Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli

Features Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli The man, Pasquale Buzzelli, called me because he heard I wrote books. He
needed help getting his story down on paper. His name was the same as
mine—Buzzelli. Unusual, even as Italian surnames go. Coincidence, the
man said and we agreed to meet in New York City where I would listen to
what happened to him on September 11, 2001.

Books Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli Suicide Sonnet
A sheriff’s past revealed in Medieval Murders
Review: Medieval Murders
By Aaron Stander
Writers & Editors, LLC
$15.95

By Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli

Since reading the first book in the Ray Elkins series by Interlochen mystery writer, Aaron Stander, I’ve wondered about Ray. More than a capable sheriff in Cedar County, Michigan, Ray is quiet and caring and tenacious—but self-protective and slightly reluctant to open himself to anyone.
Ray’s a good cop. He always gets his man. He has eclectic tastes in music, literature and food (especially Stilton cheese), has good relationships with women, and is a thoroughly likeable man. But there was something more.

Books Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli A Civil War soldier wins an inner conflict in
Echoes
Echoes of Distant Thunder
By Frank P. Slaughter
Arbutus Press

By Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli

You’re going to like Will Castor. This simple Civil War soldier is going to captivate you and show you a very different kind of war. “Echoes of Distant Thunder” by Frank P. Slaughter isn’t one of those big Civil War books we’re all used to, but something much smaller and more personal, a look into the depths and scope of one man’s soul.
The story begins in 1971 with an inheritance coming to Paul, Will Castor’s great great grandson: an antique wooden box containing some old letters, a pocket watch, and a Civil War-era revolver. The watch, inscribed “Love Always, Mollie,” is a mystery as is Will’s tombstone with the word “Peep” carved beneath the Civil War designation of Pvt Bat D 1st Mich Art (Private in Battery D, 1st Michigan Artillary).
With these two mysteries in place we’re sent back in time. Chickamauga, Georgia, September 20, 1863. Another sleepless night for Union private, Will Castor, and a day of relentless battle. The Union is losing ground. They are withdrawing. Since just before daylight the cold, heavy air had carried the deep rumble of artillery fire to them from somewhere over on the left, and it had steadily increased in volume and urgency as the morning wore on.
The battle continued: The guns of Battery D were taking a terrible toll on the Confederates as they crossed the old cornfield, but they could not fire fast enough to stem the tide, and all six guns were running out of ammunition.

Books Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli Okay, Michigan’s in this book: Wire to Wire by Scott Sparling (Tin House Books).
Detroit. Hell. Traverse City. Charlevoix. Wolverine (not the real Wolverine, another Wolverine). So I get to review it. Here goes. Hold on to your seat.
Wire to Wire is called “a stunning homage to one of our most popular and enduring genres—the American Crime novel” by the publishers.
Oh yeah? Let’s just sink into this down and dirty mystery (?) with mean drug dealers and murdering creeps, with one stoned protagonist and his freight car jumping friend. Oh, and don’t forget the women—every single female character is dropped like mud on the page, for sex, for titillation, or to die. Their choice. Well, somebody’s choice.

Books Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli South of Superior 
By Ellen Airgood
Riverhead Books/Penguin Group
$25.95

As small towns go, McAllaster, Michigan, isn’t much.  Typical UP town.  It’s got plain people, a lot of characters, a few newbies out to change a culture in place for a few hundred years, and some who just want to fit in.  This town’s got elderly sisters and down-at-the-heels oldsters who live off the land.  It’s got struggling businesses, and people with hope, and those without hope.  Everything small town’s have is here in McAllaster, the centerpiece of a first novel by Ellen Airgood, who runs a diner in Grand Marais, and captures people, places, life, and small stories writ large in “South of Superior.”

Books Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli Adoption, Guatemalan Style: Between Light and Shadow: A Guatemalan Girl’s Journey through Adoption
By Jacob Wheeler
University of Nebraska Press
$24.95
By Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli
Jacob Wheeler may be too honest. He may be too perplexed by a heartbreaking reality. He may be so torn by the state of Guatemalan adoption that he can’t morally bring himself to make a definitive statement. All of that and more is evident in his book, “Between Light and Shadow: A Guatemalan Girl’s Journey through Adoption.”
From wanting to applaud American couples saving children from poverty and early death to decrying the loss of a country’s babies, it is evident that Wheeler is torn.
On one hand there is the story of 14-year-old Ellie, a teenager from Traverse City, adopted at the age of seven from Guatemala. She was seemingly sought out by corrupt facilitators when an older child, rather than a baby, was sought after. Whether her birth mother gave her up knowingly with the expectation of being paid, or was tricked and tried to get her back—truth lies somewhere in a murky middle.
The story’s center swirls around Ellie at 14, after seven years still feeling ‘the hole in her heart’ where her other family lives. And there is her adoptive mother, Judy, who wants to help heal this child she’s come to love as her own through reuniting Ellie with her Guatemalan family—at least for a visit.

Books Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli Relatively Speaking memoir is a family affair
By Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli
It’s All Relative
By Wade Rouse
Crown Publishers
$23.99
The thing about Wade Rouse’s new memoir “It’s All Relative,” is that you shouldn’t expect a clown show. Maybe his last memoir, “At Least in the City Someone Would Hear Me Scream,” began with a raccoon on his head but don’t expect this one to be all snickers and titters, though, of course, they’re in here too.
The ‘relatives’ of the title are his mother, father, extended Ozark family, friends, and his lover, Gary. The encounters with all of them are viewed not with a jaundiced eye, poking fun, but with loving honesty about the people of his life and about himself.
The book takes a look at a year of celebrations — not from any one year but celebrations from all the years of his life beginning with past New Year’s Eves, to Oscar Parties, Ash Wednesdays, Valentine’s Day, birthdays, Easter, Secretary’s Day, Barbie’s Birthday, Halloween and, of course, Thanksgiving and Christmas. All those holidays we dread and look forward to and keep in our memories for the sweetness of them and for the disappointments (well, maybe not Barbie’s Birthday).
So, let’s jump into this swift-flowing river of memory, starting with some of my favorites, both funny and poignant. There is the Oscar party when Gary dressed up as Oscar himself, draped in gold lamé, only to find that gold lamé “Is highly chaffing.”

Books Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli Judge recalls a state senator’s assassination in 1945
1/31/11
“To Account for Murder”
By William C. Whitbeck
The Permanent Press, $28
By Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli
Murder and politics made uneasy bedfellows back in the Michigan of 1945. It was a time, just after World War II, when governmental corruption ran wide and deep through the state; when contracts went to the one who most generously greased a palm or two; and when deals were hammered out in Lansing clubs and bars, and in backrooms where whiskey flowed and paid-for women freely entertained.
Then came crusaders like Judge Leland Carr and special prosecutor Kim Sigler, who later became governor of Michigan, with subpoenas and indictments flying in all directions, shaking up the Purple Gang -- which was behind a lot of the corruption -- and the politicians happily at home in the gangsters’ pockets.

Books Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli A Daughter Remembers Alice
By Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli
The new memoir, “I Remember Alice: A Story of Her Family, An Unusual Courtship, and Counseling of the Spirit” self-published by Palma Richardson of Traverse City, is an odd book. I was confused many times as I read it: who was who, who was related to whom, where I was in time. The book has all the problems of most self-published books, and yet I was charmed by not only the author’s voice, but the voices of family members who chimed in from time to time as if everyone sat around the family dinner table, maybe after a wake, trotting out their memories—good and bad.

Books Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli Years ago, Don Piper was pronounced dead after a horrific auto accident crushed his car. For 90 minutes he lay lifeless, with medics attending to others since he was without a pulse. It wasn’t until a friend and pastor, who happened to be in the area, stopped to pray with the dead man and sing over him, that Piper returned to life, waking to his own voice singing a much-loved hymn.

Books Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli The wilds of Isle Royale come to life in Naked in the Stream
Naked in the Stream: Isle Royale Stories
By Vic Foerster
Arbutus Press
$19.95
By Elizabeth Buzzelli
If you liked Bill Bryson’s “A Walk in the Woods,” you’re going to love “Naked in the Stream: Isle Royale Stories” by Vic Foerster.
Forester’s tales of almost 30 years camping and canoeing and hiking on Isle Royale and surrounding islands is not only a captivating read, but instructive, throat-catching, and deeply knowing, the way good outdoor books should be.
In beautifully clear prose, he writes about the vagaries of weather so far north, as well as about people he’s met along the way. There are stories of encounters with animals and stories about himself—what he’s learned and how Isle Royale has made him the man he’s become.

Books Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli What to Read? Summer’s Best Beach Books
By Elizabeth Buzzelli
Yes, another list of books to read while on vacation, sitting on a
quiet beach, in a summer house, in a garden—any place you dream of
being and don’t often get to.

Books Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli Soul Searching: Three take top prize in Michigan Writers Chapbook Contest
By Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli
As all writers eventually discover, writing is a lonely business. Not just the hours spent at a computer, but the aftermath — trying to sell the work that has kept the writer busy for months, or even years. As local writer John Mauk notes: “Authors can’t write and then fall into a hole… Authors have to carry their work into the world — even when it’s heavy.”

Books Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli A traveler finds meaning in unexpected places: An American Map:
Essays by Anne-Marie Oomen
Wayne State University Press, $18.95
Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli
“Why do you think we have so many good writers here in the North?” a doctor recently asked me.
Maybe he didn’t add the ‘good.’ That might be my own addition because that’s how I feel, and that’s what makes me proud of where I live: these good writers who circle us with golden words and take our lives deeper, make them brighter.
“An American Map: Essays by Anne-Marie Oomen,” is a fine book by a northern writer cutting a sometimes microscopic and sometimes a deep and wide swath into our hearts and minds.
Oomen, a writing instructor at Interlochen Arts Academy, uses moments from her life to facet experience, finding small and large truths in unusual places. Moving from Empire, Michigan, across the United States, to Puerto Rico, and back to the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, Oomen unrolls a different kind of landscape, a deeper travelogue, pulling unexpected meaning from unexpected places.
“Stone Wounds” honors the sacred. In Mount Cardigan, New Hampshire, Oomen is mountain climbing when she comes to rest against a slab of granite running with veins of quartz. “ …long lines crossing and crisscrossing this rock like a child’s script, teasing some words or a story just to the edge of recognition—a mystery, almost a meaning. I hear in the abrupt wind some question I do not understand. Then I remember,” she writes.

Books Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli Michael Delp Seeks Answers Through Short Stories
By Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli
As If We Were Prey
By Michael Delp
Wayne State University Press
The magic thing about writers is that we get to watch the way they think. They leave a trail of pebbles behind them, a body of work that, with good writers, expands, then flattens into a wide vista of explored ideas.
Michael Delp, teacher of creative writing at Interlochen Arts Academy and writer of many books of poetry and fiction, including: Over the Graves of Horses, Under the Influence of Water and more, is one of these good writers. With, As if We Were Prey, his new book of Michigan-based short stories from Wayne State University Press, he takes old and new themes and drives them and us to new places.