Minnesota Books

This is a great resource for hiking. It has short day hikes as well as multi-day hikes. Keep in mind that the book, especially in state parks, seems to highlight one good trail in the park while the entire trail system can be much longer. Check with the parks to get a full idea of the full system. Gives a great condensed look at the hike for quick reference with GPS coordinates, difficulty, elevation, maps to use etc then gives an in depth look at the trail. I am a beginning hiker and have already found this book to be quite valuable. I use it with The Best in Tent Camping: Minnesota book for more info on the state parks. Minnesota also has a hiking club, check in at the visitor center at any state park for info or check out the DNR site.

I really enjoy this book. The entire state is covered from the north to the south. A brief description of each hike is included along with the general location and GPS coordinates. The maps outline the entire hike and even denote campgrounds and picnic areas. This book is a complete guide and wil supply years of hiking information

Minnesota has an immense variety of places to hike. It's the size of the British Isles. And it has a more complicated river drainage system than any other state -- rivers to the Gulf of Mexico, to the Atlantic Ocean and the Arctic Ocean. It has far more lakes than any other state, too. Plus it has more different kinds of habitat than any other state -- hardwood forest, northern evergreen forest, tall grass prairie, savannah and bog.

The 87 Minnesota hikes described here will introduce you to the best of this, if you're just passing through there, or keep you busy for years if you live there.

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 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.

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++++!

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!

For several months now, Mira James has been trailer-sitting for her friend Sunny in Battle Lake, Minnesota. And while her days have been occupied by working in the town library, Mira has also had to solve a few mysteries -- murder among them -- since her arrival in the spring. (See "May Day" and "June Bug.") She's gotten to know more than a few of the local characters and has even landed an extra gig as a reporter for the weekly Battle Lake Recall.

But now it's July, it's ungodly hot, and it's time for Wenonga Days. This year the townsfolk are celebrating the 25th anniversary of the installation of the Chief Wenonga statue that stands twenty-three feet tall and guards the shoreline of Battle Lake. Having a dismal past where intimate relationships are concerned, Mira has secretly projected her affections instead onto the Chief, whom she sees as the ultimate in Tall, Dark, Handsome, and Safe. He's the most stable man in her life.

And so it follows that Mira takes it personally when the fiberglass statue is stolen just before the holiday. Who could have done such an unthinkable thing, and how did they do it? Though Mira's attention is mildly diverted by real-life encounters with Johnny Leeson, the sexiest gardener she's ever met, she makes it her goal to find out just what's going on in Battle Lake. Does any guilt lie with that visiting professor who's campaigning for the rights of native peoples? What about Brando Erikkson, whose company originally made the Chief? And how is squirrelly business owner Les Pastner involved in the conspiracy? Was it part of his scalp that was found at the base of the statue?

Mira James is a quirky, likeable, and realistic protagonist / heroine. Her turns of phrase and sense of humor (especially when directed at herself) are laugh-out-loudable. Who knew that life in rural Minnesota could be so intriguing and so funny? Habitual mystery readers must leap into this series with both feet.

Although I am from Minnesota, you don't have to be to enjoy this series. I just finished Knee High by the Fourth of July and am anxious to start August Moon. It's going to be a long wait for me for September Morn (I think that's the title for the fifth book) but I will try to be patient. Keep 'em coming, Ms Lourey!

If you are in the market for a good laugh, at and with a local flare, Jess Lourey's "Knee High by the Fourth of July," the third installment of her 12-book Murder by Month series and follow up to "May Day" and "June Bug," may be the perfect end of summer book.

"The good news is that I'm proud of Knee High," she said. "It's fun, long on humor, romance, and red herrings."

Lourey's quirky humor plays throughout the book in her prose and dialogue, but more in her diversions on the normalcy and oddity of Battle Lake and Otter Tail County.

Lourey acknowledges her appreciation for the people and the area.

"I've been remiss in my earlier novels in not thanking the people of Battle Lake, who are good sports about the fun-poking and murder-creating I do in their beautiful town," she said.

Like the Mask of Bewildered Anger, which Lourey's protagonist sleuth Mira James describes as, "the official expression of rural Minnesotans confronted by liberal progressives."

Much like the faces of her many town characters who, in the midst of planning the celebration of Wenonga days, find the Chief himself has gone missing, a blow to Mira James, who suffers quite an obsession with the Chief.

Mira's second biggest crush, the organic gardening god and dead ringer for Brad Pitt--Johnny Leeson--has also disappeared. Her luck with men is running out, and a killer might be moving in. With something of her own to hide, Mira hopes she can avoid the police long enough to track down the object of her mega-crush--but is Mira trailing a statue-thief, a kidnapper, or a murderer?

The many characters running under Mira James' magnifying glass of suspicion range from the kooky to loony, so much so, a reader living in the area could easily mistake one of the characters for themselves.

While Lourey's book could be misconstrued, upon first glance, to appeal to women only, her humor transcends both genders and makes for a delightful romp through our own neighborhoods. But come looking for laughs. One thing about Lourey's humor, she demands the reader already have the sense to spot it or at the very least, have a clue.

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.

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!

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.

I was interested in reading this book, due to living in Minnesota and just to look at the pictures too! Wonderful book, storyline and art work are top notch.

I own all David Geister-illustrated books. Although Kathy-Jo writes a wonderful tale, it's David's illustrations that truly bring it to life.

This is a great book- if you want to know the background to midwestern history or have little kids who like brilliant paintings- this is a wonderfully written and presented book. My kids adore the images and it generates a lot of parent-to-child discussion. It is a warm and inviting tale, and you'll spend a lot of fun time with kids pouring over the detailed images by Mr. Dave Geister. Highly recommended!