Review by Sharon Brunner The journey of a prominent Upper Peninsula poet, T. Kilgore Splake, was as significant as the destination, as Robert M. Zoschke details in his new biography The Road to Splake. Thomas Smith, Splake’s given name, grew up in Three Rivers, Michigan with two older sisters. His…
Review by Donna Winters Dance Your Dance, Sing Your Song, a True Story By Dorothy Paad with Heather Picotte, illustrated by Matthew Forgrave. It was the first day of orientation at Northern Michigan University and it was a total zoo. With those words, Dorothy Paad opens Dance Your Dance, Sing…
“Michigan Tech Hockey: 100 Years of Memories” just released by Bill Sproule with the help of Calvin Larson, Michigan Tech’s Assistant Athletic Director, is the definitive encyclopedia of Huskies Hockey history. The book is chock full of in-depth information on every season from 1920 to 2021 and was commissioned for…
Review by Victor R. Volkman At first glance, Joseph D. Haske’s North Dixie Highway is a rage-fueled trip through three generations of an Eastern U.P. family locked in a cycle of grinding poverty, trauma, and alcoholism. But beneath the surface there’s much more lurking as we follow this broken family…
Review by Deborah K. Frontiera On the first read, A Halloween Scare in Michigan is a cute, rhymed with good rhythm children’s picture book aimed at the four-to-eight-year-old set. It has that sing-song type rhyme that kids love and rolls off the tongue with ease. Not all rhymed books achieve…
Review by Deborah K. Frontiera Board books are designed for the very youngest children who sit in an adult’s lap being read to, children who may still chew on and rip pages. So, they have few pages and few words on each page. All Aboard! Great Lakes has 18 pages…
Review by Victor R. Volkman Larry Buege’s autobiographical Growing Up in Sparta And Other Adventures is a story in three acts. In the first act, he describes the realities of growing up in the 1950s in a small rural Midwestern town of Sparta, Michigan (population 4,000). As the author points…
Review by Deborah K. Frontiera Since this reviewer, who has no talent for the visual arts, and when at her own booth at an art/craft show, often tells people, “I paint with words,” she has deep respect for visual artists in any medium. She also has two siblings in visual…
