Minnesota Books

Although this book based on a set of talks at SUNY Binghampton in 1989 has been hard to get (except in library collections), its impact has been instant and abiding: the collection is still being used by cultural critics and social science scholars from England to Australia and Taiwan, as I found out during my visit there as National Science fellow in 1995 where it was being used to help map cosmopolitan-yet- local strategies of "Asian/Pacific Cultural Studies."

Anthony King's collection, with a stunning and much-cited essay on transnational and ethnic complications of cultural identity in England by Stuart Hall called "The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity," on the one hand, and rather more homogenizing and predictable mappings of the capitalist culture of globalization by major sociologists like Immanuel Wallerstein and Rowland Robertson on the other, opens up the problematics of mapping global and local interactions, flows, contradictions, and synergies. King's own solid scholarship inquiring into the colonial infrastructures of transnationalizing global cities gave him a solid base on which to construct such cultural and ideological dialogues across disciplines and areas, and the collection remains a site where critical dialogue and trans-disciplinary interaction did take place.

In sum, the collection shows how some emerging new sensibility of "global paradox" complicates the globsl/local power of the local, sub-national, ethnic, and tribal to alter the seamless workings of global domination and transnational restructuration. Noteworthy in the collection, as well, are powerful critiques of reigning globalization models by Ulf Hannerz ("Scenarios for Peripheral Cultures") and an internal critique of the whole collection by Barbara Abou-El-Haj, who shrewdly remarks of such models (as theorized by the keynote speakers in the collection, Hall and Wallerstein), "Our ambition to do equal justice to the global and local is limited at the outset by our failures to generate a comparative language beyond the set of tiny binaries which reproduce the global regime in the very attempt to eviscerate it: center/periphery, core/periphery, western/non-western, developed/developing, etc."

This trans-disciplinary way of theorizing and representing global/local interactions called for in the collection does comprise what Abou-El-Haj notes is "a qualitative step forward." Subsequent collections of national/transnational interaction like Donald Pease and Amy Kaplan, eds., Culture of United States Imperialism (Duke University Press, 1993) and Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, eds., Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices (Minnesota UP, 1994) have been working out the far-reaching implications of these new global/local discourses and frames.

My interest is for the impact of globalizacion in México and LA

Book Review
That "Cut & Run" Loggin' Off the Big Woods" is a coffee table book is obvious when you see its cover with the three lumberjacks posed with their axes but, it is much more than that. There are over 150 pictures in its 144 pages all of them clear as bells and none of them seen before by me.
In addition to the pictures, there is text on each page and the text is what sets it apart from other books of its type. The book is written by Mike Monte, who I know. He lives in Crandon, Wisconsin, is a former logger and the son and grandson of old time lumberjacks. Where he got all the original photos I don't know but, the writing comes naturally to him from a life long interest in the logging history of the north woods. If its possible to love the sinner while hating the sin, Mike does that. He makes plain his contempt for the timber barons who were responsible for the cutting and running but his love and respect for those people who actually did the work and lived the life shows through on every page.
Although most of the book is about the loggers, teamsters, railroaders, sawmillers and river rats who did the work, there is also a lot about their wives and families. There is an entire chapter on "Padus" a typical "sawdust" town which no longer exists. Its now part of the small town of Wabeno. There are pictures of boiler explosions, train wrecks and fires all of which plagued these early towns and mills. Pictures of stores and saloons and mud choked main streets. People in their Sunday best and lumberjacks sleeping 4 and 5 to a bed in the logging camps. All with colorful descriptions , some from elderly people who actually lived the history.
You learn a lot about those days. Beneath a shot of a 'Jack with a two bitted axe, for example, Mike explains that they kept one edge sharp, the other dull and used the dull end on frozen wood since a sharp edge would chip out on frozen wood.
Since the timber companies all paid about the same wages, food in the camps made all the difference. Mike says that 'jacks would quit jobs to follow good cooks from one job to the next.
The book doesn't stop with the clearing of the pines. There are sections on the follow up harvests of hemlock and hardwoods and, finally, the cutting of what was left for pulpwood. By the 1920s it was pretty much all over. Some 70 years to take it all.
For those who are really interested, Mike shows pictures and explains, for example, the difference between an A frame jammer and a slide ass jammer, both of which were used to load logs onto railway cars. The book can serve as a history lesson into a colorful industry of the past and/or, simply a collection of interesting photos. Either way, its well worth owning

Dave Johnson

The publisher stumbled onto a treasure in this collection of photographs of early logging in America. Mike Monte's enthusiasm shines through his commentary on the history of logging. He's interested in the loggers, their trees, their lifestyle, their machinery, their locales, their women, in short, in everything associated with the logging industry in the United States more than a century ago. I keep wondering what it would be like to eat in the logging tent at the table with these rough-looking guys, or sleep on a plywood cot next to a fellow still wearing his hobnail boots--or hang out the laundry in a couple feet of snow....this book is to die for!

I was fortunate to hear Carrie Meyer give a presentation on this book and immediately bought it. I am now buying extra copies for family members who live on farms in Illinois and Iowa. I grew up on a farm in Central Illinois (roughly 100 miles of the family farm Carrie describes) in the late 1930s. This book has the daily diary from 1900 to 1944. It also has income and expense ledgers for everything they bought and sold. It tells about living on the farm in good and difficult times. Carrie's family is still living on the farm. This is the best book I have seen about life on a farm and how technology changed how farming was done. It is a must read.

"Days On The Family Farm: From The Golden Age Through The Great Depression" by Carrie A. Meyer (who grew up on an Illinois farm and went on to teach economics at George Mason University) is a memoir based history of life on a Midwestern farm from the beginning of the twentieth century to World War II as recorded in a daily chronicle kept by farm wife May Lyford Davis. The result is an entertaining and informative 'window into time' through which is revealed an American yesteryear when May and her husband Elmo experienced life on a farm through two decades of prosperity, the bleak years of the Great Depression, and the impact of two World Wars upon their Midwestern farming community of friends and neighbors. Articulate, detailed, personable, "Days On The Family Farm" is the story of a farmer's life marked by description of what was bought and sold, the evolution of farming practices and technologies from horse drawn plows to tractors, what was planted and harvested, temperatures and rainfall, births an deaths, even the impact of wind on the work of farming. Simply stated, "Days On The Family Farm" is an engaging and articulate read and a highly recommended addition to any personal or community library collection.

The slightness of Abelove's volume of essays belies the breadth of its reach and the enormous generosity of its insights, curiosities, and concerns. Some of the essays are, simply put, transformative--that on Freud makes us reconceptualize the founder of psychoanalysis, whose views on human sexuality turn out to differ notoriously from those, especially American, analysts who would claim to follow in his path. The essay on Thoreau similarly recovers this writer from a dominant (and domineering) tradition of domestication. Everywhere in his beautifully plain-spoken writing--whether it is on the demographics of 18th-century England or the critical reception of American Studies pioneer F.O. Mathiessen--Abelove quietly, gracefully, and compellingly overturns the received accounts we have of some of the crucial institutions and figures in the history of modern thought and culture. In addition to offering a richly rewarding entree into the history of sexuality, Abelove's work might best be seen as contributing mightily to a revisionist archeology of those common-sense assumptions that underwrite what we all take to be fundamental certainties and self-evident truths.

Abelove considers topics as various as Freud, the eighteenth century, Elizabeth Bishop, Thoreau, queer students, and American Studies founder F.O. Mathiessen. But these essays are not a miscellany. They are the culmination of a careful mind's work of two decades, and model a method for queering history and culture that simply does without the polemics or technical jargon that typically characterize such projects. It is a book that repays careful reading, one that is short enough to be realistically re-read, and one clear and self-contained enough to be read without reference to a mountain of other academic texts.

Though a novel, this tale shows the type of slavery that has continued to exist in Africa until very recently, and continues in some parts today. Emecheta presents a girl's predicament from a personal perspective, telling the reader both why slavery was seen as necessary and how it hurt this child. She also makes clear that this is a very different kind of slavery than that pictured by Americans. Well-written and only half fiction, this novel is a good read for anyone interested in West African culture.

Once again Ms Emecheta has written a thought provoking and captivating book about domestic slavery in Nigeria. The setting is in Nigeria in the early 20th Century and wound around significant events of the time such as the Influenza epidemic, Aba market women's riot,colonization and arrival of the missionaries. The heroine a young girl is sold into slavery by her own brother after the death of their parents in the influenze epidemic. The story details the twists and turns in her life while in bondage, her eventual return to her people and subsequent events.

Lovely photographs, informative text. After having lived in Duluth, I was trilled to find brand new delights as well as being introduced to historic places and facts. Fully descriptive of all kinds of places and events without sounding or feeling like advertisements. Great book if you wish to learn more about Duluth.

Duluth, the Zenith City, has three million tourists visit each year and in "Duluth: Gem of the Freshwater Sea," author Anita Zager provides a look at some of the reasons why. Situated at the westernmost tip of the world's largest freshwater lake, Lake Superior, Duluth stretches about 25 miles along the lakeshore from the St. Louis River in the west to the Lester River in the east. Once you go inland you hit the Duluth hillside, which creates the notorious "lake effect" that keeps things cooler by the Lake in the summer and warmer by the Lake in the winter. Of course, basically it snows here from Halloween to Easter, so it is pretty much winter half of the year. But the average snowfall in Duluth is only 78 inches (Flagstaff, Arizona, gets more than 100 inches); it is just that once it starts snowing it tends to stick around until what passes for "Spring."

Zager covers a lot in this book so do not expect an in-depth look at Duluth. She begins by looking at the geological aspects of region, which is how Lake Superior, Old Rock, and the St. Louis River helped to turn the headwaters of the inland seas into a natural harbor. The human history of the area is briefly sketched in terms of the Ojibwe and the early Europeans. Since Duluth is a major port city shipping is a major part of this book, which means everything from the Duluth Ship Canal and the Aerial Lift Bridge to sailing vessels, commercial fishing, shipbuilding, shipwrecks, and lighthouses. That leads to economic concerns of the area such as mining, lumber, and railroading.

This book includes 170 color photographs of the city and the surrounding environs, some of which are pretty spectacular, including lots of shots of the Zenith City's signature structure the Aerial Lift Bridge. This means: (1) architectural landmarks such as the Depot, Fitger's, and Glensheen Mansion; (2) local attractions including the Lake Superior Zoo, S.S. William A. Irwin, and the Great Lakes Aquarium; (3) other attractions such as Canal Park and the Downtown Lakewalk; (4) the arts scene including the Duluth Entertainment and Convention Center and the Tweed Museum of Art; and (5) parks and natural areas including Enger Tower, Skyline Parkway and the Rose Garden. Duluth is part of the Twin Ports, so Zager also looks at some of the key aspects of Superior, Wisconsin.

The final four chapters are devoted to the season activities of Duluth and underscores that this book is aimed at Tourists. Consequently it gives readers a taste of what there is to see in Duluth without going into so much detail that you do not feel you need to come and see these things for yourself. Duluth is also the gateway to the North Shore, which is touched upon in this volume as well, which is important because one of the things I like about living here is that you can drive for 15 minutes and end up down by the shore of Lake Superior without being able to see anything of the city other than the to of the Aerial Lift Bridge or Enger Tower up on the hillside. Try doing that in less than an hour from the center of downtown San Francisco.

This book is an "must have". It contains complete formulars that help the average person consider the design requirements.

Earth Sheltered Housing Design: Guidelines Examples, and References- Universty Of Minnesota ~ ISBN: 0442288212

318 pages, well done, many examples and styles of sheltered and underground designs.

Fabulous technical guide to earth sheltered (underground) housing.

Chapters include site planning, architectural design, energy use, structural design, waterproofing and insulation, building codes, illustrative designs, cold climate designs, warm climate designs.

Includes photos of homes, design details, backfilling, solar gain, roofs, and many real world examples shown including Davis Caves, solaria and ecology houses.

Appendices include energy calculations and comparisons, financing issues and references.

Architects represented: Don Metz, the Winston House and the baldtop dugout; John Barnard, ecology houses; Carmody and Ellison, the Jones House; Michael McGuire, the Clark Nelson House; Mr. and Mrs. Donald Karsky, the Karsky house; Joe Topiv, the topic house; Andy Davis, the Davis Cave; Big Outdoors People, big outdoors dome (concept only); Malcolm Wells, solaria; Ron McClure, rousselot house; Coffee & Crier, bordie residents; William Morgan architects, the Dune House; David Wright environmental architects, the sundown house at Sea Ranch; Roland Coate, the Alexander house; Philip Johnson, the Geier House; Herman DeJong, Terrasol (unbuilt). Terrific photos of this midcentury modern concept.

In-depth references and bibliography.

B&W images and illustrations.
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From The Back Cover:
Before the use of fossil fuels was commonplace, man often turned to the earth for protection from the elements and extremes of climate. Now, with fuel supplies dwindling and fuel prices rapidly rising, it is time to reconsider the benefits of habitation below the earth's surface.

This book of guidelines offers homeowners and architects a comfortable and economic approach to underground housing based on modern construction techniques. It provides plans, details and photographs of existing examples of earth sheltered houses from around the country, and shows how to design homes using such low cost natural resource and energy-saving systems as layers of soil insulation and passive solar heating. Many of the homes illustrate how the designs can be adapted to take advantage of specific natural surroundings.

Avoiding the use of technical language whenever possible, the authors give clear-cut explanations of energy performance in earth sheltered homes, as well as helpful hints on selecting materials and equipment. The reader will find basic information on warm climate and cold climate designs, including detailed coverage of plans, site selection, waterproofing and insulation, as well as zoning codes and other public policy issues that relate to underground construction. Essential advice is given on systems which provide maximum protection from wind chill, unwanted infiltration, and direct heat loss. All the facts are here on creating a durable, low maintenance structure that is not only economical, but also as comfortable as a conventional home. Detailed appendices offer precise information on financing, building codes, and product information.

Forward-looking homeowners, architects, and planners will value this comprehensive and timely study. The AA Journal calls it "The first comprehensive underground design manual."

The Undergound Space Center:
A comprehensive research program studying problems relating to resouce utilization, the Center draws upon the efforts of numerous experts of the scientific community at the University of Minnesota as well as professional engineers and architects working in the areas of innovative residential design and energy research.

At the end of Valley of the Shadow, Ellen and Two Stars are both dead. Simon has undergone a spiritual renewal with influence of Gen, and he now needs a wife and mother to his children. Gen slowly begins to accept the death of Daniel Two Stars, and promises to Simon that she will try to love him, while he promises to take it slowly. Far away, Daniel Two Stars lingers in a prison for rebel Indians, being put there by mistake with others who have also accepted the Christian faith. Miraculously, he is released, only to eventually find out that Gen is promised to Simon. He makes Simon promise never to tell Gen the truth, and resolves to lead his life without his beloved Gen. Whitson's master storytelling skill is evident as she weaves the differing stories of Gen and Two Stars, as well as those of Miss Jane and the Major and the orphaned twins into one riveting novel. This is a great read, a must for those who are fans of Whitson and historical fiction, as well as for those who like to read about the power of God in people's lives.

Book two covers a lot of territory - some of the top Indians are offered jobs as escorted scouts for the Army. Daniel Two Stars has finally gotten out of a living hell prison and is wearing an Army uniform and hunting renegade Indians. Genevieve LaCroix is serving as caregiver for Simon's children and orphaned baby Hope who was rescued by Gen and Daniel after the death of her parents.

The conditions of the Indians is deplorable - most of the children have died. Thousands are still sick, starving prisoners. Simon Dane buries himself in Indian missionary work but is frustrated at his limited resources. Simon is falling in love with the beautiful half-breed Dakota Indian, Blue Eyes (Gen) and even though she respects him in return, her heart still belongs to her true love, Daniel Two Stars who she believes is dead.

Elliott Leighton, Ellen's brother, enters the storyline and has one goal in mind - to prevent his sister's children from being raised in the wild West, OR by an Indian mother. He has been discharged from the Army after losing one arm and having his long hair turn white overnight. He travels to Simon's home to retrieve the children, having no idea the changes that await for him.

Jeb Grant is a pivotal figure in this book. He is a farmer who just cannot bring himself to hate all Indians and he opens his heart and his farm to questionable Indian activities.

Simon and Elliott accidentally run into Daniel while traveling in a storm during an illness, and after learning that Gen is engaged to Simon, Daniel asks both men to promise not to tell her and to forget they ever saw him. This is NOT going to be easy to do but Daniel determines to leave her alone so she can have a better life. Simon has a strange illness that persists, and among his many nurses are Mother Friend, Daniel, Elliott and Genevieve.

The devastation of the good Indian's homes and villages by soldiers and renegade Indians leaves families separated and thousands homeless, injured, starving and defeated. Several major questions are answered in this book:

1. Will Gen marry Simon even though they both know her heart belongs to the memories of Daniel Two Stars?

2. What will happen to an angry Elliott when he visits the Crow reservation?

3. What happens to Daniel who was reported as hanged? Will he ever see Blue Eyes again?

4. What is the fate of 5 orphaned children, including baby Hope?

5. Which is stronger, love, committment or duty? Is it possible for Simon, Blue Eyes(Gen) and Daniel to make the right choices in spite of their hearts?

I felt that Stephanie Grace Whitson reflected some of the pain of her own life in this book. Love, death, grief, faith, loyalty, overcoming and doing the right thing were foremost in the intrigue and interest this second book held. I give this book at least 15 stars for the mystery and suspense it generates particularly in the last 25 pages. Excellent writing skills Steph!

Book three in this series is due out in late 2001 and I am planning to order it well in advance.

I absolutely loved this book. I'm a city girl who at the time I read this book had been transplanted to a hobby farm in Kansas. I always recommend this book to any "newcomers" to the country. I was sad to see the book end! Definitely a must read!

Marjorie Myers never guessed she'd be spending the next 17 years of her life on an out of the way farm way the heck out in Western Minnesota; she'd been happy and content living the urban lifetsyle of busy, bustling St. Paul. But then she fell in love and got married, in the middle of World War II, and the next thing you know she was living among her in-laws, a mixed blessing at best. This is her memoir of her years in what amounted to another country for her, a time when she learned a lot about a simpler life and a more arduous one as well. For if America changed a lot between 1943 and the beginning of the "New Frontier," it never changed as much as for people living on stock ranches like Marjorie. She never thought she'd be killing animals, much less ones she had gotten to love as pets and friends, but the hard way of the farm got her used to it. At bottom she remained the same endearing, enchanting woman she had started out with, and you know what?

She came out of her experience a whole lot smarter and with more of a natuve wisdom about the way things work, not only on the farm but in the secret chambers of the human heart. If you like Mary Gaskell's novels of 19th century farm life, you will enjoy this true account, s beautifully written, of one'woman's farm wife experience, and you will grow to love her husband, "Don," and understand why a man like that could make a woman leave her former home and follow him even unto a farm not much removed from the famous COLD COMFORT FARM. Highly recommended for both city and country folk.

Deleuze follows Nietzsche in asserting that literature, at its strongest, plays a *clinical* role in our lives, providing us with a technology to discharge blockages, to liberate the penal colonies of our overcoded neuroses. Literature is a vector of disease, the writer a physician of the spirit, the world a dissoluted Body without Organs shimmering between the escape-routes of Life and the leprous snares of a doctrinal judge-mentality. Sickness and disequilibrium on a world-historical scale, a delirium far beyond the personal and the individual, the great authors (in this anthology: Melville, Whitman, Carroll, Lawrence, Jarry, Masoch, Beckett) struggling to plot the epidemiology of these terrors, groping for an escape-hatch that may redeem the years of incarceration, both psychical and political. Illness is defined as the *stopping* or interruption of the writing process, the exhaustion of the literary machine, when the schizo-author feels abandoned by the world's epic Traverse and wills her own destruction. Where once the literary agent had all her powers engaged in the machinic exploration of her own narrative Immanence, there now remains only an outmoded cyborg husk, having lost "the spontaneity or the innate feeling for the fragmentary, and the reflection on living relations that must constantly be acquired and created. Spontaneous fragments constitute the element through which, or in the intervals of which, we attain the great and carefully considered visions and sounds of both Nature and history"(60). These essays show how every great writer is also a master aetiologist, a "holistic pathologist" trying to identify and dissolve the negative forces which separate Life from what it can do, that keep Immanence from exploding against its world-historical targets. As a supplement to *Capitalism and Schizophrenia* (that immaculate Public Health textbook), these discourses are outstanding.

I must confess, I've only read three of the essays so far in this book, but it's the introduction that I'm most grateful for. Daniel W. Smith does a magnificent job of explicating many of the concepts that have perplexed and confounded my poor artistic mind. I feel that Deleuze had a special understanding of literature, and I was interested to see what he has to say about some of the writers I also love (Beckett, Kafka, Melville). But I've mostly had this experience of wishing I could get what it was he was saying. I felt all along like I was just-this-close, until Smith cracked it open for me. Lots of "Aha" experiences. For people with an artistic bent and with an attraction to philosophy, Deleuze is perhaps a kindred spirit whose words and thoughts about literature, painting and music can give hope and faith to whatever projects we work on at the foot of the capitalist mountain. I've also read his book on Kafka, and I selected that one because I want to understand more, and based on a review here on Amazon where someone said "this was the one to start with." I would say, that Kafka is definitely the one to start with, but Smith's intro to this book gives a very helpful overview of what one can expect. So Start with the Intro, go to Kafka, then come back to the essays. My .02.