July 1, 2019 Post # 44

Saturday, June 1, 2019

Inexplicably my blog decided this is the June 1 posting and will not allow me to change the date on the posting. 


Quote for the day: "Professional seamen treated (the upper Great Lakes) with the respect a lion tamer pays an excitable cat." William Ratigan. Straits of Mackinac. 1957.


Reviews

Before the Snow Flies
by John Wemlinger

John Wemlinger's latest engrossing book is a deeply felt and emotionally honest novel that chronicles the life-altering ramifications faced by a Michigan Afghan war veteran who loses both legs to a roadside bomb. It seemed inevitable Major David Keller would eventually wear a general's star until the day he became a double amputee with a severe case of PTSD. It changed everything, including his will to live. He decided he would rather commit suicide than live in a wheelchair, but he has to convince his army psychiatrists he isn't serious about suicide before they will let him go home. He hides the fact he went to a gun show and bought a pistol and goes home in late spring with plans to end his life before the snow flies.

Compounding his readjustment to civilian life and the loss of both legs is the fact Keller left his hometown of Onekema, Michigan for West Point under a cloud. He never returned home or communicated with his father or brother (now the county DA) from the day he left 16 years ago. Onekema welcomes home their hometown boy as a hero but David returns filled with doubt, remorse, and unexpected emotional stress. He argued bitterly with his father, a Vietnam Vet, about joining the army and discovers his dad now suffers from dementia and may not even know him.  His high school sweetheart who he cut all contact with on leaving has suffered emotional and physical abuse from an unbalanced and violent ex-husband.

It is a long difficult road to recovery and an equally painful re-entry into his family and hometown society. Keller wants to put everything right with his family and ex-girlfriend before winter but life becomes even more complicated when he has a run-in with the law.

The author is a native of Onekema and a retired army colonel. He is adept at capturing the ambiance and closeness of small Michigan towns, his characters are well drawn, and the plot is hugely involving and at times will leave readers breathless with anticipation. Wemlinger is especially effective at portraying with honesty and compassion the psychological damage of life-changing wounds and suffering from PTSD. He makes Keller's struggle to overcome his wounds profoundly and emotionally realistic. You can not read this book and be unmoved. It deserves to be on any number of lists of Best Books of 2019.
Before the Snow Flies by John Wemlinger. Mission Point Press. 2019. $16.99



All Manner of Things
by Susie Finkbeiner

Regular readers of this blog know that I don't publish negative reviews. If I can't recommend a book it doesn't get reviewed and in all likelihood, I'll put the book aside without finishing it. As Gene Mierzejewski, the book editor of the Flint Journal liked to say, "life is too short to read a book you don't like."

I didn't give this book much of a chance for a positive review because I knew it fell within the genre of Christian fiction and the publisher states in part its mission is to, "serve the diverse interests of evangelical readers." To put this as politely as possible, I don't turn to fiction for religious renewal,  guidance, or inspiration. But the novel is set in Michigan and therefore deserved consideration. I cracked the cover and the author had me from the fourth page with a very funny observation on Michigan weather and the Almighty's self-congratulation on his creation. By page fifty I had become so totally involved with the book's characters and the dynamics of the Jacobson family and their story I sometimes lost the sense of reading a book.  Now that is real magic and the mark of a great storyteller. 

The novel is set in 1967-68 and chronicles the trials, tribulations, hope, and despair faced by the Jacobson's, a devoutly religious family of Dutch descent living in western Michigan. The story is told by the family's oldest daughter, Annie, who just graduated high school and is stuck in a dead-end job in a local diner and can't afford college. She has two brothers, Joel, the youngest, hardly knows his father because the man walked out on the family twelve years ago. Her older brother, Mike, enlists in the army and is sent to Vietnam as a medic. Frank, the father, is a Korean War Vet who apparently suffers from undiagnosed PTSD. He surprises everyone by suddenly and periodically returning home for short visits. Frank has to face the wrath of a wife left to support and raise a family and a young son who longs for a father. The older children don't know what to make of their dad's reappearance and are further bewildered when their mother isn't sure she wants a divorce. The tension can be palatable as the family deals with a father who may want back in the lives, Mike's constant brushes with death, and a grandfather in the grip of Alzheimer's who's reached the stage where he can't be taken care of at home.

The author has drawn a believable and moving portrait of an ordinary family close to being overwhelmed by large and small events, family tragedies, and the consequences of life-changing decisions. Yes, they often pray for guidance but if there are few clear answers or no apparent divine revelations the family must find the strength to face life's vicissitudes and deal with what the future holds. The author writes with honesty, realism, and compassion about a family that struggles to meet life's daunting hardships with hope, perseverance, and faith in family.

All Manner of Things by Susie Finkbeiner. Revell, 2019, $15.99.


The Perp Walk
by Jim Ray Daniels

This book of connected short stories is a wildly inventive collection of coming of age stories, brief but vividly recalled impressions, and fragments of memory that almost pass for old Kodak snapshots of growing up on the Warren, or "White" side, of 8 Mile Road in the late 1960s or 70s. The pieces range from lengthy, twenty pages plus stories that take place in a Detroit that no longer exists to less than two-page-long recollections of a place or incident. The stories are rich in detail, capture the mindset of the time and place, are often funny, and are delivered in prose that is sharp enough to inflict paper cuts.  The author clearly loves to play with words and cliches such as, "Beating around the bush beats diving into the bush and getting scratched up."  

The author is a singularly unique prose stylist. His longer stories are presented in brief scenes in which many could fit on a 3x5" index card with some as short as a sentence or two. The quickly shifting scenes have a cumulative effect and make the stories powerfully compelling and vivid. They also have the effect of making the reader suspect the scenes may be fragments of a life that have been broken into pieces like a decorative ceramic tile dropped on the floor and the author is attempting to fit the bits and pieces back into what he thinks is a sensible narrative order. The storytelling is compelling and is equally engaging because of the manner in which the story unfolds.

What really caught my attention was the author's one- to two-page word pictures or ruminations on remembered moments from youth. The short pieces range from a freeze-frame still of a 1960s Warren neighborhood to the sounds heard on 8 Mile Road. They read like literary jazz riffs by Coleman Hawkins or Miles Davis. Here a short excerpt from the latter piece. "Lips kiss cigarettes outside AA meetings at old  Sr. Mike's. Chopper bray. House-door: slam. Car-door: slam, Bar-door: slam. Alarm. Accident. Alarm. Gunshot. Don't pretend or imagine a backfire. Not here. Not now. Siren. Siren call. Folded in night's dark envelope. Flattened by fear/suspicion." I read and reread these compressed literary gems and found I liked to read them while listening to jazz.

Memorable, resonant, funny, provocative, reflective, and filled with literary pyrotechnics. What more could you ask for? More.

The Prep Walk by Jim Ray Daniels. Michigan State University Press, 2019, $24.95 pb.


A History Lover's Guide to Detroit
by Karin Risko

The author, a native Detroiter and the owner and operator of City Tour of Detroit certainly has the credentials to write a guide to historic Detroit. The book serves as a literary, do it yourself, Grayline Tour of the main historical attractions from magnificent commercial buildings that are architectural works of art, to parks, stadiums, theatres, public buildings, and houses of worship within the Greater Downtown area. 

The book opens with a very brief history of the city and a briefer list of Detroit firsts which include the Lindell A.C. the country's first sports bar, and the nation's first mile of concrete highway.  Then it is on to the historic sites, beginning with the Renaissance Center/Millender Center People Mover Stations and ending with Elmwood Cemetery some 160 odd pages later. Each site receives from a long paragraph to a couple of pages packed with interesting, important, and odd historical facts and tidbits. I discovered the Mariner's Church was founded in 1842 and is an autonomous Anglican Church that is not connected to any diocese and is the only church in Michigan incorporated by an act of the state legislature. Even more surprising is the fact that Carhartt Clothing Company originated in Detroit in 1889. The factory is no longer standing and the making of its clothing has moved out of state but the corporate headquarters is in Dearborn.

The pages of the book are splashed with maps and historical photographs. In addition to the historical sites, the author sprinkles the book with lists of Detroit firsts, major industries in Detroit other than automobiles, and odd facts such as Detroiters eat several more pounds of potato chips per capita annually than any other city in the nation. The book is authoritative and fairly exhaustive when it comes to the coverage of Detroit's obvious historical treasures and institutions. Though I would have liked to have seen hours of operation and entrance fees, if any, for each site.

The only serious fault I find with the book is some glaringly obvious omissions. Neither Hudson's Department Store nor Stroh's Brewery makes it into the book and except for Baker's Keyboard Lounge, historic bars and eateries are completely omitted. History lovers would take delight in being introduced to Abick's Bar. It is the longest family operated bar in Detroit and was founded in 1907. Recent remodeling uncovered prohibition-era bottles and two huge whiskey barrels that predate 1920. And then there's Tommy's Detroit Bar and Grill that has been serving thirsty Detroiters since the 1840s. Wayne State University Archaeology department worked a summer carefully excavating the bar's basement and discovered an underground tunnel used to smuggle liquor from the Detroit River during Prohibition and it is believed the bar was used as a waystation on the Underground Railroad. During the 1920s it was a reputed hangout of the notorious Purple Gang.

That said the book serves as a very good introduction to and a self-guided tour of nearly all of Detroit's most significant historical sites in the Auto City's greater downtown area.

A History Lover's Guide to Detroit by Karin Risko. History Press, 2018, $21.99.



Any of the books reviewed in this blog may be purchased by clicking your mouse on the book's cover which will take you to Amazon where you can usually purchase the book at a discount. By using this blog as a portal to Amazon and purchasing any product helps support Michigan in Books.











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Post # 43

Quote for the day:  "Michigan has put the world on automobile wheels, (but) Michigan novelists are still jogging along in one-hoss shays." Arnold Mulder. Saturday Review of Literature. March 4, 1939."

A brief rebuttal. Jim Harrison, John Smolins, Robert Traver, Elmore Leonard, Joyce Carol Oates, Bruce Catton, Edmund Love, Iola Fuller, and Ernest Hemingway. Those are the authors this 70-some-year-old with a failing memory could think of within a couple minutes. Most, but certainly not all of the aforementioned admittedly blossomed into writers after 1939.

Reviews


Empty Promises: A Seamus McCree Novel
by James M. Jackson

Seamus McCree is in serious trouble again and that is always good news and good reading. Seamus is a financial analyst who specializes in busting big time crooks by untangling their financial records. Invariably in a Seamus McRee mystery, of which this is the sixth, things never go as planned and the man finds himself up to his receding hairline in mortally serious trouble.

In this latest outing, Seamus has talked his girlfriend, a professional bodyguard, into letting him guard a witness by taking the man to his remote cabin in the UP's Iron County until he is due in court. That should be simple enough but the first time Sheamus goes to town and leaves his charge behind in the cabin he returns to an empty cabin. Outraged at his unprofessionalism, his girlfriend dumps him. It appears an assassin is on the trail of the man he was guarding and may decide to take out Seamus as well. Then there's the murdered body Seamus finds in the woods while searching for the witness he is supposed to be guarding, and the old human bone his Golden Retriever granddog proudly finds not far from the site where Seamus stumbles across the body. If that isn't enough trouble, Seamus is also withholding evidence from the sheriff of Iron County.

Seamus knows if he can't find his witness and unravel the mystery of two murders, that apparently occurred twenty-years apart, he'll land either in jail or six feet under. The pace is furious, the narrative is relentless, and contains more hairpin twists and turns than the Brockway Mountain Drive in the Keweenaw Peninsula. Seamus is a well-drawn main character but the author is equally adept at creating believable, always interesting, and singularly original UP  characters. Jackson captures the enchantment and rugged wilderness of the western UP and makes this reader and probably many others wish they could simply finish the book and head for Big Mac. 

As always, another thoroughly enjoyable mystery from a very dependable writer, and that's no empty promise.

Empty Promises by James M. Jackson. Wolf's Echo Press, 2018, $14.95 pb.


Welcome to Republica Dodge
by Natalie Ruth Joynton

This wise, fresh, and honest memoir asks if a young woman, from Houston, Texas who likes big cities, was raised a Methodist and converted to the Jewish faith, can find happiness and fulfillment living in a wood-heated old farmhouse some fifteen miles from Ludington, outside internet service range, a hundred miles from the nearest synagogue, and married to an atheist. To top off the author's northern Michigan other-world experience the house's previous owner built a replica of 1880s Dodge City when it was a lawless cowtown in the farm house's front yard. She also mistook deer blinds for outhouses and wondered why residents built them so far from the house.

The author felt totally out of place and "at odds with the Michigan countryside," and found the slowness of rural life hard to get used to. The reason for the move to the Ludington area was that both the author and her fiance landed teaching jobs with the local community college. They bought the house before they were married and her husband-to-be was fine with being married by a rabbi but the author finds it nearly impossible to locate a rabbi from Michigan or the surrounding states willing to marry them. It seems many rabbi's refuse to marry interfaith couples.

This intelligent and engaging memoir is a meditation on home, religion, family, and being culturally adrift. The author explores her doubts about Christianity, which began in childhood, her eventual conversion to the Jewish faith, and how hard it is to practice her faith without a synagogue or even meeting a fellow Jew in Ludington. It's interesting to view Michigan, especially rural Michigan, through the eyes of a young, life-long, urban Southerner. She slowly comes to terms with Michigan winters and beginnings to look at rural Ludington as home, for at least the near future. And she finds a rabbi that will marry them in their barn. The local, small German religious sect loans the couple their tables for the wedding and in return asked to be invited to the wedding because they have never seen a Jewish marriage ceremony.

From the first page to last the book is enjoyable, informative, and a view of rural Michigan from a new and definitely different perspective. In five years I would like to read where life has taken Natalie Ruth Joynton. Does she still live in Michigan and has she continued to adapt to the state? How difficult is it to raise Jewish children in an area that has no Jewish community, and if she's moved out of state how does she reflect on her Michigan experience? The book is well worth your time and may well have you reflecting on your journey through life.

Welcome to Replica Dodge, A Memoir by Natalie Ruth Joynton. Wayne State University Press, 2019, $18.99.  https://www.wsupress.wayne.edu/books/detail/welcome-replica-dodge



Michigan's Strychnine Saint: The Curious Case of  Mrs. Mary McKnight
by Tobin T. Buhk

Death followed Mary McNight around like a rabid puppy. She was eventually convicted of killing her brother, sister-in-law, and their baby with Strychnine poison and is believed to have killed at least eleven others via poisoning including her two husbands. This succinct, readable, and absorbing book detailing the case of one of the earliest, if not first, Michigan serial killer is notable because the killer was a woman, the crimes took place in northern Michigan, and the earmarks of death by Strychnine  are so singular and horrendous it's hard to believe doctors kept filling out the death certificates of Mrs. McNights' victims miss-identifying the cause of death.

A victim of Strychnine poisoning has violent convulsions, foams at the mouth, their body twitches spasmodically, clenched fists turn white from the force of the grip, and the hands are suddenly snapped up toward the chest. Most significantly the back begins to arch and reaches the point where only the victim's heels and top of their head touch the bed. The grotesquely arched spine remains bowed even after death. When a Kalkaska doctor and the county D.A. became suspicious over McNight's brother's death they exhumed the body, removed the stomach, and send it downstate for analysis the corpse was still strung like a bow. When huge amounts of poison were found in her brother's stomach the corpses of his wife a baby were exhumed with similar results.

The murders and resulting trial made national news and were covered by nearly every paper in Michigan. The author gives a detailed account of the trial which was moved to Cadillac. The cost of the trial doubled Kalkaska County residents taxes. The only real mystery not settled in the book was Mary McNight's motive for taking so many lives. The author devotes the last chapter of the book to examine seven possible motives for McNights' murders and can't arrive at a conclusion. Mary McNight was found guilty of killing her brother. She served 18 years in the Detroit House of Correction and was paroled in June 1920.

The author has done a fine job of illuminating and recounting a little known but extraordinary chapter of Michigan history. A thorough bibliography, extensive photos, illustrations, and detailed footnotes compliment the narrative. 
Michigan's Strychnine Saint: The Curious Case of Mrs. Mary McNight by Tobin T. Buhk. History Press, 2014, $19.99



All of the books reviewed in this blog may be purchased by clicking your mouse on the book's cover which will take you to Amazon where you can usually purchase the book at a discount. By using this blog as a portal to Amazon and purchasing any product helps support Michigan in Books.





  

     









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