Reviewed by Victor R. Volkman Brockway Mountain Stories is a beautifully illustrated tribute to the 2013 decision of Clyde and Lloyd Wescoat to relinquish their family’s nearly 80 year ownership of the 320 acres which comprised Brockway’s summit. Through a consortium of public and private donors both large and small,…
Reviewer: Sharon Brunner Mikel B. Classen’s “Piracy on the Great Lakes: True Tales of Freshwater Pirates” offers thought-provoking information about piracy, including attacking, robbing, and hijacking various types of watercraft and their crew. Piracy has occurred on the Great Lakes since the 1700s. Voyageurs in canoes transporting tons of furs…
You can now download and read “Wolves of Isle Royale” by L. David Mech, the classic 1966 book published by the National Park Service. As you know, any book published by a US Government agency is automatically in the public domain (your tax dollars at work!) Read Wolves of Isle…
Review by Sharon Brunner Denise Vandeville’s “A View of the Century Past: 1887 – 1987: Laird Township Centennial” presents a well-documented account of life in the wilderness of the Upper Peninsula (U.P.) of Michigan in a town called Alston—an area known for its freezing temperatures, logging operations and the mining…
Review by Mack Hassler “It is a poetry where the world becomes writing and language becomes the double of the world.” Octavio Paz I will blend in this review of Make It Go In the Snow ideas and effects that I have come across in my general reading on surrealism…
Review by Mack Hassler Recently I flew from O’Hare in Chicago to a conference at Moline, Illinois, and got a good look at the empty prairie West of the Windy City—wide open and empty like the UP. Two very big cities full of mob violence and major crime are the…
Review by Sharon Brunner Tom Chambers delved into the history of Mackinac Island, Michigan from the 1940s to the present in his memoir “Memories of a Mackinac Island Native.” The island is located in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan near the town of St. Ignace, Michigan. It served as a…
Review by Jon C. Stott In 1948, retired Michigan lumber company owner William S. Crowe, surprised to discover how little members of the Manistique community knew about the later 19th and early 20th-century white pine logging era of the Upper Peninsula, began writing for local newspapers a series of essays…
Review by Tyler R. Tichelaar Jennifer McGraw has compiled a treasure trove of information about Father Marquette’s life, burial, and various unburials and reburials in The Unsolved Mysteries of Father Marquette’s Many Graves. The story of Father Marquette’s graves—yes, multiple graves—ranges from his death in 1675 to the most recent…
Nobody predicted that 2023 would be the “year of the wildfire”. Where I live most of the year in downstate Michigan, we were inundated by the smoke from Canadian wildfires in early Summer 2023. As a result of this conflagration, my wife and I both woke up coughing and with…
Review by Deborah K. Frontiera In her new book Impermance: Life and Loss on Superior’s South Shore, Sue Leaf details the constant change in Lake Superior’s south shore through memoir-like phases of her own life and relationship with the lake in an artistic way with vivid descriptions. Both people’s lives…
Indians and Other Misnomers of the Upper Great Lakes: The True Indigenous Origins of Geographic Place Names, by Phil Bellfy (Modern History Press, Ann Arbor, MI 2023), 154 pages pbk, $25.95. Brockway Mountain Stories: The History of Brockway Mountain Drive and Keweenaw Mountain Lodge, by Paul LaVanway (Mudminnow Press, Copper…
Review by Brad Gischia Mikel Classen has spent most of his life traveling the Upper Peninsula and writing about the varied and colorful history of this remote place. In those travels he’s encountered any number of historians and those people have shared their collections and stories with him. Faces, Places,…
Reviewer by Sharon Brunner Michael Schumacher in his book Too Much Sea For Their Decks brought to life the remarkable history of shipping on the Great Lakes. He clearly delineated the perils faced by captains and the crews of shipwrecked schooners, wooden freighters, steel-hulled steamers, passenger vessels, whalebacks, and bulk…
New Book Highlights U.P.’s Most Prominent Architect Fred Charlton is not a household name in the U.P. or even in Marquette where he lived, yet he deserves to be as well known as Peter White, John M. Longyear, Louis G. Kaufman, and many other notable U.P. figures. Perhaps more than…
Review by Tyler Tichelaar In Digging Up the Truth and Other Big Bay Stories, Faye Bowers, a native of Big Bay, Michigan and longtime professional journalist, shares stories informed by her quest to set straight the historical record. The result is a series of stories that shed light into some…
Review by Mack Hassler Deborah K. Frontiera is a major voice in the writing of a UP literature, and I have been very interested in most of her work across several genres. She keeps trying new things. But history is a hard genre to get right. History is all we…
Review by Deborah K. Frontiera This short volume, Shipwreked and Rescued, is loaded with historic photographs, maps and charts, Larry Jorgenson presents the story of one of the more famous shipwrecks on Lake Superior, the City of Bangor and its cargo of Chrysler cars. The author begins with a brief…
