cop's life was shattered 18 months prior to the opening of the book by the murder of his wife in a Huron-Clinton Metro Park.  It seemed to be a random killing with no motive and less clues. After more than a year its become a cold case in the police department but not for Jack. He quits the police and spends his days looking for his wife's killer and pesters his old police partner to search this or that imaginary lead. 

Pellum's one slim clue is that he saw a man in a crooked hat lingering around their house a day or two before his wife's murder. In eighteen months of asking questions he's unearthed bubkus. His old partner is tried of Jack's fixation and reluctantly agrees to give him one last line of inquiry. A writer in Detroit committed suicide and his suicide note appeared to be the first page of the dead man's only published book. It lay open to page one in the room in which he hung himself and the first sentence of the book begins, "The man in the crooked hat..."


Pellum is off and running, tracking down everything he can find about the writer's life and if there is a posssible connection to the man in the crooked hat. Pellum's new burst of inquiries  sets off a chain of chaos much like a ball launched in a pinball machine and and then trying to keep track of every bumper it hits and why. Pellum blindly keeps digging away until seemingly insignificant clues slowly uncover the secrets in a small town that have been buried for twenty years. The plot has stunning unexpected turns and twists and even includes informal walking tours of some Detroit neighborhoods. The Jack Pellum character is fascinating as he struggles with his compulsion to find the killer of his wife and at the same time grows to understand at some point he can still grieve but he must also move forward in life.

Harry Dolan is a very good mystery novelist writing at the top of his form. Effortless prose jumps off the page and goes down like rum-spiked eggnog on New Year's Eve. Its smooth, full bodied, and comes with a punch.



Dolan, Harry. The Man in the Crooked Hat, G,P. Putnam's, 2017, 353p. $27




Lake Effect: A Deckhand's Journey on the Great Lakes
by Richard Hill

If you live in Michigan chances are you've caught sight of the huge ore carriers plying the Great Lakes, probably more than once, and tried to imagine what life is like as a sailor on one of the great boats. Well give your imagination a rest and read Richard Hill's memoir of his 10-year career as a Great Lake sailor in the 1970s. It is a vivid and fascinating account of life and work on North America's great fresh water seas.

The author takes much of the romance out of the job but doesn't make it any less interesting. When not not docking or departing port a deckhand spends days on end chipping and painting. When a deckhand doesn't have a paint brush in hand he's usually performing some other on board maintenance. The boat becomes the sailor's home, workplace, and entertainment center and on average makes port every four or five days.  After a few weeks the crew longs for almost any kind of break from the the everyday routine even if it is just a few hours ashore tipping back a beer with a buddy in rough, dockside dive. Hill mentions Peckerhead Kate's and Horseface Mary's, both in Chicago, as two of the toughest bars during his time on the Lakes. I can't help but wonder what a t-shirt from either place might have looked like.

The book is filled with fascinating little tidbits of  life on the inland seas. When the ore boat is emptying its holds of taconite a Caterpillar is lowered into the holds to scrape up the last of the  iron pellets. A first-time sailor quickly learns never walk the decks with his hands in his pockets because an ore boat's decks are both slippery and filled with things to trip over. So your hands always have to be ready to grab a rail and save yourself from falling overboard.  

Life boat drills were performed weekly but sailors felt life jackets just prolonged one's suffering if you went in the water. In November and December Lake Superior gets so cold just hitting the water means instant death by either cardiac arrest or thermal shock. It was only decades later that crews were supplied with survival suits if their boat was going down. 

The first time Hill's boat encountered 25-foot waves on Lake Superior was both frightening and spellbinding. He writes his, "600-foot boat was nothing but a helpless tin bucket tossing around in a tempest." On the other hand he claims that the deck of an ore carrier on a beautiful day out of sight of land was the best golf driving range one could ask for. 

The book provides a rare glimpse into a life that can be as close at hand as a ore boat steaming down the St. Clair River yet is totally unknown to more than 99% of us. 



Hill, Richard. Lake Effect: A Deckhand's Journey on the Great Lakes Freighters, Gale Force Press, 217p., 2008. $17.95



Michigan Books for Christmas Giving


The following are my humble suggestions for books about the Michigan experience that would make good Christmas gifts. The list is compiled on the principle that no matter how old the book, if a person hasn't read it is is still essentially new. So the following list includes both new books on Michigan as well as classics. For ease of order all one has to do is click on the book cover and it will take you to Amazon Books where the price is probably less than the posted price on the list.


The Legend of Sleeping Bear by Kathy-Jo Wargin, Gilsbert van Frankenhyzen, illustrator.
Sleeping Bear Press, 1999, $17.95

The beautifully illustrated and gently told legend of  how Sleeping Bear Dunes got its name. Long ago a mother bear and her cubs tried to swim across Lake Michigan. The mother bear made it and now rests on shore and waits forever for her two cubs, represented by North and South Manitou Island to come ashore. Moving and lovingly told. Reading level is 4.8, but the book begs to be read aloud. Named the Official Children's Book of Michigan.




Trout Magic by Robert Traver. Touchstone Press, 1989, $12.54

A classic book of essays about the demented fringe of fishermen (me included) who pursue trout with a fly rod. Written by a former Michigan Supreme Court Justice who left the court to spend more time fishing and writing, this is a creel full of tall tales, weird characters, wit, and wisdom. It is also chocked full of great descriptive passages of the U.P. wilderness and the joys of wading a beautiful river.  Reading this book almost feels as good as having a hungry Brook Trout strike your Royal Coachman.




Michigan at Antietam: The Wolverines State's Sacrifice on America's Bloodiest Day, by Jack Dempsey. The History Press, 2015, $24.95


A profusely illustrated, compelling narrative that explores the important role Michiganders played in the single bloodiest day of the Civil War. This should be must reading for any Michigan Civil War buff.





Sweet Girl, by Travis Mulhauser. HarperCollins, 2016, $15.95

A sharp, taut, thriller set in Emmett County in which 16-year-old Percy, sets out a stormy night to find her meth addicted mother who has been missing for days. Percy's first stop is the meth dealer's house deep in the back country of Emmet County.  Mom's not there and the dealer and his girlfriend are passed out on the living room floor. In searching the house for her mother Percy discovers a snow-covered, untended, and sick baby lying in a bassinet next to an open window. The girl gathers up the baby and heads out into a deadly winter storm and is soon hunted by the meth dealer's gang. Great characters, relentless plotting, and dark humor mark this superior novel of suspense and survival.



Detroit Disassembled by Philip Levin, Andrew Moore photographer. Damiani/Arkon Art Museum, 2010, $50.

A great gift for photographers or anyone who enjoys photography as art. Photographer Andrew Moore's subject is the crumbling factories, ruined churches, deserted schools, and abandoned houses of a post apocoliptic Detroit. The book prompts a wide range of emotions.  Who thought garbage, derelict buildings, and empty factory floors could be transformed into astonishing works of art that are sad and trans formative. Page after page of stunning photographs that at times remind one of looking at photos of ancient Rome or Greece. 



The Veteran by Frank P. Slaughter. Mission Point Press, 2016, $18.95 pb.

The engrossing novel of a Michigan Civil War soldier who is wounded at the Battle of Chickamauga and is discharged because of his wound and unknowingly also suffers from PTSD. He goes home to Michigan and decides to make a career in lumbering while trying to deal with his terrible nightmares and his troubling outbursts of anger. Harrowing battle scenes and rigorously authentic descriptions of the life of a Michigan lumberjack in the 1860s makes for a fascinating and compelling read. One of the best novels I've read in the past year. A full review will appear in a later post.



Paddle to the Sea by Holling C. Holling. HMH Books, 1980, $11.95

An Indian boy carves a toy canoe and sets it free on Lake Superior hoping it will drift through the Great Lakes and to the Atlantic. A great introduction to the geography and lore of the Great Lakes. Wonderful illustrations that captivate readers, draw them into the majesty of our Inland Sea, and record a marvelous adventure. A great read aloud book for elementary and pre-school children.



The Situation in Flushing by Edmund G. Love. Wayne State University Press, 1987, $24.95

A warm, funny, wise, and captivating autobiography of  a childhood spent in Flushing, Michigan at the turn of the 20th Century. This much loved book has brought readers from afar to walk the streets of Flushing. It has also been taught in history and sociology classes at U of M with classes making field trips to the village. A Michigan classic.



True North by Jim Harrison.Grove Press, 2004, $16.00

A moving novel of a son's estrangement from his lumber baron father because of the father's ravenous destruction of the Upper Peninsula's forests. One reviewer called it, "the epic of  Michigan's Upper Peninsula." A great book by one of  Michigan's most celebrated writers.



Terror in the City of Champions: Murder, Baseball and the Secret Society that Shocked Depression-era Detroit by Tom Stanton. Lyons Press, 2016, $12.20 pb.

Stanton chronicles a strange confluence of events that gripped the Motor City in the mid 1930s when the Detroit Tigers, the Lions, and Red Wings all won their first national championships while the Black Legion, a virulent Klan-like organization, was using murder and threats of violence to win control of Detroit and even had visions of taking over Washington. Selected as one of the great reads of the year by NPR.



0

Post 8

Wednesday, November 15, 2017
Quote for the day: "It is so healthy here, that a person has to get off the island to die."   
                        A soldier stationed on Mackinac Island in 1830.




Reviews


Tracking the Beast
by Henry Kisor

Michigan mystery readers will take to Henry Kisor and his book featuring Sheriff Steve Martinez because it is so good on so many many levels. It is a well-crafted police procedural, peopled with believable characters, and boasts an absolutely unique plot line. The remote Upper Peninsula milieu is captured like a fly in amber and to my great delight the author puts the village of Ontanogan and Ontanogan County on the literary map.  I'm guessing many Michigan readers will have trouble even finding it on a map. 

Although set in Michigan the mystery begins when railroad workers in Omaha clean out a long unused hopper bulk freight car and discover the skeleton of a small child. The case falls in the lap of  Porcupine (read Ontonagan) County Sheriff Martinez' lap because the hopper car came from a large rail siding deep in the woods in his county. Various railroads have stored freight cars there when not needed, and some have been sat on the remote siding for years.

With the help of the Michigan State Police, tribal police, and game wardens Martinez cordons off the large railyard and begins a through screening of dozens of hopper cars. In a day long search two more dead girls and the body of a man shot in the back of the head are found lying inside two other hoppers. The cops are more than perplexed. There's little chance of identifying the remains of the two girls and it is unlikely the dead man is the killer of the girls.

Kisor unwinds the mystery and the work of the police team with a deft hand. The task force's investigative work feels authentic, and the systematic search for a needle in who knows how many haystacks captivates the reader. Railroad buffs will also probably enjoy the book for its information on railroad operations. 

This the fourth Steve Martinez mystery and frankly they deserve much more attention than they have received. They're worth reading just for the Upper Peninsula ambience as in this passage, "One gets spoiled by the wilderness of the Upper Peninsula, where heavy traffic consists of a dozen cars backed up behind a one-lane path around bridge repairs, where you can go into the woods all day without encountering another human being, where the air is so clean you can take deep breaths without coughing, where you can lie on your back in a forest clearing and count every star in the Milky Way."

The author is a retired editor and critic of the old Chicago Daily News and the Chicago Sun-Times. He was a finalist in 1981 for a Pulitzer Prize for criticism and spends half the year in a cabin on the shores of Lake Superior in Ontonagon County. He obviously knows how to write and is writing in near obscurity. Wake up mystery lovers and take a literary trip to the western U.P.



Kisor, Henry. Tracking the Beast, Gale Cengage Learning, 2015. $25.95



Pinery Boys: Songs and Songcatching in the Lumberjack Era
by Franz Rickaby with Gretchen Dykstra and  James P. Leary

In August 1919 Franz Rickaby strapped a rucksack on his back, threw a fiddle over his shoulder, wrapped his hand around a walking stick, and took his first steps out of Charlevoix, Michigan on a 900-mile journey on foot to North Dakota. Rickaby was a songcatcher and his 900-mile wander took him to lumber camps from Michigan to North Dakota where he hoped to hear and record on paper the songs of the shanty boys. Rickaby was friendly, open, and usually chinned his fiddle and played for the lumberjacks in their bunkhouses where it was traditional for the shanty boys to entertain themselves nightly by taking turns singing songs. It was an unwritten rule that a singer could not repeat a song already sung. Rickaby's mission was to collect and preserve the unique songs of the lumber camps in the fading days of White Pine era in the northern Midwest.

Published in 1926 the book Ballads and Songs of the Shanty Boys quickly became a classic among folklorists. The book didn't just contain song lyrics, but most often contained the melody, and who wrote the song and its many derivations. Franz Rickaby died before the book came off the press and Franz left a significant amount of unpublished matrial he'd gathered and probably meant to publish at a later date.The book also was soon out of print.

Pinery Boys is three books in one. It brings Ballads and Songs of the Shanty Boy back into print, it also contains a short biography of Rickaby by his granddaughter, and the final third of the book contains forgotten and unpublished songs that were omitted from the 1926 book.

Many of the songs originated in Michigan and became favorites throughout the Midwestern north woods. "Michigan-I-O details the difficulting traveling to and living conditions in the camps and after complaining of the bad food and having to bed down in snow the laundry list of complaints ends with: 
"We'll see are wives and sweethearts, and tell them not to go
To that God-foresaken country called Michigan-I-O."

"Jack Haggerty's Flat River Girl" is a long lament about being dumped by a sweetheart and was sung by thousands of jacks around the Greenville timber yards and Muskegon River. "Harry Bail" came from a family of songs recounting in bloody detail the injuries and death that were so close at hand in sawmills and lumber yards. The songs second stansa sets the scene:
"In the township of Arcade, in the county of Lapeer,
There stands a little shingle mill that has run about one year.
'Tis where the dreadful deed was done caused many to weep and wail.
'Tis where this poor boy lost his life, his name was Harry Bail."

The song "Silver Jack" is worth the price of the book itself.   Jack was an authentic north woods character. He could drink most men under the table and was famous for his no holds barred fisticuffs. Lumberjacks loved to trade tales of his storied fights and "Silver Jack" recounts one of them. The fight started because a young atheist lumberjack was too outspoken about his lack of religion and Jack took exception. In part the lyrics read:
"One day we were all sittin'round
Smokin' black-head tobacco
And hearing Bob expound:
Hell, he said, was all humbug,
And he made it plain as day
That the bible was a fable,
and we 'lowed it looked that way.
Miracles and such like
Were too rank for him to stand,
And as for him they called the Savior
He was just a common man.

"Your a liar," someone shouted,                Now this Bob weren't no coward
"And you got to take it back."                   And he answered bold and free:
Then everybody started--                           "Stack your duds and cut your capers,
Twas the words of Silver Jack.                   For there ain't no flies on me."
And he cracked his fists together                And they fit for forty minutes
And he stacked his duds and cried,            And the crowd would whoop and cheer
"Twas in that religion                                   When Jack spit up a tooth or two
That my mother lived and died;                  Or when Bobby lost an ear."
and though I haven't always 
Used the Lord exactly right,
Yet when I hear a chump abuse him
He's got to eat his words or fight."

The remainder of the song tells of the end of the fight and Bob's sudden acceptance of the divinity of Christ and in Chrsitian brotherhood they passed a bottle of rot gut liquor around the room.

The granddaughter's short biography of her songcatcher grandfather and his work is an introduction to a fascinating and all to short a life. And who knew songcatcher was a job title and one ever operated in the state. The songs collected by Rickaby are pure gold and all the more interesting because many were born in Michigan's north woods. If you're drawn to intereting lives, American folklore, the wild and wooly lumbering era in Michigan and the Midwest, or American folk songs then, "stack your duds and cut your capers," and go out and get the book. Or just tap the book's image below to order it.



Rickaby, Franz. Dykstra, Gretchen. Leary, James P.  Pinery Boys: Songs and Songcatching in the Lumberjack Era, University of Wisconsin Press, 2017, 356p.   $25.95


0

Post # 7

Wednesday, November 1, 2017




Quote of the Day: "The first qualification for public office in Hamtramck is a prison term." A common saying of the 1940s because of the graft and corruption in the city's government.



Reviews


The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of Straits
by Tiya Miles


This book is a triumph of research and persistence in sifting through scraps and pieces of  primary source material from Detroit's first century of existence.  Yes, its a scholarly work but very readable and it details an aspect of the Motor City's history that is often ignored or just consigned to the shadows - slavery in Detroit. The author's premise is that from its founding through its first hundred years the 'Peculiar Institution' was an integral part of Detroit's economy and culture. 

In Detroit both Native Americans and African Americans were held in bondage and the buying and selling of slaves was common practice. Most Native American slaves were female and worked as household servants and quite often were their owners' mistresses. On the other hand Indian slaves were freed much more often than African slaves. African Americans usually numbered about a third of the Detroit slaves, at any one time, and were considered a status symbol by most slave holders.

Slaves as a whole were only a small percentage of Detroit's population. In 1750 Detroit counted 33 slaves out of a population of 483 souls. By 1773 the number had risen to 85 and spiked in 1782 to 180 and to 288 in 1796.  The sharp rise in numbers was due to the French and Indian War when Detroit raiding parties as far south as Kentucky and invariably returned with slaves. By the end of the War of 1812 slavery was all but gone in the territory. 

Which leads me to the one disagreement I have with the publisher, not the author. The book's blurb claims that, "Miles reveals that slavery was at the heart of the Midwest's iconic city..." I think that's overselling a very important and valuable history. Cadillac didn't found the city to further slavery, nor does the book persuade me or argue that the city would have failed if it didn't have slaves or a small slave trade.

The author does convince the reader that because of Detroit's physical and jurisdictional isolation in the 1700s the issue of slavery was not addressed until the U.S. took control of the city after the War of 1812. It did not help that the city was often operating under conflicting French, British and American laws. Jay's Treaty of 1795 averted war between the U.S. and Britain and also gave control of British forts and Detroit to the Americans within two years. The treaty also insured French and British subjects they would loose no property after the Americans take over. This obviously included their slaves.

At the same time the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 banned slavery and involuntary 
servitude. The author presents plenty of evidence on how the law was either simply ignored or the slave owners had their chattels make an X on a sheet of paper that turned them into voluntary indentured servants for life. Ms. Miles is especially good at ferreting out both the tragedy and absurdity of slave law. For some years before Canada outlawed slavery a Canadian slave could escape to Detroit and be recognized as a free man and courts would not send the ex slave back to bondage. On the other hand slavery still existed in Detroit and slaves regularly escaped across the river where they were made free men and courts wouldn't return them to the United States. And then the author tells the story of  family of slaves that fled to Canada gained their freedom and then the father of the family was asked to return to Detroit and recruit and lead a Black armed militia. He accepted the offer and was promoted to Captain. So Detroit became the first place in America with a company of armed ex African American slaves commanded by Black officers.

The author makes this history personal, intimate, and interesting by telling the early history of the city through the lives of the slaves as well as the slave holders. The author digs up wills, court records, and family journals, in order to paint a picture of  individual slave experiences in Detroit and the Cat's Cradle of confusing laws that ensnared a slave in a web of deceit and oppression.

The result is a revelatory study of Detroit's first hundred years.



Miles. Tiya. The dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits, The New Press, 2017, $27.95






Sweet Girl
by Travis Mulhauser


This novel is an addictive, taut, gritty, and suspenseful slice of up north Michigan noir.
Percy James is a 16-year-old girl who in personality and spunk could be the twin sister of Mattie from True Grit. Her older sister has married and moved to the West Coast to get away from her meth addicted mother, leaving young Percy to deal with mom Carletta.

When Carletta disappears for several days it is up to Percy to find her, even as a fierce winter storm dead aim at northern Michigan and Emmet County where Percy and her mom live. The obvious place to look is Sheldon's, one of the major meth dealers in the county. Heading into Emmett County's back country Percy gets her truck stuck in a snow drift as night falls, and has to walk the last mile to the meth house in a growing storm. She finds Sheldon and his girl friend passed out in the living room and quietly searches the house for her mother.  Instead she finds a few months old baby in a second floor bedroom lying in a bassinet shoved up next to an open window with blowing snow starting to cover the baby. On close examination the baby girl's dirty diapers haven't been changed for ages, she suffers from horrendous blisters and rashes across her back and bottom, and she's screaming to be fed. Percy wraps the baby in blankets, grabs a can of dry baby formula and baby in hand flees into the storm.

Percy knows Sheldon will come after her and heads for a cabin well back in the woods looking for help from an old man who once was sweet on Percey's mom and lived with them for a year. The man's name is Portis and is the closest thing Percy has ever had to a dad. And I can't help but believe Mulhauser named the character as homage to Charles Portis the author of True Grit. Portis, the character, is is an irascible old drunk, rude more often than not, and for his age a rugged outdoorsman. He kicked drugs but continues to drink heavily because as he says, "I suppose it is a slower more reasonably portioned suffering."

Portis can't turn down Percy's cry for help. They feed the child, treat her blisters, and rashes the best they can, and worried about the child's elevated fever, Percy and Portis take off cross country heading for Petoskey and the hospital. They will not only have to survive the storm but avoid being captured by Sheldon's deadly crew of drug dealers and enforcers. To make it even worse Percey and Portis are on foot while Sheldon's crew is hunting for them on snowmobiles. 

The rest of the novel unfolds during the course of the night. The two main characters are finely drawn and engage readers' full attention. Milhauser writes crackling dialogue and is very good at capturing the isolation and hopelessness of the poor, and those who live on the ragged fringes of society. Veins of dark humor run through the story and throughout the book memorable sentences abound. On enduring Emmet County winters Percy remarks, "It's not so much the cold, it's the fact that at some point the ass kicking feels personal."

The author is from Petoskey and currently lives in Durham, North Carolina. Here's hoping readers don't have to wait too long before Mulhauser makes another literary visit to his hometown.



Mulhauser, Travis. Sweet Girl, HarperCollins, 2016, $26.99, pb 



And Here: 100 Years of Upper Peninsula Writing, 1917- 2017
Ronald Riekki, editor

From the introduction by Thomas Lynch, in which Michigan's award-winning literary funeral director recalls a childhood trip to the U.P. to the heart-breaking poem about the devastating impact of drugs on the Rez this book seems nothing short of a gift from the publisher. Except for a few well-known authors, U.P. literature, from poetry and novels, to mysteries and non fiction, is often overlooked or simply ignored. Even those who consider themselves widely read will not recognize a majority of the author's names.  Or as Lynch writes in his introduction this is, "A book brought into being, like a bridge to a mysterious place, offers us access to voices stilled by time or disinterest or obscurity."

Editor Ronald Riekki has mined a century of U.P. writers and poets plus a few pieces from authors from below the bridge to present readers with the rich literary landscape found north of the Straits of Mackinac. The poems and excerpts from the little known writers living north of the Straits are often the most interesting and surprising because they let the reader see the U.P and its culture through the eyes of those who live there. The book also offers the joy of revisiting and rediscovering work from familiar authors like mystery writer Steve Hamilton, or Ernest Hemingway, Jim Harrison, and even Gordon Lighfoot's "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" and its opening sentence that still sends chivers down the spine. If you've forgotten, it reads:

     "The legend lives on from the Chippewas on down
        Of the big lake they call Gitche Gumee."

There are many stand out poems and excerpts but I must mention a few favorites. Mildred Walker's novel "Fireweed" is set in the post lumbering days of the U.P. when immigrants arrived and, with only limited success, tried to farm a land blistered with white pine stumps and covered in acres of slashings. Walker won the Hopwell Award for the this novel and was a National Book Award nominee for a later book. The chapter  included here nails the desolation left in the wake of clearcut lumbering in Michigan.

Michigan Supreme Court Justice and author of "Anatomy of a Murder" Robert Traver is represented by a chapter from his "Laughing Whitefish." The novel is an enlightening courtroom drama in which a Native American tries to legally reclaim land belonging to the tribe. I've never read one of Justice Traver's legal opinions but I can attest to his narrative skills in telling a story and capturing a historical period.

The dozens of poems in the book range from a tribute to  the U.P.'s culinary contribution to the state -- a pasty, to the Soo Locks, and the wilderness landscape and the folks who've learn to live in it. Other poems take the reader to a pow wow and a even a Dominoes Pizza. I must admit I'm not always a big fan of poetry but there are poems here that bury themselves in your 
heart. The poem "To Dance is to Pray"is a wonderfully moving description of a pow wow. One stansa reads:  "Your blood pumps with purpose,
                           in rhythm. Thunderous chills climb,
                           your spine -- spirit passengers riding your bones
                           ascending, spirits of those yet to be born. Spirits of those
                           who have passed on, spirits of those
                           who lie alone, awake
                           dying.
                           The heartbeat sounds. The lead singer on the 
                            host drum cries to the open sky. At the base of hundreds 
                            of pines 
                            a thousand footsteps
                            erupt in time.
                            Grand Entry begins.

The last word on what it means to be a Yooper comes from the poem "Vacationland" by Ander Monson. The last sentence of the first stansa reads:
                             "Everyone from here is still here
                                regardless of where they are or where they end."

This collection of writings is as refreshing and eye-opening as a dip in Lake Superior's Whitefish Bay on a hot day.



Riekki, Ronald, ed. And Here: 100 Years of Upper Peninsula Writing, 1917 -2017, Michigan State University Press, 2017, $29.95 
      














0

Post # 6

Sunday, October 15, 2017





Quote of the day: "That [the Fox Theatre] was built for mere movies and not coronations, almost boggles the mind." Rick Sylvain. Michigan Living .February 1989.


Reviews

The Marsh King's Daughter
by Karen Dionne

Reader beware, by the end of the first chapter of Karen Dionne's debut novel unsuspecting readers will be at the mercy of this northern Oakland County writer. Like Brer Rabbit you can pick up the book but, try as you might, you aren't putting it down until Dionne releases you on the last page. Dishes will go unwashed, leaves will not be raked, snow shoveled, the car washed, or things checked off the "To Do List" until this addictive book is finished.

Helena has two daughters, a loving husband, a successful small business, a comfortable double-wide prefab home in a remote corner of the U.P., and a terrible secret she hasn't even shared with her husband. Helena's mother was kidnapped at the age of 14 by a mentally ill loner and kept captive in his remote, rustic cabin surrounded by a huge trackless U. P. marsh. Two years after her capture the 16-year old gives birth to Helena.

For the first dozen years of her life Helena's world is limited to the cabin, swamp, her domineering and crazy father, and a quiet, withdrawn mother suffering from the Skockhom Snydrome. Helena learned to read from a stack of abandoned National Geographic magazines and didn't realize they were 50 years out of date. Her father both terrorized her and showered her with attention. If a miserable example of a human being, Helena's dad was an accomplished woodsman and an expert at living off the land. He taught Helena everything he knew about nature, tracking, and hunting. She killed her first deer at age five.

Helena finally learned the truth of her mother's kidnapping at the age of 12 and at nearly the same time she comes to understand her father has no regard for the safety or feelings for anyone but himself. When the opportunity presents itself Helena helps her mother escape. It takes two years before her father is captured and sentenced to life imprisonment in Marquette State Prison. Back in society the young girl sees counselors, changes her name, tries to live a life of obscurity with her husband and two daughters, and bury her past. 

A dozen years later Helena's mother has died and Helena and her family are living a near normal life when her dad kills two prison guards and escapes. Helena instinctively knows the man will be coming for her and her two daughters. The only way to insure her and her daughters safety is to hunt her father down and kill or capture him before the man comes for them.

Dionne masterfully controls her plot and builds suspense. Helena's pursuit of her father through the rugged U.P. wilderness is interrupted at the most crucial moments by flashbacks as Helena remembers significant chapters of her 12 years in the wilderness with a psychologically damaged mother and dangerously insane father.

The author has done a wonderful job of capturing life lived on the barest subsistence level, the beauty and wildness of the U.P. landscape, and how rugged outdoorsmen build an intimate relation with nature. The book also works as a gripping psychological thriller as Helena recalls her life with her teacher and tormentor and wrestles with what to do when and if she hunts him down.

This book is effortlessly readable and has narrative pace equivalent to an F-16  with the after-burners lit.



Dionne, Karen. The Marsh King's Daughter, G. P. Putnams, 2017, $26.




My Near-Death Adventures: 99% True
by Alison DeCamp


This may be a young adult book with a 4th - 6th grade reading level but odds are the entire family will thoroughly enjoy it. That's because fatherless, eleven-year-old Stan Slater who lives with his mom and cantankerous grandma in Manistique, Michigan during the U. P. lumbering boom of the 1890s is both very good company and very funny. 

In need of money mom, son, and grandma take kitchen and dining hall jobs in a lumber camp owned by Stan's uncle near Germfask. Stan is OK with the move because he thinks he might find his father in the camp, and if not, he can at least learn how to be a man and the head of the family. 

Ah, but there are a host of personal liabilities and short comings standing in his way. First, he's eleven. Secondly, well honestly the rest are in no particular rankings or order they're just hurdles that have to be cleared.  The boy thinks out load and it constantly lands him in hot water or a mouth washed out with soap. His mother has suitors, none of which Stan likes. He has too vivid an imagination and too high an opinion of himself. He thinks he has a taste for danger and is 95.7% certain he's invincible. According to Stan he's barely escaped death from an untouched axe, raw chickens, an older female cousin, and the soap grandma uses to washout his mouth. 

Stan is also a fount of misunderstanding and confusion. When granny tells him he has to acquire some manners and that learning the correct spoon to use can open doors, he wonders how you jimmy a door with a spoon without bending it. He thinks George Washington chopped down a log cabin and signed the Declaration of Dependence.  When told by his cousin he has tedium he wonders how long he has to live. The lumber camp only adds to Stan's confusion on  how to be a man. It shakes his belief that becoming a man means growing a beard, drinking coffee, and apparently understanding things only men can understand, and lastly, your mom allows you to take part in the dangerous spring log drive downriver to the mill. It doesn't help that his mother makes him wear an apron when serving food.

On the plus side he is a dispenser of useful information, such as "hogwash" has nothing to do with washing a hog. He sometimes stands up to bullies and has a quick tongue like the time he told the school bully, "He'd never be the man his mother is." And according to Stan he always tells the truth, even if he has to make it up.

The boy is so desperate for a father he makes up and writes letters to himself from his dad. He also keeps a scrapbook as living proof of  his adventures and courageous deeds, as well as whatever strikes his fancy to share with his father. Pieces from his scrapbook adorn every page of the book and it becomes very obvious Stan can't clip a face from a magazine or newspaper without drawing glasses and a moustache on every man and women. 

All kinds of surprises await Stan at the lumber camp including a lumberjack asking him to join the spring log drive. This is a rollicking good story of a youth dealing with life and a great portrait of a 1890s Michigan lumber camp. It's universal message is all boys everywhere in every era struggle to learn to be a man. Most of them are just not as laugh out loud funny as Stan. 




DeCamp, Alison. My Near-Death Adventures 99% True!, Crown Books. $16.99.



Paddle-to-the-Sea
by Holling Clancy Holling

This is not a review but homage to a book that changed my world and permanently impressed upon me, at a very early age, the magic, wonder, and majesty of the Great Lakes. I was five or six when I read or, more likely, someone read this wonderful book to me. 

For those who have not had the good fortune to crack the cover of Paddle-to-the-Sea it tells, in words and colorfully detailed illustrations, the epic journey of a small, toy canoe carved by a Native American boy living on the north shore of Lake Superior. He whittles the one-foot canoe out of a piece of pine one winter, and on the bottom carves "Please put me back in the water, I am Paddle to the Sea." He then places the canoe in a snowbank beside a south flowing creek and waits for spring to melt the snow and send the canoe on its way. All that occurs in the first two pages.

The rest of the book follows Paddle to the Sea's extraordinary adventures through sawmills, to the iron ore docks of Duluth, along the coast of Lake Superior, through a terrible storm and shipwreck. The little canoe hitches a ride on an ore carrier, passes through the Soo Locks and after many more adventures makes it to the mouth of the St. Lawrence River and the Atlantic Ocean.

The book is a marvelous geography lesson and an unforgettable introduction to the wonders of the Great Lakes. It's been almost 70 years and I still treasure the book and still hold it responsible for my enchantment with Michigan and the Great Lakes.



Holling, Holling Clancy. Paddle to the Sea, Houghton Mifflin, 1941, $11.95 pb



My Michigan Bucket List
by J. R. Roper

Among the plethora of bucket list books on Michigan and nearly every other state and geographical region on the Earth comes this book that offers dedicated bucket listers something a little different and useful. Although it does include one page of the author's selections of the state's top buck list destinations the rest of the book is arranged as a journal in which the bucket lister can record their impressions and details of their visits.

Each entry has space where the journal keeper records DESTINATION DETAILS, DATES, TRAVEL COMPANIONS, RECOMMENDED GUIDES, INSIDER TIPS, SURPRISE ENCOUNTERED, WHAT WAS UNFORGETTABLE, and REFLECTIONS. The journal is divided by the type of  destination including; Drinking, Accommodations, Shopping, or simply on the bucket list. There are also several lined pages in which the journalist can make their own bucket list.

If you want to capture the your memories of Michigan's special destinations with more than snapshots this may be the book your looking for.


Roper, J.R. My Michigan Bucket List, Hidden Cottage Press, 2017, $9.99




















0

Post # 5

Sunday, October 1, 2017



Quote for the Day: "You want to go to Saginaw! ...do you realize what you are undertaking? Do you know that Saginaw is the last inhabited place til the Pacific Ocean; that from here to Saginaw hardly anything but wilderness and pathless solitudes are to be found?"  A Pontiac innkeeper to Alexis de Tocqueville, on hearing that the French traveler was journeying to Saginaw. 1831.



REVIEWS

The Kelloggs: The Battling Brothers of Battle Creek
by Howard Markel

Right about the turn of the 20th century, Henry Ford ushered in the next step of the Industrial Revolution with his production line that subsequently put the world on wheels. Meanwhile, out in western Michigan, two brothers were perfecting a new kind of prepared food that eventually changed how hundreds of millions of people across the globe eat breakfast.

Although products emblazoned with their name are in countless homes, few folks know much about John H. and Will K. Kellogg, whose efforts gave birth to a multi-billion-dollar business behemoth.
Howard Markel, a medical historian at the University of Michigan, does much to rectify this situation with The Kelloggs, a fascinating dual biography of the brothers.

John and Will's forebears arrived in America not long after the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. About 200 years later, John Preston Kellogg, the men's father, had his fill of trying to farm the rocky soil of Massachusetts and set out with his family to the promised land of Michigan. They settled near Flint and hewed two farms out of the wilderness. John H. was born in Tyrone to his father's second wife in 1852.

A turning point in the family's history came a few years later when John Preston joined a new sect, the Seventh-day Adventist Church. He and a few other members persuaded church leader Ellen Harmon White to move her operations to Battle Creek in 1855, and he traded his farm for a broom factory in the city a year later. Will was born there in 1860.

John H. became the family's golden child at an early age. Believing he was destined for greatness, they sacrificed to send him to medical school. Will, meanwhile, was considered a drudge. He started making brooms in the factory as a boy and went on to menial sales jobs in his teens.

John and White developed a close relationship, and the church helped support him in medical school. When he returned to Michigan, he took over a small hospital run by the Adventists, which he used as the cornerstone of his world-renowned Battle Creek Sanitarium. A devout church member, John thoroughly endorsed the Adventists' approach to diet, which avoided meat and focused on fruits, vegetables and grains. And that's the food he served to patients at his sanitarium.

Meanwhile, as the sanitarium became bigger and more complex, John took on Will as his factotum. An organizational genius, Will essentially wound up running the place -- not that his brother really noticed. John never deigned to give Will a job title and treated him miserably, paying him only $9 a week when he put in 120 hours or more on the job.

John was forever tinkering with recipes for his sanitarium, and breakfast posed a particular problem because he wanted to serve food that was nutritional but quick to prepare. While he didn't invent cold cereal, he (with Will's help) perfected it.

To some extent, C.W. Post helped create the Kellogg cereal empire. Post had come to the sanitarium as a patient and worked in the food operation to help pay for his treatment. He learned all of the brothers' cereal secrets, formed his own company and made a fortune marketing the Kelloggs' wheat flakes as Post Toasties and their granola as Grape-Nuts.

While John had always made small amounts of his cereals for sale in town and to former patients, he felt commercializing the products would hurt his reputation as a medical doctor. Will, however, was outraged. After years of fruitlessly arguing with John about going into the cereal business, Will finally paid off John for the right to produce and sell their cereal in mass quantities.

And so it was that, after decades of abuse at the hands of his brother, Will Kellogg became an overnight success in his mid-40s.

There is so much more in Markel's lengthy -- 506 pages -- but thoroughly engaging book. Some of it is depressing, especially the bitterness between the brothers that sometimes spilled into outright hatred over the years. Even sadder is Will's personal life. Perhaps because of his unhappy childhood and years of subservience to John, Will never seemed to enjoy the millions he made. His relations with his children were strained, and he had few close friends.

But Markel has done a great service in telling how The Best to You Each Morning came to be. And you'll never think of corn flakes as boring again.



Markel, Howard. The Kelloggs: The Battling Brothers of Battled Creek, New York: Pantheon Books, 2017. $35.00




The Graybar Hotel
By Curtis Dawkins

In deciding to review books written about the Michigan experience I never considered or imagined reviewing a novel or short story collection dealing with the everyday, stultified life of state prison inmates. After only a few pages in The Graybar Hotel there is little doubt in the reader’s mind the life behind bars described in these stories may be hauntingly similar to life in most U.S. prisons. But this book also offers a unique look at a seldom described Michigan experience – life behind bars at Jackson State Prison. An early short story in the book gives almost and an hour by hour account of an inmate’s first day at Jackson State Prison.

The author has a Master in Fine Arts in writing from Western Michigan University and is serving a life sentence, without parole, in the Michigan prison system for a drug-related homicide. Unfortunately Curtis Dawkins is both an accomplished master of his art and he has a lifetime to write about a subject he knows intimately. And although these stories are populated with a number of well draw charters the stories feel very autobiographical and very real.

Despair, loneliness, and longing are palpable. Watching a Tigers game on TV one inmate conjures entire life stories for people and families caught on camera in Comerica Park.  There is such longing for the outside world the inmate makes blind, collect telephone calls. When asked to accept the charges and the person called askes who’s calling the inmate always says, “It’s just me.” Because he’s persistent and has a trusting voice the gambit works often enough the inmate talks to someone on the outside every day or two. It’s just not talking that’s important. He listens for background sounds like the click of a grandfather clock, outside traffic, and on one call thought he could smell food cooking in the oven. For most inmates with long sentences there’s a painful longing for everyday life that’s so distant it may as well be on the far side of the moon.

Although Dawkins crafts well written stories with interesting characters the stories also work as fine descriptive essays of Michigan prison life. The author reveals prison tattoo machines are built from a motor taken from a Walkman, set in a plastic spork taken from the cafeteria, and a guitar string threaded through the barrel of a Bic pen.  Dawkins also acknowledges “Tattoing in prison is like trying to sew fine stitches with a knitting needle.”

The book is also leavened with humor like the short story in which an inmate has to be taught how to lie convincingly instead of making a fool out of himself by trying to convince fellow inmates, “He died twice and met God both times,” or “He used law-enforcement-grade-pepper-spray to spice up his pizzas.”

Dawkins is a fine writer and his descriptions of life in a Michigan state prison may be fiction but they ring true as a tuning fork. MLive reported on September 28th that Dawkins just signed a book deal with a major publisher.



Dawkins, Curtis. Graybar Hotel, New York: Scribner, 2017. $26

Thanks to our guest reviewer Gene Mierzejewski, Flint Journal's retired book review editor, for reviewing The Kelloggs.

New Books to be Published in October

Daniels, Ken. If These Walls Could Talk: Detroit Red Wings; Stories from Detroit Red Wings Ice, Locker Room, and Press Book, Triumph Books, October 15, 2017. $16.95






  


0
Powered by Blogger.