Books

Books Robert Downes Words of Wisdom
Matt Sutherland’s journal offers daily inspiration
By Robert Downes
Consider the following quote and how it might apply to your own life:

“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything in the universe.” -- John Muir.

That bit of wisdom by the legendary California naturalist is one of the quotes in Matt Sutherland’s new book, Go Seek: Journaling to Spiritual Fulfillment. The idea is to think about what Muir said about the interconnectedness of the universe and write out your own thoughts on several blank journal pages that follow the quote.
To aid you in that endeavor, Sutherland also includes some thoughts on how physicist Albert Einstein viewed “the connections between all elements of the universe, be it energy, matter, space or time.”
Spiritual stuff? That’s what Sutherland, 46, is hoping readers and journal writers will get out of his project, which has been published by Spirituality & Health Books, a firm launched by himself and his wife, Victoria, who is also the guiding light behind ForeWord Magazine in Traverse City.

Books Anne Stanton New Year’s Resolutions? Try putting them in pictures this year
By Anne Stanton
Have you vowed to never make another resolution, knowing that you’re
quite likely to fail?
The problem with New Year’s resolutions is that they’re more about
what you don’t want to do, as opposed to dreaming up a vision that
puts a smile on your face.

Books Anne Stanton Couple Makes
Torch Lake History
By Anne Stanton
Torch Lake is known for its beauty, as well as its summer flotilla of floating parties thanks to an endless sand bar. The vast emerald blue lake is reputed to be the inspiration for Kid Rock’s hit song, “All Summer Long.”
But, ever wonder how Torch Lake got its name?
The early settlers in the area saw Native American Indians waving birch bark torches along the shoreline in order to attract fish for supper.
You’ll find that fact along with all kinds of history about the Torch Lake area in Torch Lake, The History of Was-Wah-Go-Ning, a 436-page book with stories that trace the lake’s evolution from a frozen tundra to a resort that inspires rock song lyrics of catching “walleye off a dock and watching waves roll off the rock.” The book, priced at $60, features no less than 673 maps, drawings and photographs.
The book reflects the combined efforts of Mary Kay and Edward McDuffie, a wife and husband team. Ed (known as Eb to his close friends) focused on the area’s ancient history, glaciers and maps, while Mary Kay compiled the more recent information and wrote most of the text.

Books Top 20: Michigan Notable Books
Each year, the Library of Michigan compiles its list of 20 Notable Books highlighting Michigan people, places, and events.
Short stories of people living on the rough side of life in Detroit; a biography of the state’s first geologist; and a children’s book that tells the story of a slave family’s flight to freedom are among this year’s most notable Michigan books.
“This year’s Michigan Notable Books bring to life the Michigan experience through vivid storytelling that creates portraits of the people and places that make Michigan great,” said State Librarian Nancy Robertson. “These books celebrate Michigan as a place and a people that even in the most trying of times find transformation.”
Michigan Notable Books is a statewide program that began as part of the 1991 Michigan Week celebration, geared to pay tribute and draw attention to the people, places and things that make Michigan life unique.
The 2009 Michigan Notable Books are:

Books Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli Hardcovers & Hard Cider
Book sale brings female authors together
By Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli
Hardcovers and Hard Cider don’t sound like two things that normally go together. But they’ll both be offered by local women writers when they gather to sell their books for holiday gift giving at the Mercato in the Village at the Grand Traverse Commons on Friday, December 18, from 4-9 p.m. Cider will be offered, along with the writers talking about their craft and sharing the holiday season.

Books Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli Meth & Mayhem Make their Mark in
American Salvage
American Salvage
By Bonnie Jo Campbell
Wayne State University Press
$18.95

By Elizabeth Buzzelli
Bonnie Jo Campbell’s American Salvage, from Wayne State University’s ‘Made in Michigan Writer’s Series,’ is ugly in the stories of sad and stupid people who do harm to themselves and others, but beautiful in prose that cuts deeply into places where good writing should go.

Books Robert Downes Book Round-Up
What’s new from local authors
By Robert Downes 11/9/09

Books about Northern Michigan topped the mailbag at the Express this fall as a number of authors explored fictional territory that is ‘close to home.’ Here’s a round-up of what’s new on bookstore shelves:

Echoes of L’Arbre Croche by Donald A. Johnston is a re-write of a 1917 mystery novel called The Indian Drum.
L’Arbre Croche is French for Cross Village -- once a large town of Ottawa Indians, as well as Pottawatomies and the Chippewa. As the book notes, every time someone dies out on Lake Michigan, an Indian drum sounds in the village to mark their passage.

Books Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli From Sex to Glass Ceilings
The Shriver Report Updates Women’s Progress

THE SHRIVER REPORT:
A Woman’s Nation Changes Everything
By Maria Shriver, edited by Heather Boushey
Available as an ebook or as a free PDF download at www.americanprogress.org/issues

By Elizabeth Buzzelli 11/2/09

Women have come a long way, according to a new study on women published this month as The Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation Changes Everything.
The report, available only as an e-book or as a free online download, was authored by Maria Shriver and edited by Heather Boushey (a senior economist with The Center for American progress), and Ann O’Leary (Executive Director of the Berkeley Center for Health, Economic, and Family Security).

Books Rick Coates Bob Seger
Turns a Page

Travelin’ Man On The Road and Behind The Scenes With Bob Seger
By Thomas Weschler & Gary Graff
Wayne State University Press

By Rick Coates 10/19/09

Rock stars have an inner circle and those that are a part of it live by a code: “What happens on the road stays on the road.” Because of that code, at times it is hard to get the real story and some musicians have tighter inner circles than others. Bob Seger is one of them. For his fans, little is really known about Seger except what can be deciphered through his lyrics.
Sure, there have been articles and interviews, but Seger really has only bared his soul on stage. Those closest to him have shared memories in casual conversations. But the man responsible for forging the Midwestern singer/songwriter sound has remained more of a “mystery man” than a “travelin’ man.”
Now, the silence that has surrounded Seger over his 45-year musical career might be changing. A new book by photographer and former Seger road manager Thomas Weschler and music journalist Gary Graff opens the shades of secrecy on Detroit’s favorite son, although only slightly.

Books Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli A Nun Meets a Tragic End in Isadore’s Secret
Isadore’s Secret
Mardi Link
U of M Press
$22.95

By Elizabeth Buzzelli 10/19/09

In 1907 a young nun was murdered and buried beneath Holy Rosary Church in the Leelanau County village of Isadore. Isadore’s Secret, by true-crime writer, Mardi Link, captures the despicable crime, and extends the fascination, disgust, and sadness to yet another generation.
It was the summer of 1907. Sister Janina, 33, disappeared from the convent in the bucolic village of Isadore, a town of Polish immigrants devoted to family, priest, and their church. At that time the clergy held sway over people who were superstitious, uneducated, and—like small towns everywhere—inundated with gossip. Rumors ran through town. It was said the nun had run off, leaving the convent because she was unhappy with her life there. Soon it was rumored that she was pregnant.

Books Erin Crowell When Angels Intervene
Detective Ingrid Dean delves into the paranormal in Spirit of the Badge

By Erin Crowell 10/5/09

It’s hard to argue that police work is not the usual nine-to-five job. It’s a career of long, lonely hours, dealing with unique situations and people. We hear about them in the news – the routine traffic stop gone wrong, the burglar who got away, the standoff lasting hours. But, what we rarely hear about are the personal stories of those officers, the good stories – the ordinary, the extraordinary, and for some, the unexplainable.
Ingrid Dean, a 20-year veteran of the Michigan State Police, gathered some of those stories and wrote a book: Spirit of the Badge: 60 True Police Stories of Divine Guidance, Miracles, & Intuition. Released on October 1, the book is a collection of first-hand, written accounts by police officers from around the country. While some stories may be interpreted in the realm of the paranormal and the divine, all show a side of law enforcement we rarely get to see.
Dean – who has served as a field detective for there years, was a polygraph examiner for 12 years and worked the road for six – is currently a detective sergeant and forensic artist for the Seventh District Michigan State Police Post in Traverse City.

Books Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli Lost in Detroit
Short stories dust up urban grit

Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli 8/31/09

The Lost Tiki Palaces of Detroit
By Michael Zadoorian
WSU Press - $18.95

It’s exciting to read something truly new, passionate stories woven as if from the web of the writer’s being. That’s what is found in Michael Zadoorian’s The Lost Tiki Palaces of Detroit.
These newly envisioned stories of Detroit come at you without apology for the gritty language of the city, the racism, the madness of everyday life. The whiff of ‘presence,’ of being there, grabs at your throat. I was compelled to read on by an author who knows how to involve readers with his implied promise: Stay with me here. I’ve got something new to show you.
In ‘The World of Things’ the son of a recently-dead mother has been tantalized for years by the kitschy detritus of her life, kept in a locked basement. My mother put a lock on our basement door when she decided I was after everything she owned, her son says. He is a collector of all things from the early ‘60s, that era when my parents were in their prime, living in a good white middle-class Detroit neighborhood.
He collects his mother’s memories, in the guise of Danish Modern and limned-oak furniture; things ludicrously self-serious with their commitment to the well-living of the American dream as if collecting her -- in bits and pieces. What he finds in that basement, kept from him for so long, is a rebuke for trifling with other people’s lives, and a slap at his need to collect what his mother once valued -- the bits and pieces that defined her, for reasons having nothing to do with family memory but having much to do with separating himself from his heritage.

Books Robert Downes The One to Read this Summer
The Living Great Lakes by Jerry Dennis
By Robert Downes 8/24/09

Informative, wise, funny -- and an adventure story to boot -- The Living Great Lakes: Searching for the Heart of the Inland Seas by Jerry Dennis is a page-turner that reads like a novel while informing you on par with a college education on the history, geology and biology of our region’s greatest resource.
Published in 2003 to widespread acclaim, The Living Great Lakes is this summer’s selection by TC Reads, a community book club sponsored by the Friends of the Traverse Area District Library that takes a crack at a different title each year from April-October, followed by a public event with the author.
The book delves Michener-style into the natural history of the Great Lakes, taking you back 600 million years or so to a time when Northern Michigan lay beneath a saltwater sea, filled with critters whose exoskeletons would someday become our Petoskey stones.
But before you can grow bored with the Paleozic Era, Dennis skips to the recent past and his adventures getting seasick on his first tack with the Chicago-Mackinac Race; or the fun of crewing on the Malabar on its cruise along the St. Lawrence Seaway.

Books Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli Unlocking the World of Writer Gloria Whelan

By Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli 8/10/09

The Locked Garden
By Gloria Whelan
Harper Collins - $15.99

I met up with writer Gloria Whelan at Horizon Books in Traverse City where she had come to do a book signing for her newest young adult novel, The Locked Garden. Gloria and I have a history that goes back a few years. I’d interviewed her often while sitting on the deck of her lovely home overlooking Oxbow Lake in Mancelona, watching deer come to drink on the shore and loons gliding past; and talking of literature, writing and writers through the afternoon hours.
I missed those afternoon teas we’d shared and, now that’s she’s moved to southern Michigan after the death of her husband, Joseph, I couldn’t help but ask if she missed Northern Michigan.
“I miss Oxbow Lake and the woods every day of my life,” she said. “I’ve never really left it. We travel, you know, with all kinds of worlds in our heads.”
One of the worlds inside Whelan’s head is one other fiction writers might only dream of. A couple of years ago her book, Homeless Bird, won a National Book Award, one of the most prestigious prizes in American Literature. She and her husband were in New York City for the presentations. “All the other winners went off for a night of partying and drinking,” she said at the time. “Joe and I went back to our hotel room.”
Evidently, life back in the woods outside of Mancelona doesn’t prepare one for dissipation and the high life.

Books Kelsey Lauer Inside the Heads of Generation X

By Kelsey Lauer 8/10/09

backpocket e-pistles
By Mike Darigan
Skellum Imaginations, Inc.
264 pages — $11

“It’s about getting off the track and onto something different, maybe not a road,” writes Josh Meritz, one of four young men in backpocket e-pistles.
And that is exactly what the four close friends — Mike Darigan, Josh Meritz, Cleveland Winfield and Perry Panzarella—proceed to do over the course of a year as they study at four different universities—step off the beaten path and onto one of their own making to escape the pressures of modern society and learn who they truly are.