Minnesota Books

Passengers used to look out the window and see "Slow to 90 MPH" signs! It's schedule still stands as the fastest scheduled run by a steam locomotive - in the world! It's design and implementation was the standard many countries are still trying to copy! We are talking about Milwaukee Road's Hiawatha, the 1930s-era streamliner, the Hiawatha. It's story is told in Jim Scribbin's treatis - 'The Hiawatha Story' by Kalmbach Publishing.

Scribbin's books clearly and factually tells birth of this legendary train, it's rise to fame and slow decline in liberally used photos and tightly written text. The best thing about it is that is does so with an entertaining mix of factual information, statistics and first-person accounts. If you have an interest in railroads - especially ones that regularly exceed 120mph, this book is a requirement for your library

Profusely illustrated with historic black-and-white photography, "The Hiawatha Story" by railroading enthusiast Jim Scribbins provides other railroading fans with an impressively informative pictorial history of the Midwestern railroad that ran from Chicago, Illinois to the Twin Cities of Minnesota. Beginning as a single experimental coach and evolving into a full fledge railroad fleet, the Hiawatha became a kind of railroading legend with its radical streamlined look and industrial design. From 1935 to 1970 the Hiawatha was an integral part of American railroading. A work of seminal scholarship and very highly recommended for academic library Railroading History reference collections, as well as engaging and entertaining reading for railroading enthusiasts, Jim Scribbin's "The Hiawatha Story" is an informed and informative account of those golden yesteryears of a truly great American fleet and system.

This is the paperback republication of Jim Scribbins' classic 1970 "The Hiawatha Story". A decade ago I was happy to obtain the original hardcover at many times the price of this new paperback. As the standard text on this subject, its republication is most welcome.

While the production of the new book is excellent, its wide format in paperback is a bit clumsy. It is simply too wide to hold and view comfortably sans solid backs. It also would have been nice to have included some color in the new book, but at this price it is not missed.

Through its many black and white photos and conversational text, "The Hiawatha Story" traces the history of these Milwaukee Road streamliners through their glory in the 1930s to the general fading of US passenger service in the 1960s. The reproduction of the photos and text is excellent, although there are a few repagination issues in the reprint, wherein the page numbers referred to in the original text no longer jibe with the 2007 version. The text is necessarily local; few railroad aficionados in the Rocky Mountains will be impressed with the scale of Tunnel City, Wisconsin, nor will the uninitiated find Milwaukee Road diesel number 15 particularly "famous". The reader may also be surprised at Scribbins continued use of "CONsist" as a noun. However, the pride of Milwaukee ownership of this history shines through Scribbins' text. This remains an excellent description of a slice of American railroad history, and is a must for any fan of the Milwaukee Road. It remains a far better book than the recent "The Milwaukee Road's Hiawathas" by Gruber and Solomon, or the error-filled "Milwaukee Road Passenger Service" by Dorin.

The story ends with its original 1970 publication date, immediately before the demise of Milwaukee Road passenger service and the advent of Amtrak. It would have been nice of the publishers to update and finish Scribbins story, and perhaps note that Amtrak continues to honor the Hiawatha history in its naming of its Milwaukee to Chicago service.

As the director of several programs for the homeless, I know that Ms. Connolly's account of her work captures the complexity of homeless services. This book is captivating as she layers the client's stories with her own responses, as well as artfully mixing in theoretical and philosophical points. A great book if you are in the field, considering the field, needing closure on feelings if leaving the field. I would also highly recomend this as required reading for any clinical field training, particularly where the subject is supervision. Ms. Connolly does a fabulous job illustrating the points during interventions when her own feeling bubble just over the line. While her actions remain professional, this read takes you into the subjects that supervision is designed for, while giving an honest beautiful illustration of "the work." Thank You for not only describing the complex reasons for peoples homelessness, but also the approaches you used to work with them, and the way most of our "clients" fall into the gaps between services.

I really enjoyed this book and recommend it to anyone interested in learning more about homeless women and their personal struggle. The author did an excellent job of bringing the mothers and children to life for the reader and showed the reader the human side of their struggle. The families depicted are easy to relate to and their stories are thoroughly engrossing. An excellent read--A++++!

I loved this book and couldn't put it down. The author really made the women come alive and I feel like I got a first hand glimpse into the lives of mothers struggling to make ends meet. This book is for anyone interested in why people become homeless and what it would take -- personally and politically -- to get back on track. The stories are fascinating and enlightening -- it's absorbing reading and you'll learn a lot from it.

In this book, the author takes the reader on several grouse hunting trips over a period of many years in an area of farmlands and woodlots in the upper midwestern U.S. The reader is treated to stories of the lives of Scandanavian farmers, living and dead, as well as insights drawn from the author's personal experiences. The sport, the outdoor environment, the game, and the hunters blend in ways that are at times humorous, at times poignant, and often seen with an artistic eye. This is an excellent book for anyone who has spent more than a few days hunting grouse in the hardwoods of eastern North America.

Lundrigan tells it like it truly is in Northern Minnesota, sharing his pains, passions, and sorrows, in this memoir of his life journey where partridge hunting is the moderator and one of the few constants. Without trying he makes a case for the necessity of hunting, not to eat but to have one's spirit filled.

Much of the story takes place in the land of my own journeying, and I followed the story on my topographical maps. After reading I felt a tremendous urge to go there, to see the land Lundrigan writes about. I didn't. The journey outlined is not one of the physical, but of the spirit, impossible to recreate, but totally able to be experienced within one's soul on a brisk fall day.

This is absolutely the best book I have read on the spirit of the hunt. I recommend it to absolutley anyone who has experienced the thrill of flushing a covey and not known how to explain it; Lundrigan explains it perfectly.

Straight from the heart. Ted Lundrigan's "Hunting the Sun" is a passionate autobiography of his grouse hunting days. Chapter by chapter, Ted talks you through one of his many hunting trips. The man is clearly an authority on grouse but also on life. In several sections, Ted reflects over key events in his life (Vietnam, the death of his daughter) giving the reader a true insight into his life and personality.

In particular, I liked some of the later chapters when Ted talks about hunting with friends or hunting over the ground of a pair of local farmers.

This book is great! Its a great coffee table book or a nice piece to briefly cover the topic of sustainability in Minnesota. It gives brief overviews of individuals and families that are incorporating community building and sustainability into their lives, business practices, business models, and architecture. My hat's off to the authors of this book and to the people whom made this book possible, the many subjects of this book.

I purchased every volume of this directory and found them all to be very useful to me at one point or the other. The information is very fresh and up to date. Thank You - Balil

Very complete information. Extremely helpful. Let's of sources and contact information. Definite must buy!

Anyone who considers himself a Dylanophile needs this book. It's incredibly rare, as it was printed in a tiny first printing (about 1,000 copies) and the publisher failed soon after. But a Dylan collection isn't complete without it. Engel writes from a lifetime's research. It's a shame he doesn't reprint his book elsewhere.

I grew up on the Mesabi Range within 25 miles of Hibbing, Dylan's boyhood home. I've been a fan of his for 26 years. This is the definitive book on his early years. Full of photographs, some never before published, this book covers all aspects of his youth...his faith, his family, his town, his friends, and how he grew into who he became. Delightful reading for the true Dylan freak!

An excellent guide for a road trip, or pilgrimage to Hibbing. It gives a lot of information on the history of Hibbing and its culture. Also quite a bit more info on Dylan's childhood and family history than I have seen anywhere else, including numerous photos. Picked it up on New year's Eve afternoon last year, devoured it overnight, and on New Year's Day--at 4a.m.--left for Hibbing and felt as if I had been there before when I got there and "watched the sun come rising from that little Minnesota town." Found all of the Dylan sites listed with the help of the book, but should have picked a better day. (Zimmy's was closed, the Dylan museum was closed, and it was rather chilly to be wandering around old Hibbing.)

Think of it as a highly detailed tour guide to Dylan's Hibbing, whether or not the reader actually goes. Adds a lot of weight to references in songs like North Country Blues, etc.

This book is wonderful for two reasons.

1: It sumarizes & clearly illustrates basic concepts for those unfamiliar with how landscaping & vegetation choices/arrangements effect water quality. I've resorted to showing more than one person sections of this book when I'd failed to explain how to, or why to, restore native vegetation in someone's yard. I imediatly saw a smile of comprehension.

2: Appendix A, is a useful reference even for people familiar with native plants. The "Restore Your Shore" CD, that I also own, is a waste of time. Use this book.

I've many books that focus on subtle floristic diferences on which traditional taxonomic names are based, yet say hardly a sentence about the ecological niche and life requirements of the plant. Some books catalog what county species have been sighted, yet fail to mention that a plant requires ponded water. I hope this book sets a new standard.

This appendix has basic information one needs to find a good home for a purchased plant.
Flower color, bloom season, typical height, appropriate spacing
moisture habitat(deep water, shallow water, wet soil, upland mesid, upland dry), and light requrementsFull sun (8+ hours), Partial Shade (4+ hours), and Shade (no direct sun).
What animals use it...

Besides typo-errors of the sort Google corrects if you search for "Hevchera richardsonii", I've yet to find a substantive errors in this reference. Plant spacing and heights are by nature variable.

As a lakeshore property owner in northern Minnesota I would like this book to be read by all lakeshore property owners. Lakeshore environments are in need of our best conservation efforts.

Learning about the role of "aquatic weeds," dead trees, "brush," and live trees enables us to improve lake water quality and our relationship with wildlife. The information, presented by authors with expertise, will be useful in the planning of your lakeshore while learning about and understanding the wonderful diversity of lakeshore environments.

The layout's inviting, full of graphics and easy to read. The nine chapters deal with lakeshore landscaping and problems, site preparation and plant installation, shoreline stabilization and maintenance, good stewardship and more.

There are also thirteen useful appendices that include the state rules of Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan, while other appendices help you identify and locate native plants and invasive non-native plants.

This is the perfect gift for every lakeshore property owner! Full of information and fun to read!

We are upsetting nature and killing our lakes with lawns to the waters edge and removing all the natural vegetation. Read this book before you start landscaping. You can make it a win-win situation with you and nature.

This is a great guide of Minnesota (and neighboring states) native plants. You will probably not like it if your idea of gardening is neat rows of flowers or even English gardens. I wasn't thrilled at first sight because it's not "pretty" but once I got into it I changed my mind because as it says it is landscaping with native and native plants don't sit neatly in a row. (By the way, it's more a guide than a landscape book.)

This is about the most user-friendly garden book I've ever owned. In the first third of the book Ms. Steiner teaches the how's and why's of native plants, and how to distinguish them from invasive, weedy introduced plants. She shows how to make your gardens wildlife-friendly, drought and disease resistant, and beautiful, describing planting strategies for all sorts of environments (sunny, dry, marshy, woodland, water gardens, etc.) She covers everything about plant cultivation--from weed control, pruning, staking, dividing plants, pests and much more. She also covers garden design, and the photographs of plant combinations are inspiring. One chapter, entitled "A Gallery of Gardens," has many examples of beautifully designed native plantings.

The last two-thirds of the book is an encyclopedia of sorts, divided into Flowers and Groundcovers, Grasses and Sedges, Ferns, Deciduous Trees, Deciduous Shrubs and Small Trees, Conifers, and Vines. She describes in depth many different cultivars of each plant under these headings, how to care for it, what other plants to plant with it, and what its prime landscape use is. This portion of the book is invaluable for planning your gardens, and is great for bringing along on your trips to the nursery.

This book is packed with so much information on both the science and the art of gardening with native plants. If you think that gardening with natives results in a dull, rather colorless garden, this book should change your mind and get you excited about working with the plants nature has so abundantly provided us with.

An excellent resource for those who are wanting to learn to plant part or a lot of their yards using native plants.
The book covers many different types of sites, with pictures of some beautiful native gardens in MN. Good plant resource in back of book.

In this book, early, but not that much so, in Agamben's carreer and work, he explores what metaphysics has proposed as the grounds for being and language. As he notes through a close reading of Hegel's concept of the Absolute and Heiddeger's Ereignis, the place of the ground has been a negativity. It is this negativity what remains to be thought in western philosophy, and what relates language and death as ungrounded grounds of being. Divided in daily conferences, with intermitent excursus, a concise and very profound work on both metaphysics and continental philosophy of language. Recommended to anyone who is interested in such subjects.

Agamben analyses the space of negativity in the thought of Hegel and Heidegger. Since Derrida,continential philosophies of language have critiqued traditional philosophy for privleging presence and treating signs as transparent conveyors of meaning. But Agamben, through exacting studies of Patristic and Medieval thought, demonstrates the tradition's awareness of the constitutive moment of absence in discourse. He contends that the deconstructionist critique of metaphysical thinking merely repeats an old problematic and fails to escape the difficulties it reveals. His corrective account of language and the place of negativity within it open a space for the human apart from reductive theories of the self as merely a social and linguistic construct.

Giorgio Agamben's Language and Death goes beyond certain limits - in philosophy, linguistics, and anthropology - while concurrently speaking of the limit, that which is undefinable, lacking, absent. It is a significant work that questions not only self-presence, through discussions of the fractured 'Voice' of the human, but also, in leaving behind poststructuralism, draws out the possibility of a life that has, in some sense, 'abandoned' speech, and accepts something of a constitutive emptiness found in the awareness of death.
What Agamben proposes is thus a truly radical redefinition of the linguistic basis of the human, a linguistic basis, it must be added, which has explicitly political effects. Instead of enclosing humans ever more within the 'prison-house' of language, historically taking the form of the polis or political community, Agamben considers the importance of absence and lack in defining the proper dwelling place of the human. To live in poverty, without a proper home or 'mother tongue' is that which is most human. Emptiness must be taken as the starting-point of all definitions of the human.
The breadth of themes this book covers makes it an important work for any who seek to question the now hegemonic theories of language proffered by postmodernism, as well as those who seek to effect a radical opposition to those institutions and systems whose existence are premised on the fullness and consistency of their speech.

Duff Brenna, who has won numerous awards for his fiction, including the AWP Best Novel Award and a New York Times notable book mention, brings us his sixth novel The Law of Falling Bodies, and it is simply wonderful. The range of narrative tactics includes free indirect discourse, epistolary sections, and good ol' traditional psychological realism. And what's more impressive is how seamlessly and naturally these various tactics work together to make for a page-turning read.

Duff Brenna has been writing some of the best fiction in America for decades. Hopefully this excellent new novel will bring him more the readership he greatly deserves.

Nothing Duff Brenna does in literature will surprise me any more. Long underrated, one can only hope that this amazing new novel, "The Law of Falling Bodies," finally gets Brenna the full recognition he deserves. You can virtually taste Brenna's settings, along with the hopelessness inherent in every fallen leaf or the draining soul of each character -- no matter how insignificant. And yet I'd be leading you astray to portray this as a bleak or depressing novel. The immutable spirit found in the most forlorn of characters soars under Brenna's hand and his humor is as unflinching as anything found by Harry Crews, high praise from me. And war, which seems to be the common denominator of each American generation, is given the fitting importance it deserves - all in the trenches of the minds of the Foggy family. Duff Brenna is as fine a fiction writer that we have working today and "The Law of Falling Bodies" is a high entry in the canon of American fiction. Bravo!

Award-winning author Duff Brenna presents The Law of Falling Bodies, a novel examining the cyclical nature of wars between men, women, and countries. Fifteen-year-old Virgil Foggy is trying to eke out a living on a failing dairy farm in Minnesota. Virgil's mother is pregnant, with a potential sibling the family cannot afford to raise; Virgil's brother has joined the army and departed abroad, yet war for Virgil is a daily reality with his stepfather at home. At times grim bordering on gruesome, The Law of Falling Bodies is punctuated with stark emotional coldness, even slaughter as reflected upon the merciless killing of farm animals for food. An unforgettable reading experience.

This is probably the best book I have read since reading Lonesome Dove many years ago.

LIKE OTHER BOOKS ABOUT VIETNAM I DO NOT THINK IT REFLECTS THE TRUE HORROR OF THAT TIME, BUT FEEL IT IS PROBABLY BEYOND WORDS. I FOUND IT VERY INTERESTING AND PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES CAN SEE THAT THEY REALLY CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE. VERY IMPRESSED WITH HIS DRIVE TO EXCELL. IT REALLY HELPED SINCE BOTH MY HUSBAND AND I ARE FROM FERTILE, MN. WE REALLY ENJOY LAND O LAKES CHEESE AND PICK SOME UP WHEN WE ARE IN THE AREA. VERY INTERESTING READ. IT IS JUST LIKE YOU ARE LISTENING TO HIM TALK.

Vietnam veteran Jon Hovde teams up with Maureen Anderson to bring us a real life tale of heroes, redemption, sadness, suffering and joy! Jon's life story "Left for Dead - A Second Life After Vietnam" will inspire you and it will also make you very aware of the sacrifices that many veterans have made on the personal level. This book tells it like it was and allows you to view a part of the veteran experience that mostly remains hidden from the public view.

We find that Jon is very much a human being with all that baggage that comes from being a baby boomer growing up in the 1950's and 1960's. That includes his days spent driving fast cars and getting drunk. But his story takes us to new places of the heart and the spirit as we follow along on his personal journey through his life. We are there with him when his body is ravaged by war and his life is almost taken from him. Then we get an insider view of what it was like to recover and try to move on with his life. As a reader you will find yourself rooting for him as he begins his new life with a wife and family.

The thing that will impress you most when reading this story is the author's lack out anger or outrage at what the war did to him. He accepts life as it is and moves onward as best he can. Of course, with all that happened to him it is matter of time when he discovers that his workaholic attitude is killing him and that he needs to focus on his family and personal needs. He deals with many issues from PTSD to excessive drinking to depression but it is all just a part of the healing process for Jon as he continues to move spiritual and emotionally forward with his life.

This book is riveting--once you read the first few pages you will not put it down until you have savored the final words on the last page. I know that is what happened to me. The book will inspire you as does his life to many people. Jon is a special person and is now doing much through his public speaking and now his book, to inspire and to help others.

This book gets the MWSA TOP RATING - 5 STARS! A must read book

2005 Silver Medal Award for Military Non-Fiction!