Michigan Books

In yet another wonderful anthology of the Civil War, author Eric J. Wittenberg expands his library of work on Custer's successor in the Michigan 6th Cavalry, Brigadier General James H. Kidd. Wittenberg provides readers with a remarkable sense of reality, an inescapable feeling that they are sharing a personal fireside chat with a living, breathing veteran of our own Civil War.

"Under Custer's Command" is sure to please any readers of his previous collections of James Kidd. This latest book, a well-preserved and edited anthology of the personal letters of the young colonel and brevet brigadier general continues Wittenberg's efforts to detail the wartime activities of the Michigan 6th Cavalry. One of the most successful mounted commands during the war, the "Wolverine's" received far less acclaim and few of the accolades enjoyed by cavalry units led by men such as Jeb Stuart and Stonewall Jackson.

"One of Custer's Wolverines" is an exceptionally well-written collection of personal letters. Kidd's abilities as a writer breath life into his experiences and observations. As one of the few existing collections of first-person accounts, Wittenber's latest book expands and improves on the legend of Custer's cavalry. This wonderful book is a fantastic addition to any serious Civil War Custer library.

I have always been a fan of the cavalry in the Civil War, and this book provides some of the best accounts from a cavalryman I have ever seen. Mr. Wittenberg has done a great job annotating these letters, and has made the letters flow. Kidd was a great writer, and Mr. Wittenberg has made his work all the better. I highly recommend this book to anyone who loves cavalry, or who loves the Michigan Brigade and Custer's men.

Although I don't agree with some of what the author says, she says it well. This book is funny and insightful. The author has written about women and their place in politics and how many important issues are overlooked by men in politics. She was very direct and to the point that there all issues are important to women although not all issues are important to men (such as mammogram scanner machines). She talks about how she overcame some of the preconcieved notions men had about her as a woman and how she learned to survive in politics. Very interesting.

enjoy.

Maxine Berman's inside view of the workings of the Michigan Legislature is funny, insightful, and interesting. An easy read, this book is full of biting commentary that forces the reader to think about political issues from a different perspective. Read it and weep tears from laughing so hard! Refreshing perspectives.

This is a first rate book on poetry. Its breadth is satisfying large, but more importantly its originality and insight are enormously rewarding. Like most any good book on poetry, it uses prosody effectively to help the reader see and hear things in the poems themselves. Anyone interested in poetry-not just devotees of free verse-will find much in this book to enjoy. It has that rare quality of actually teaching you something about things you thought you might have already known, so that when you turn again to read familiar poems, they are likely to reveal more about themselves. Also, this book is written with enormous clarity and good sense.

This is a first rate book on poetry. Its breadth is satisfying large, but more importantly its originality and insight are enormously rewarding. Like most any good book on poetry, it uses prosody effectively to help the reader see and hear things in the poems themselves. Anyone interested in poetry-not just devotees of free verse-will find much in this book to enjoy. It has that rare quality of actually teaching you something about things you thought you might have already known, so that when you turn again to read familiar poems, they are likely to reveal more about themselves. Also, this book is written with enormous clarity and good sense.

This is a wonderful pictoral journey through one of Michigans little towns. It depicts the people, the industry, the country and the things that shaped their lives. I personally would have like to see more but this was not enough reason to give it only 4 stars. However, it is a reason to have another book.

What a lovley view of the midwestern small town.. the old pictures are very enjoyable. The history, too, that they impart fits so many times and places.. a book to keep out and share with friends and children. Perhaps, especially, children... since it is like a different world from what they know, but there is still a hint here and there of what still is in the what was...

We just moved to Michigan and our family lives in Atlanta. This book provided excellent hints and tips on keeping our child entertained for the long trip. It is full of information for entertaining pit stops. Instead of searching for ways to distract our child, now we can take a quick look at this book and plan our trip easily.

In a former life, I supervised the compilation and editing of thousands of directory pages each year. So I know a bit about the problems and goals of such information-publishing. And this one delivers. Specific information, concentrating on its topic, consistently presented. Plus, a good portion of fun and advice. If you're hitting the road down that long stretch of I-75, this is a solid and worthy investment.

Anyone who took Dr. Mark Perlman's courses on the history of economic thoughts will admires why he knows so much about the development of economics. His lecture notes are just like pieces of maps that lead his students into the Treasure Island of Knowledge. I am very happy to know that Mark and Dr. McCann have published their books. I would like to share my experiences with everyone who read the books.

Learning from Professor Mark Perlman was one of the best things happened to me when I was still a student. Since Professor Perlman had stopped lecturing on this topic ( in fact I was among those who attended his last series of lectures ), this book, along with an earlier publication in 1998, serves as an alternative to his interesting and thought provoking lectures filled with first-hand information about economics and economists. The course was an eye-opener for me and I highly recommend this book which covers the materials Professor Perlman put together for us.

This is not just another lighthouse story. Campbell's inspiration and primary source for the main character, Annie, (and her experiences) was a real person. Reading the book, you get a sense of both the beauty and the harshness of life on tiny Passage Island. Annie's deep love for the island resounds throughout. "Pocketful of Passage" is a book that everyone in the family can enjoy.

This story has all the heart of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Series, the thrills of Nancy Drew, and the added benefit of focusing on Michigan's history and lighthouses! Boys and Girls will both love this book!

These translations of Sappho are for me the most beautiful I've come across so far...

Lombardo presents each fragment on its own page, and presents them in thematically (in other words, not in order).

He has used ALL of the long and short fragments, and has intersperssed the flow with a few single sentence ones to offer a pleasing aesthetic feel.

He says that he did not use every single fragment because some of them are only one word and thus incomprehensible for poetic purposes (which I agree also)...so in total he presents over 90 of the fragments in the most beautiful renditions I've seen!

In Antiquity decent women were supposed to work in the kitchen and to raise their children, nothing more, but there were exceptions. More or less 150 years after Homer's Iliad, Sappho lived on the island of Lesbos, west off the coast of what is Turkey today.. (She went in exile for a short period due to political upheavel).
Sappho was already famous in Antiquity. Plato called her the tenth Muse and someone said her poetry was "as refreshing as a morning breeze".
Very small fragments - only three or four words - are not included.
Some of the best poems of Sappho are those that describe her loneliness.
(#62)
"But if you are my friend,
Go to a younger woman's bed,
For I will not endure an affair
In which I am older than the man."
(#73)
"The moon has set,
And the Pleiades
Midnight
The hour has gone by
I sleep alone."

While conventional wisdom might say that we have been in a golden age of conspiracy theories ever since the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Michael Pfau contends that conspiracy rhetoric has been prevalent in American politics from the time of the revolution. If we want to point to a time in American history where conspiracy rhetoric proved manifestly successful, then Pfau makes the case for that period being the eve of the American Civil War. In "The Political Style of Conspiracy: Chase, Sumner, and Lincoln," Pfau provides a trio of case studies focusing on three of the major figures who defined the ascendancy of the Republican Party. Richard Hofstadter's essay on "The American Style in American Politics" provides the foundation for contemporary conspiracy scholarship and Pfau's starting point in terms of rhetoric and social theory.

In Chapter One, "Problems of Interpretation: Approaching Conspiracy in Text and Discourse," Pfau establishes his theoretical groundwork, but also focuses on the example of William Lloyd Garrison, to show how the paranoid style and conspiracy discourse was on the fringe of American politics, setting up how his three figures will move the slave power conspiracy of the radical abolitionists into the mainstream of American political rhetoric. Pfau focuses on how aristocrats and demagogues were established as traditional conspiratorial enemies, the creation of powerful slave narratives at the center of this rhetoric, and the shared ideology of civic republicanism that Chase, Sumner, and Lincoln grew up on. As the Republic Party emerged in the 1850s, Pfau establishes their goal as being to seek the center of the mainstream and then looks at the chronology of the Republican narrative of the slave power conspiracy in terms of the rhetoric of its most prominent mainstream politicians.

Chapter Two, "The Slave Power According to Salmon P. Chase: Entering the Mainstream of Partisan Rhetoric, 1845-1854," examines a pair of texts by Chase. The first is his 1845 "Address of the Southern and Western Liberty Convention," a major landmark in the political antislavery movement (as well as of slave power conspiracy rhetoric), and the second is his 1854 "Appeal to the Independent Democrats," which drove the anti-Nebraska movement that would coalesce into the Republican Party. Pfau underscores Chase's achievements as a party builder and see his texts as being pivotal examples of party mobilization. Towards that end Chase employs partisan rhetoric, civil republican ideology, and conspiracy narratives, which looking at the audiences Chase has targeted.

Chapter Three, "Charles Sumner's 'Crime against Kansas': Conspiracy Rhetoric in the Oratorical Mold," reminds us that there was a reason why Sumner was attacked and nearly beaten to death on the floor of the U.S. Senate by Preston Brooks in 1856. That was the year that Sumner delivered his philippic, "Crime Against Kansas," which is what Pfau examines. After looking at Sumner's political evolution from Whig to Free-Soil Senator, the essay looks at the text of the speech that was largely forgotten once Sumner was brutally assaulted. The speech is largely imitative of oratorical tradition of conspiracy going back to ancient times, but Pfau is again able to show how such elements combine again with civic republicanism. Pfau is also attuned to the fact the speech digresses at points, engaging more in personal attacks and insults than logical argument, but the emphasis is on how Sumner not only details "The Crime Against Kansas," but also attack the "apologizes" for the crime as additional evidence. Although Sumner speaks of a "true remedy," his final part of the speech covers a lot of possible remedies on the Kansas question.

Chapter Four, "Lincoln, Contemporary Rhetoric, and the 'House Divided': Assessing the Judgment of History," presents an analysis of the best-known text in this volume. Despite the viewpoint of Southerners to the contrary, Lincoln was not a radical within the Republican Party. Pfau looks at this famous speech as one of the best-known slave power conspiracy texts, which implicated Stephen Douglas as part of the well-coordinated conspiracy to nationalize slavery, and which has been condemned by scholars and critics in the last century. What Pfau reveals, to no one's surprise, is that Lincoln's speech is constructed on a move logical framework than either Chase or Sumner as Lincoln stands in the present and evaluates the past. There is a key section in the essay on Pluralist Preunderstandings and the Reception of the "House Divided" speech that deals with Douglas as a protopluralist and also with pluralist revisonism by later scholars and critics who argued popular sovereignty might have been a better policy than what Lincoln advocated. In the end, Pfau is able to make a case for Lincoln as the last in a long line of hortatory civic republican rhetors who succeeded in part because of their practice of conspiracy rhetoric.

Chapter Five, "Lessons of the Slave Power Conspiracy: Conspiracy Rhetoric at the Center and Fringe," explores the broader ramifications of Pfau's findings and suggests future avenues of research. In mapping the slave power conspiracy formation Pfau is able to talk about both sacred and secular ideologies. After talking about the two traditions of conspiracy discourse, namely those on the fringe and those in the center, Pfau is able to move on to contemporary conspiracy discourse and look at those two traditions today. The final lesson of this volume is that the marginalization of conspiracy discourse that has presumed such rhetoric to be both logically flawed and ethically problematic is undercut by the fact this political style is now indigenous to the mainstream of American political discourse. By the time Pfau finishes his book, such a conclusion seems patently obvious.

Pfau uses Richard Hofstadter's seminal essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" are a matrix for his own study; except where Hofstadter sees the "paranoid style" as mostly at the fringes of political activity and rhetoric, Pfau sees it as central to this in the years leading up to the Civil War. Starting most notably with Salmon P. Chase, a politician from Ohio, the Southern slaveholders were inferred to be a group working to take over the Federal government to insure the perpetuation of slavery throughout the country, not just the South and some western states as the U.S. expanded. This repeated rhetoric strengthened the Abolitionist movement, and also effectively spread antislavery sentiment and prompted political alertness and activism to work against this alleged design of the slaveholders. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts picked up on this perspective spawned by Chase. In coming to Abraham Lincoln, Pfau paints him not to be the compromise, moderate choice of the Republican Party he is usually seen as, but another in the line of like-minded politicians fostering a picture of the slaveholders as a monolithic group bent on taking over the government. Lincoln was more subtle and artful in extending this paranoid style viewing the opposition as a threat to democratic, majority-rule government. Lincoln's "house divided" speech which is generally agreed among historians to have sealed his nomination is closely analyzed for its characterization of the slaveholders and cultivation of a "paranoid style" to thwart their aims. An assistant professor of Communication Studies at the U. of Minnesota-Duluth, Pfau casts much of American politics and history in a new light.

a brillant, insightful exposition of a fascinating subject -- a must read for historians and all persons interested in government regulation.

This engaging and colorful account of the history of U.S. food regulation provides excellent perspective for better understanding the recent spate of high-profile, food regulation trade disputes between the U.S.and Europe, and within Europe, such as the "Banana Wars", "British Beef", and "Genetically modified corn" incidents. A must-read for anyone who who has interest in the unique nature and psychology of government actions in dealing with issues around "our daily bread". This book appears to have been subjected to a very rigorous "peer review" and I expect it will become a classic reference work.