Review by Tyler R. Tichelaar I’ve always said that if I didn’t live in Marquette, I would want to live on Mackinac Island. Despite numerous trips to this beautiful isle, I’ve never stayed a night on the island, much less lived there year-round, so I’ve always been curious what it…
Review by Mack Hassler “…to tell the whole thing, going back to that first grisly night….back even further, in fact, to our days with Professor James at Harvard. Yes, to dredge it all up….” Caleb Carr, The Alienist (1994), p. 5 Tichelaar has produced a comprehensive book loaded with…
Review by Tyler R. Tichelaar In these pages, we might say the mystery of Bigfoot is solved, and yet, in all of his many aspects, as revealed by former two-time UP Poet Laureate Martin Achatz in this book, he becomes more enigmatic than ever. If you think you know Bigfoot,…
Review by Tyler R. Tichelaar I recently reviewed Jennifer S. McGraw’s nonfiction history book The Unsolved Mysteries of Father Marquette’s Many Graves. That book and this one may both have been inspired by the recent repatriation and reburial of Father Marquette’s (alleged) bones at St. Ignace in 2022. While McGraw…
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…
Review by Tyler R. Tichelaar In Legacy of an Immigrant: Four Generations of Flying, Maria Vezzetti Matson shares the story of her incredible pioneer Italian-American family. This book, although based on Maria’s family history, is written as historical fiction. Maria takes some small license with the past and present to…
Review by Deborah Frontiera In Odin’s Eye: A Marquette Time Travel Novel, Tichelaar’s main character, John/Neill Vandelaare, wakes up with no memory of who he is or how he came to be in a bed in the home of the Allen family. The year is 1900, the place, Marquette, Michigan….
Review by Mack Hassler Trained as a medievalist but now working mostly with stories about Marquette in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, Tyler Tichelaar has learned how to weave in and out of time references perhaps from his work with Chaucer or the King Arthur stories. He has done a…
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…
Novel Full of Quirky Characters You Come to Care About Review by Tyler R. Tichelaar Leif Enger’s Virgil Wander is an intriguing novel that manages to rope the reader in without a lot of sensational hooks, but instead, real-life characters in real-life situations. Set in a small town in northern…
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…
Marquette County’s Medical History Explored Reviewed by Tyler R. Tichelaar The Macabre to the Mundane: Death, Life, and Medicine in Marquette County Michigan during the Early 1900’s—with Covid 2020 Updates by John Parlin, M.D., reminds me of the fat old medical books my grandmother used to own that looked like…
New Novel Reveals Pain of Native American Children Taken from Families Review by Tyler R. Tichelaar Linda LeGarde Grover’s new novel, In the Night of Memory, is a powerful and moving story about two young girls who lose their mother. Dedicated to “the missing Native women and all who grieve…
Kawbawgam Finally Tells the True Tale of Marquette’s Most Famous Chief Reviewed by Victor R. Volkman Kawbawgam: The Chief, The Legend, The Man by Tyler R. Tichelaar, PhD, is the first woke history of Native Americans in Upper Michigan that I have read. I’ll go so far as to presume…
Tichelaar’s New Tale of Marquette Highlights T.R.’s 1913 Visit When Teddy Came to Town by Tyler R. Tichelaar tells the story of the brief tenure of then former President Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt’s visit to Marquette in the Spring of 1913. Roosevelt had been accused of being a drunkard by local…
