Michigan Books

An interesting book which tells not only the story of a Michigan landmark, but also what can happen when an unscrupulous real estate investor tries to trample on a homeowner.

...sometimes, the homeowner wins!

Pick this up.

This is a very interesting book that explores the concept of diabled persons in performing roles in the theater, dance, art, music, and sports. Of these sports, in the form of special olympics has probably generated the most attention. But plays have been written that feature disabled people.

The late Christopher Reeve raised the bar, so to speak, with his public appearances where his speech was delivered with the help of artificial breathing apparatus.

The book is a serie of articles written by, I guess you would call them experimenters, working in these fields. Most of the writers are connected with universities but vary widely in their areas of study including: theater, sociology, women's studies, social anthropology, medicine, communications, English, and dance. Other writers are practicing musicians, playwrights, or poets.

This is a book that is breaking new ground in the area of disability studies.

Written by former teacher Virginia Law Burns especially for young adults, Bold Women in Michigan History collects the true stories of courageous women who helped make Michigan the proud state it is today. From fur traders and poets to soldiers and senators, each woman's unique contribution is recounted in a brief biography, with black-and-white illustrations or photographs. Individuals profiled include Cora Brown, the first black woman in the state senate; artist Marguerite de Angeli; Genevieve Gillette, champion of Michigan parks; and many more. An upbeat, well-researched and enthralling introduction to the role great women have played in Michigan state history.

I received this book so quickly~~
And it has a good quality, almost liked a new book without any marks.
thx

This is an inspired book of poetry, rich in language and experience. Erickson speaks to the heart in a way that anyone can understand and appreciate. The subjects are familiar to us all--parents and children, love and loss--but her insights are fresh and let us renew our relations with the world around us.

Bridges can be more to people than simply a method of crossing water without a boat. "A Bridge Worth Saving" is a thoroughly 'user friendly' guide for activists wanting to save historical landmarks they deem worth the effort and expense to campaign for their preservation. Filled from cover to cover with practical advice for keeping an old bridge in tip top condition, "A Bridge Worth Saving" is a complete and comprehensive instructional guide to bridge restoration, enhanced with an index and appendixes. Highly recommended for personal, professional, academic, and community library collections.

This is a well written, compelling study of early attempts at police reform in the 1960s. A wonderful analysis of the failures of American liberalism and very interesting biography of a true unheralded American hero, George Edwards, Jr., who attempted to change the tragic course of Detroit history and for a short time looked might he succeed. An excellent read! Highly recommended. This reviewer is looking forward to the next book.

Jack Ridl writes meditative poems about raking leaves, about toys in the attic, about different times of the year, about his own conception, about his mailman. He proves that he can write about any common household object like Neruda. He invokes numbers, fractals, equations, and other abstract mathematical ideas as launching slips for his psyche's boat to let drift and wander the coastline of his life. And what a strange and magical coastline it is.

We get to understand the world of the poet who is trying to penetrate the mystery of his existence and the phenomena of time and place surrounding him. Ridl writes to find ways to enter his private world and its numberless avatars of objects that make their appearance like actors on his mind's stage.

Whatever is imagined through the magic of numbers using equations, quantum physics, or through the power of metaphor to build a bridge to this particle word, makes the speaker wonder. After all, math is just another form of writing, and writing, like math, in the hands of a poet is used to penetrate the outer visible surface of life to reveal its invisible inner structure as witnessed in these lines:


...Go deeper. All the cells split
into identical ice dancers, all
electrons spin the same bacchanal.


Ridl is like a pre-Socratic philosopher awe-struck in front of all of life's forms that divide from one substance to become all living and non-living things. It is a meditation touched on throughout the book, and Ridl returns to this ontological dilemma again and again.

I like the fact that he grabs hold of a sense of what it means to leave a trace of human discovery in the form of words-language that abstract man-made tool for diving into the unknown. He muses on this in the second poem titled "The History of the Pencil" that starts with the premise of how the lowly pencil is the true companion of solitude. The speaker in this poem evokes Thoreau, how this brilliant woodsy chronicler failed to itemize the pencil he wrote with while taking stock of all his worldly possessions in his tiny cabin at Walden Pond.

On another level, this poem is a type of "Ars Poetica" in which the speaker resurrects the Renaissance master Da Vinci to convey a sense of what it means to ponder an act of creation:



Even Leonardo, whose mind would never let
Anything escape from the possibility of being better,
Wrote those mad, mirror-written obsessions,
His maimed right hand dangling
Like a sash, and sketched his own hand
Sketching,...

Ridl wants us to contemplate the simple act of holding a pencil and using that timeless invention to create a universe of infinite combinations out of words to express even the mundane grocery list or the heartfelt note to a friend.

Starting from the opening poems in this volume, we are taken on a personal tour of people, places and things that matter in the life and memory of a man who has struggled with what it means to hear his mother's voice over the phone discussing the death of her favorite singer, Frank Sinatra, or how he feels thinking about his deceased father, or the facts of his birth and growing up, or about his own children. The speaker of these poems always returns to where everything in his universe begins and ends-to the domestic center of his life and his world at home.

He uses humor and writes a false memoir poem titled "This Was My Real Life." In the middle stanza he writes:



I never married. I built
two houses, one where my father
had his woodworking shop, one where
my mother shot our dog.


This poem reveals a great deal about the complex inner world of the poet/speaker and about the dual nature of love and how it is possible to hold two contradictory emotions simultaneously. These feelings return in other places in other poems that resonate with mixed emotions when the speaker deals again with the subject of his mother and father.

In the poem titled "Fractals," the immediate surroundings in the speaker's life recall some other time and place, and the speaker is able to move between his past and his present ending where he began. It is a beautiful poem about the passing of time and the things that fill our days. This poem is a signature poem, one of his best. Here as in other poems, the emphasis is on the act of writing of "seeing into the woods" to quote one of the key lines. This is what the poetry is about and the speaker of course wants to clear away any obstruction that prevents this from happening.

It is a tender poem filled with domestic memory of what life was like as newlyweds moving into a house in need of renovation, and filling that house with a lifetime's possessions, of kids and family, and of returning over time to that place that T. S. Eliot alluded to-where you have to travel your whole life just to know the place you started from.

There is a movement towards death in many of the poems, a reaching for darkness, for what lies underneath the earth. In "Burying the Poems" at the end of the book, the speaker fantasizes about taking all his poetry to its grave by sealing his poems in jars and burying them. The seasons and the animals in their brute indifference to poetry forage blindly around the literary crypt. This is not Wallace Stevens's empty jar left in a woods, but a jar full of what is contained in the speaker's poems-his entire life and with it all his memories. The last lines of the poem contemplate what is there in each of us when we face the void, and the poet returns us once again to those mysterious Michigan woods:


...Moles
will come, nuzzle each jar. Voles will spin
like dervishes around the lids. Winter will
bring the hard frost tightening the ground.
Then following the breakage of spring and
the blisters of summer, the fall will raise
no harvest. Nothing there. Nothing to be there.
Only the jars under the lost dark green of leaves.

I liked this book and will be using it this coming school year with my 5th grade students. It is an excellent book that focuses on self esteem, persistence, and acceptance of others with handicaps. However, it appears to be confusing for the fifth grade reading level. The advanced vocabulary and lack of flow because of the use of letters within the text makes me believe the reading level is probably at about eighth grade (12-14 years old). For younger students, it could be used with the teacher reading it to the students.

A great book of a family's life journey living in a FLW house. The highs and lows and the pride in owning a unique piece of history designed by the master builder of pride filled livable homes. A relaxing read for anyone and especially students of FLW history.