Ohio Books

The earliest photograph in this book is dated 1874 and shows a one-horse sleigh, and behind it a horse drawn car of the Monroe Street Line. The horsecar line was converted to electricity and operated until 1949. This is a magnificant collection of photographs of the trolleys that served Toledo during those years.

It is both interesting and educational to look at the trolley cars. But perhaps it is even more so to look at the backgrounds of the pictures. You can watch the buildings of Toledo grow during these years. You can see the early years of horse drawn sleigh, and wagons giving way to early and then later automobiles.

Unfortunately 1949 came along, and the trolleys were converted to buses. Here are pictures as the trolleys were being scrapped. With the current price of fuel for the busses (and of course going up), I wonder if someone somewhere in Toledo isn't wondering if scrapping the trolleys was such a good idea.

This is BY FAR the best book on Toledo, it has very beautiful pictures and very informative on the city of Toledo. It is a very nice coffee table book. YOU MUST BUY THIS!!

... a beautiful book full of extraordinary poems. I too am haunted by the stars & nebulas that stream away through Pascal's Abyss. They are all fine poems, but best I like The First Law of Thermodynamics, perhaps because I wish I had written it. -- Kenneth Rexroth

"I brood a lot about Gamov and Sandage and Hoyle... Curved Space. What marvelous/ phrases they have! Red giants, holes in the void." Love, all that holds things together on our human level, can bind too tight. In "..Go Free" a son longs to [hurt] his mother, to free her and himself from the pain and the sleazy technology of her hospital.. In "..Together" an old man in a supermarket, treasuring the few minutes' release from his wife at home, stares "at the small heap of food in the cart/ and thinks-- 'If I could only get her to eat.' As he is moving toward the cashier
it suddenly happens then that he knows
fifty years' love
seeping..
through stunned membranes into his lungs...
Tornado Watch is the first book of a very mature, accomplished poet. --Robert E. McDonough

Wrapped in a striking dust jacket displaying the Great Nebula in Andromeda and partitioned with full-page comet-heads, the book reminds the reader that he inhabits a magnificent, violent universe with which he must strive to become reconciled. In 53 intense poems, Mr. Grigsby deals with human passion, pain, and joy. He speaks, usually in the first person, of both triumphant and disappointing loves, of a ..mother, ..at men's hands and from natural disasters, of the ravages of man-made pollution, of human blindness and hope -- and always of the infinity of the stars. --Wil Margeson

I have the greatest possible respect for the poet who goes his own way, unfashionably, personally, honestly, and that's the way Gordon Grigsby has chosen. The poems are simple in their structure, often craggy in tone, and almost always passionate in their perceptions. If the term cosmic is suspect as used in reference to some, here it is most appropriate, for the poet is sublimely aware of the mysteries, above us and within us, and as in his fine title poem, which ends with a tremendous question, "Now, what shall I do with my life?", the spatial range is extraordinary, is felt, is earned....there are other themes and moods, when we see the poet intensely in love with the earth, compassionately involved in the lives of his fellow humans, so vulnerably part of it...a fully adult volume: no tricks, no currently fashionable modes, no dishonesty. Anyone interested in the possibilities of poetry, of what it can accomplish for the poet and the best of his readers, should read this book. --Lucien Stryk

To the past, Grigsby is beholding and beholden. "Everywhere on earth [he has written,] small farmers disappear, small towns, small tribes. Whole cultures that have endured since the Stone Age vanish in 20 years. The wonderful variety and inwardness of life, rain forests, mountain meadows, African villages, the whole of Tibet: eaten alive by Western ideas, whose true and banal symbol is the bulldozer.... It is the honor of poetry that poets have opposed this for centuries." Grigsby's poems, in praise of what has slipped into darkness, are incantatory but not always celebrative. The tone of his work comes more from the dark side of the moon, where the length of shadows is immeasurable. --George Myers Jr.

Gordon Grigsby has also written Mid-Ohio Elegies and Greatest Hits 1975-2000, Pudding House Publications.

Massillon is a city in North Central Ohio. Margy Vogt has written an excellent history from the 1830's to today. She considers all aspects:
interesting people, business, culture, architecture, politics This book features
many great pictures from the 1850's to the present. Towpath to Towpath refers to Massillon's beginnings as a canal town, to the excellent public park system of today that follows the old Towpath.
Massillon was the home of many interesting people from the Gish sisters, to Paul Brown to General Coxey of "Coxey's" army. Vogt tells the stories very, very well.

Thomas Shevory (Professor of Politics, Ithaca College) presents Toxic Burn: The Grassroots Struggle Against the WTI Incinerator, the environmental true story of East Liverpool, Ohio, which has suffered from a massive hazardous waste incinerator located in the eastern Ohio River Valley since 1993. The incinerator burns 60,000 tons of hazardous waste each year, has encountered dozens of accidents, and is only 100 yards away from an elementary school. Toxic Burn tells of the grass-roots movement against the incinerator. Interviews with key members of the movement, copies of official documents, and more spell out how the incinerator came to be, and the obstacles and victories that the counter-movement faced. An in-depth case study of how ordinary people are a necessary counterbalance to the power of corporations, and how new environmental models devoted to protecting the life and health of those at greatest risk is desperately needed.

Reynolds is my medical anthropology professor at UC Berkeley. The book, like Reynolds, is engaging and interesting. Reynolds is compassionate and very intelligent. These qualities are clearly evident in her book. It is a wonderful resource for both laymen and anthropologists, for anybody interested in healing systems outside of the Western tradition. Read the book.

"If America holds a collective portrait of the Polish immigrant landing at Ellis Island, exhausted, bewildered, clutching bundles and children, surrounded by queerly lettered trunks, what, in the popular imagination, do those trunks contain? The featherbed, embroidered linens, a treasured family photograph . . . a fistful of village soil . . . . Rarely, however, do we imagine a book among the carefully packed belongings . . . " (p. 15).
Popular stereotypes may envisage the Polish immigrant of the late 19th/early 20th century as an illiterate peasant who provided only brawn to the American Industrial Revolution. But the emigracja za chlebem also had a voracious appetite for reading. Karen Majewski, associate professor of Polish & East Central European Studies at Michigan's St. Mary's College, documents a lost page in immigrant history: the large book publishing industry that grew up in Polonian centers to serve the first and second generations of Polish immigrants.
The demand for books was great, evidenced by the number of titles that appeared. Writing their history is itself a challenge, because much of the primary source material has disappeared. Being in Polish, the books often didn't catch the attention of American libraries. Since book publishing was a sideline of the Polonian newspaper publishers, they kept costs down by printing on acidic paper that crumbled over time. Few of these books were sent to deposit collections like the Library of Congress. Few were copyrighted: some even couldn't be, because-as today-Polish "entrepreneurs" had no qualms about pirating books published elsewhere, calculating that an author in the old country was unlikely to fight for his intellectual property rights in Wisconsin.
Majewski devotes her book to a special niche of those writings: fiction published by Polonian authors for the Polonian market. She examines four different genres: crime and detective novels, sagas about immigration, short stories and novels containing social critiques, and romances. She also devotes an epilogue to Polish-language novels being published today by writers like Zofia Mierzyñska, recounting the lives and experiences of today's economic immigrants who overstay tourist visas and disappear into the underground economy.
The author advances a provocative thesis: that Polonian fiction was often a metaphor for intra-community debates about what it meant to be Polish in America. The emigracja za chlebem had come to America from a Poland that did not appear on anybody's maps. In many ways, the most open and public debate about Polish identity occurred not in Austrian-, Russian-, or Prussian-dominated Poland but in the "fourth partition," American Polonia. Majewski argues that many of the images of family, love, marriage, betrayal, and usurpation were also extended metaphors for what was taking place on the political level in Poland. As later under communism, Poles learned how to communicate effectively through a "'conspiracy of understanding'" invoking certain words, symbols, and associations. It was not mere coincidence that Pope John Paul II often spoke about the virtue of solidarity after the suppression of SolidarnoϾ. Majewski argues that the same phenomenon was operative in that early Polonian fiction.
Majewski's recovered a fascinating and forgotten page of American Polonian history. While not minimizing its scholarly value, it reads well and can be of benefit to general readers interested in matters Polish. Highly recommended.

This book is wondrous. For openers, it is written so well that it is a marvel of English usage and will shame most of us that think we know the language. Secondly, it strikes a marvelous balance between pedagogy - for fundamentally this is a serious scholastic work - and the delight that the author takes in his subject.

Dealing with Thoreau to great degree, it shows how punning was a significant part of romantic literature, and should not be dealt with contempt, but rather as a serious and significant part of our literary heritage.

Plus the humor in both the the subject matter and Professor West's treatment thereof are incomparable. Highly recommended to both the scholar and the interested dilletante atracted to our language and its associated history.

This book is easy to read and it is fun to review all the old photos of buildings (some of which no longer exist). Most of the buildings are familiar to those of us who live in Sandusky or visit regularly. After reading this book, you will find out the little known facts of the buildings that are so familiar. I would recommend this book to any age. It is a great way to learn how interesting Sandusky, Ohio is. I learned after reading this book that it has one of the largest collction of limestone buildings in Ohio, crayons were invented here, and it was part of the "underground railroad", which aided slaves in their quest for freedom.

As a native buckeye with no plant knowledge and a black thumb, this book is great! It is an alphabetical reference to all the native trees & shrubs. It tells you their good points, bad points, tips for success, etc in a very practical format. It also has TONS of photos of how the plant looks in different seasons. We moved out of the city & onto an acre, and this book has been used a lot!