Minnesota Books

The system that Stan Tekiela uses for his field guides is clear and easily understandable. You can easily find the bird you saw and identify it! This book is great for beginners, but adds fun and interesting facts that everyone can enjoy. I have had all kinds of field guides for more than 25 years; and now that I have discovered these, I reach for them first every time. "Birds of Prey of Minnesota" works just as well for Wisconsin and other surrounding states. In fact, we have pretty much the same birds of prey here in Illinois, Indiana, and Iowa. The tips that Stan gives for telling one species from another are second to none. He chooses points of identification that are easily visible. What can I say, I love this book!

Using the history of Aunt Jemima as a springboard for researching
the affinity between African-Americans and food, BLACK HUNGER
focuses on debates that have been waged over the term 'soul food'
since the tumultuous era of the late 1960's and early 1970's.

BLACK HUNGER looks specifically at how the association of African-
American women with food has helped structure twentieth-century
psychic, cultural, sociopolitical, and economic life in America.
An association that has blossomed into a complex web of political,
religious, sexual and racial tensions between Blacks and whites,
and within the Black community itself.

Doris Witt uses vaudeville, literature, film and cookbooks to
explore how food has been used to perpetuate and challenge racial
stereotypes. Hence, the main focus is the controversy surrounding
the authenticity of soul food and stereotypical views of black
women in the United States. Witt fervidlyly contends that Aunt
Jemima was not only used to sell pancakes, but also to perpetuate
post-Civil War race and gender hierarchies, including the
subordination of African-American women as servants, and white
fantasies of the nurturing mammy.

As I read this book, I sensed Witt raising her fist in a Black Power
salute and wielding her spatula like a sword; as if Aunt Jemima had
stepped off the pancake box with vengeance and fury. BLACK HUNGER,
which began many years ago as a dissertation at theUniversity of
Virginia, is now an extraordinary book that should claim a viable
place in African American history. This is a fascinating look at the
role of food in our culture.

Reviewed by aNN
of The RAWSISTAZ™ Reviewers

This book was meant to be the first of a three-part saga, similar to Rolvaag's other saga, Giants in the Earth. Having written this first part of the series, Rolvaag switched to writing the Giants in the Earth series; unfortunately, he died before he had the chance to finish this incredibly beautifully written series -- so it ends up being a permanent cliff-hanger, which will likely haunt the reader. The writing in this book is, in my humble opinion, lyrical, poetic, moving and compelling. The book is about a young Norwegian immigrant who comes to America. Gradually, he loses touch with his parents, who have stayed in Norway. His father, who could probably be described as lovable but antisocial, comes to America but ... well, if I told you what happens, it would spoil it for you. The book contains some references to Norwegian folklore, but the folklore is shrouded is some mystery; I suspect that Rolvaag intended to flesh out the meaning of the Longing Boat later in his series. Though I read the book about 8 years ago, I still remember the images that it evoked and long to know what Rolvaag had planned for the rest of the series.

This book is not quite as easy to read nor as interesting as Hanawault's book The Ties That Bound, but this book still gives insight into the culture of fifteenth century England. As a history and political science major, I greatly enjoyed reading a book that looks at history and literature to help create a broader perspective about what this time period was like. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in English history.

Wonderful book,rich in language and imagery. Mr. Hanson caught so many of the nuances of my memories of Northern Minnesota... not only its landscape, but its spiritual connections as well. Don't think you can just browse through the book and be done. It bids many readings and with each one you will be grateful that you took the time. I look forward to his next title....

BOOKWORKS: Making Books by Hand is published by Carolrhoda Books of Minneapolis, and so filled with projects that adults working with children may want to be selective in suggesting something simple like a collage & accordion book as a first step.

Whatever is chosen from the many varied examples is bound to be colorful and fun and give confidence which will lead to more complicated creations. Making the paper is a wonderfully squishy adventure which surprises and delights most beginners, even adults. Coloring or marbelizing paper is exciting,too. Sometimes words just tumble from one's imagination and soon the young artists have stories to write down, and perhaps decorate with block prints.

Gwenyth Swain introduces many interesting facts about the history of book-making, and you will feel the enthusiasm of the children pictured as they learn to make something "from scratch." The Minnesota Center for Book Arts offers classes to hundreds of lucky students but your library or community arts group could sponsor similar workshops. Participants could experiment with pop-ups for greeting cards, and make small bound books for special gifts. Their imaginations will suggest projects you can add in the back of the book.

The year 1849 was when Minnesota became a state; 1883 was the year the Northern Pacific Railroad celebrated the completion of its link between Minneapolis-St. Paul and the West coast. In between these years, the historically closely tied cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul grew from a "collection of huts and shanties" to a major national and international center of commerce. With the phone system, up-to-date plumbing, and electricity the cities brought in in the latter 1800s, they began to more and more resemble other major American cities. Wills meticulously follows the rapid growth of the two cities by focusing on the activity of the most important individuals in the area of commerce and the economy. She is methodical and complete in describing their outsized activities and the results of these, for the most part passing over their personalities and personal lives. Even the author's notes over 40 pages are worth going through for the facts and comments found in many. Wills is an assistant professor of history at Brooklyn College, CUNY. What her book lacks in color, it more than makes up for in substance and thoroughness. It's the fundamental economic history on Minneapolis and St. Paul in the middle decades of the 19th century.

An important dimension of the "meaning" of the border text exists in the difference between the referential codes of author and reader. Since the special ontology of the border text makes the reader a conspicuous collaborator in the "writing" of the text, the same relationship of difference can obtain between the reader and herself as between reader and author. For the reader willing to engage in "border crossing," the "non-identities among the codes of the writer, the reader(s), and "sociohistorical semiotic" contexts create an ontologically special place or space within which "a remembering occurs" whose form varies with the desires and historical and political knowledge of the border crosser. Framed by a largely theoretical introduction and a meditative conclusion on the semiotics of work by Sandinistas and Chicano poets as well as her own creative writing, Hicks's discussion of Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien años de soledad), Julio Cortázar's Hopscotch (Rayeula) and A Manual for Manuel (Libro de Manuel) and Luisa Valenzuela's He Who Searches (Como en la guerra) and Other Weapons (Cambio de armas) inventively challenges readers to "deterritorialize" their categories of literary and political analysis. Performance artist, video maker, and activist as well as tenured professor of comparative literature, Hicks has created a theoretical work that is to academic theory and criticism something like what performance art is to theater/art/literature-a kind of genre-free zone in which the relations among and between performer, performance, and spectator/reader, writer, and text are not governed by the logic of identities and identification. Hicks's book changes its shape-as a good border crosser, trickster, or shaman does-from a good though unorthodox academic book about interesting Latin American texts to a highly charged "border handbook," an invaluable guide to the "border effects" being played out and ignored in the Southern California (or "occupied Mexico") region from which Hicks has taken her inspiration. Hicks uses holography as her metaphor for the multidimensional border text. Her introduction, "Border Writing as Deterritorialization," is an intrepid and intelligent extension of the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in Anti-Oedpus and Kafka. In it she explains how holography creates an image from more than one direction: "A holographic image is created when light from a laser beam is split into two beam and reflected off an object. The interaction between the two resulting pattern of light is called an interference pattern,' which can be recorded on a holographic plate." By analogy, the border metaphor produces an interaction between the connotative matrices of more than one culture. The holographic "real," then, is always understood to be a translation rather than a representation. It actively undermines any hierarchical original/alien distinction, resisting domination by the "monocultural or nonholographic" real and giving the reader the opportunity, instead, to "practice multidimensional perception and nonsynchronous memory. " In her discussion of Cien años de soledad, for example, Hicks reflects on the collective amnesia about objects and their uses that afflicts the residents of Macondo after the arrival of the gypsies (with their ice) and the banana company. Read from a holographic perspective, she suggests, Macondo's amnesia may be seen less as an instance of "magical realism" than as "realist" or "historical" documentation of the cultural effects of technology and capitalist exploitation and commodification. The Anglo reader, meanwhile, is also made aware of the precapitalist, pretechnological referential codes she or he is lacking. Time is experienced nonsynchronously by both characters and readers. García Márquez's remarkable experiments with tense, the text's flight from linearity , and the wildly uneven development of its character has perhaps less to do with the "irrationality" of the inhabitants of Macondo than with the effects of cultural domination. But, just as characters in Cien años read and respond to events in Macondo differently, so readers can be expected to respond differently to border texts--which count on this manifestation of difference in their operation. Hicks mentions, almost in passing, an immensely suggestive instance of the kinds of difference that may obtain (and be overlooked in Anglo-American literary theory and criticism) among subjectivities belonging to the "same" place and time. For the Mexicanos living in the U.S.-Mexico border region of San Diego-Tijuana, the main, socially-structuring dichotomy tends not to be Freud's male-female, but documented-undocumented. An African-American gay male fiend of mine, raised in new Orleans and now teaching in another southern state, corroborates her point, observing that the race, much more than the gender, of the person he lives with is the issue in his community. Hicks argues that neither psychoanalysis nor Marxist categories are adequate to the critical study of the characters in the works of these three authors. On the contrary, both Freud and Marx offer equally treacherous paths away from the real for Valenzuela, whose texts, Hicks maintains, overtly reject European models of subjectivity. Valenzuela, in fact, presents us with the possibility that Argentina's frightful recent history is directly lined to the aesthetics of the Renaissance humanist subject, whose repression of whatever threatens it ends up maintaining the disease of fascism. According to Hicks, Valenzuela has responded to the situation in Argentina by rewriting entry into the stable order of the Lacanian symbolic as a betrayal, using the Lacanian model to indict the years of Argentina's "dirty war." Some of the epistemological impasses of postcolonial and postructuralist theory begin to appear less than absolute from this border vantage point. Hicks's close-up look at the holographic "real," a non-ontological and therefore not easily dominated cognitive space, may usefully complete the images of irremediably colonized spaces offered by theoreticians working with the history of the British presence in South Asia, for example. There will also be readers who resist this way out. Many of us prefer the nice, stable impasses of an essentially realist epistemology (and/or its deconstruction) to the radical multiculturalism advocated and practiced by Hicks, which literally leaves nothing, including "ourselves," the "same."

Excerpted from Marguerite Waller, Review of Border Writing, published in Comparative Literature, 1995.

Finally a comprehensive review of the journeys of Brackett's Minnesota Ballation Cavalry Volunteers. I was able to track the travels of one of my ancestors from his enlistment to untimely death in the Dakota Territory. Well written, informative and entertaining. A must for anyone looking for more information about this segment of Civil War activity.

I was forced to buy this book for a culture awareness class in college. It turned into one of the best purchases of my life. Asian, hispanic, African-American and Indian stories are the content, and each story is touching. Real insight is gained and an understanding is found as you turn the last page. Buy it for your children, the hispanic section makes wonderful bedtime stories! I can't comment on the usual specifics .. dialouge,scenes, etc ...since each section is so different. But the book will fulfill you, guaranteed!