Review by Mack Hassler “Mark Twain’s Huck Finn underlies all American Literature” Character of Hemingway in Midnight in Paris (2011) by Woody Allen When he writes, produces, and directs film, Woody Allen can be brilliant. In the epigraph above, he captures an idea about Hemingway often found in scholarly work. …
Review by Jon C. Stott “Travelling over the Mackinac Bridge always gives me a feeling of stepping back in time, where the pace of life slows a bit and folks wave as they pass on the road, whether they know you or not.” This is how Bob Otwell, who, with…
Review by Mack Hassler Mazza recently retired from thirty-one years of teaching in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois in Chicago and has moved to the Upper Peninsula, so we can now consider her as a Yooper writer. She is a native of Southern California and has…
Review by Victor Volkman The first thing I was struck by in reading “Farmed Out in Ontonagon County” by Pat Winton was the extensive overlap between this first-person memoir of growing up in the U.P. and the fictional “SideRoad Kids” series of books by Sharon M. Kennedy. You may remember…
Review by Mack Hassler “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men” Matthew 4:19 Do the Right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest.” Mark Twain, epigraph to Chapter 22 One of the things that interests me about all of literature, reaching back even to…
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 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…
Review by Mack Hassler The self-publishing of one’s work can, now and then, lead to books that are very strange and that hardly fit into any pattern of literature. I Married a Troll: My Husband Married a Yooper is a nicely printed and well-bound, tidy book in appearance. At the…
Review by Mack Hassler The Diaries of a Marshall Islands Peace Corps Volunteer (1975 – 1977) is a non-fiction volume that is loaded with wonderful photographs from a part of the globe about as distant from the snowy North as one can get as well as distant in time from…
Review by Mack Hassler So many people never live long enough nor have the inclination to write a memoir. Those who do have a great responsibility. Not only memory and accurate detail but also they need the art to construct something of imagination. I think Joe Kirkish steps up nicely…
Review by Brad Gischia “Perspective is where you stand and how you measure the world you pass through.” This line, in relation to the passage it was pulled from, is important. In relation to the work as a whole, this line perfectly shows what D.J. Williams has done in his…
Review by Tyler R. Tichelaar New Book Inspires With Words, Poetry, Art, and Wisdom Chandra Ziegler’s new book Extraordinary Endurance: A Training Plan for the Marathon of Life is a unique book that gives the reader a look into the beauty of its author’s soul as she tries to juggle…
T. Marie Bertineau’s new memoir, The Mason House, published by Lanternfish Press, shares the author’s story of growing up in the 1970s through to the present. The title references a house in the small community of Mason, a former mining town in the Keweenaw Peninsula, which belonged to the author’s…
Ironwood Native Son and Playwright Details His Struggles for Acceptance and Love Reviewed by Victor R. Volkman Raymond Luczak’s collection of autobiographical essays, Assembly Required: Notes From a Deaf Gay Life was accessible to me because it is very much the story of an outsider growing up in the 1980s. …
