Minnesota Books

Westward We Came: A Norwegian Immigrant's Story, 1866-1898 is the first-hand memoir of Harold B. Kildahl, Sr., a Norwegian immigrant to America who came to the New World in 1866. He and his family witnessed historic events such as the notorious James-Younger gang bank raid in Northfield, Minnesota and the beginning of St. Olaf college. Westward We Came offers insight into the hardships, satisfactions, and daily routine of pioneer life. In 1888, Kildahl returned to Minnesota to gain an education at St. Olaf College and the Lutheran Seminary, where he was ordained, married, and became a pastor in the Lutheran faith. An authentic settler narrative, that virtually opens a window in time to over a hundred years ago.

Anyone intrigued by *The Manchurian Candidate* (1962) deserves to check out this book, which delves deep into the film's artistry and (I mean this in the best sense) its insanity too.

For those who simply love the film -- for its inventive visual sense, for its mix of camp and horror, for its witty dialogue, for its cockamamie yet gripping plot -- there's a lot to love in this book. There's all the newly unearthed backstory to the making of the film -- for instance, how Frank Sinatra threw himself into this Cold War satire of McCarthyism just after he'd felt the chill of the blacklist himself (he'd hired Hollywood Ten screenwriter Albert Maltz to adapt a novel about a US soldier executed for desertion, then been forced to drop Maltz and the project) or how Sinatra personally got the thumb's-up from JFK in order to convince United Artists executives that the film wasn't too anti-Soviet. And there's a lot of new analysis of the film itself too: the authors help solve one of the great mysteries of the film -- what the hell is the Rosie character doing in the train, and why does she fall for Frank Sinatra's Major Marco? -- by demonstrating, convincingly, that the film is patently misquoting from earlier train courtship scenes by Hitchcock (*Strangers on a Train*, *North by Northwest*), where men square off with an enigmatically curious fellow passenger. Dreaming about women's garden parties night after night, Major Marco has become a very strange kind of man -- and Rosie is there to draw out the strangeness.

Yet this is more than just a great book about a great film. It's also a wonderful primer on how the Cold War shot through American culture -- how Cold War ideas were the foundation even for films, say, made by anti-McCarthy directors like John Frankenheimer. It gets under the skin of the movie, you might say. So there's not only a fine discussion of how the film satirizes McCarthyism (which you'd expect), but also an illuminating discussion of how the film understands the threat and allure of Asian culture, leveraging Orientalist cliches throughout. I'd never really thought through the oddness of the film's opening scene, which is set in a Korean brothel, until I read this book. (Which brings up another interesting twist from the film's backstory: Khigh Dhiegh, who plays the viciously madcap Dr. Lo, was not Asian or Asian-American. Originally named Kenneth Dickerson, he was born to an Anglo-Eyptian-Sudanese family in New Jersey. That's a nice factoid but not too unexpected -- Hollywood in that period rarely employed Asian or Asian-American actors, even for Asian roles. More amazing is that Dhiegh, who played the Asian villian in countless roles, took up another Asian self in his offstage life: he founded a Taoist institute in North Hollywood and, until his death in 1991, conducted seminars on the I Ching and Eastern ways of knowing.)

A word to the wise: as the above paragraph might suggest, this is not your typical fan-driven book. It's juicy but also thoughtful and thought-provoking, raising a lot of questions about how the Cold War continues to hang over our contemporary moment. As someone who teaches the Cold War to undergraduates at the college level, I can't wait to assign it so that they can appreciate the unique genius of the film, and so that they might ask themselves, along with Raymond Shaw in the film, "what they've been built to do".

Farred's narrative prose is matched only by his
stirring retelling of high points in black
socio-political expression. This text
brings 20th century history to life engaging all levels of
emotional and intellectual discourse. It shows the
power of intellectuals existing outside of the academy.

Christopher Isherwood's name and the breadth of his work is completely overshadowed by a musical adaptation of just one of his short stories. One of the best writers of memoir, reportage and fiction of the twentieth century, his work will one day appear on required reading syllabi alongside Hemingway, Faulkner and Fitzgerald. In the meantime, please read and share this book.

The demi-biographical stories presented in "Where Joy Resides" demonstrate Isherwood's ability to consolidate place, time, character and emotion into a concise and highly readable presentation. Although a diverse selection, the reader will finish the book with an understanding and affinity for the author.

Spend a weekend "Where Joy Resides," and I'm confident you will not remember Christopher Isherwood as the guy who wrote "Caberet."

The best there is for scouting a river trip. We have used this book for over 20 yrs.

In the frontier days before the railroads penetrated the western plains, the Whoop-Up Trail was a high road of adventure and commerce. It led Indians, traders and cattlemen into a great interior market stratching northward from the Missouri River in MT to the Bow River valley in Alberta. From Fort Benton on the Great Muddy to Fort Macleod on the Oldman, the trail with the rowdy name wrote its history in whisky, guns, furs, and pioneer enterprise."

Connolly once again provokes and inspires. This leading political theorist and recent winner of the prestigious Lippincott Award for his classic Terms of Political Discourse shows in this book why the impasse between secularists and theistic thinking can best be overcome through a cultivation of a new kind of pluralist enagement with others. This is a breakthrough we've all been waiting for. "Heaven is a place, a place where nothing ever happens."

This book is an excellent resource for learning about what to feed most birds that will visit your garden. There are also ideas and instructions on how to build birdfeeders - from simple to more complex. A must-have for anyone who enjoys back-yard birdwatching.

You are what you grow. That is the message of this delightful volume about one woman with a horticultural vision that is a rare match in US lore. As told by Hellander, Eloise Butler brought a deep affinity for earth's pleasures to her work in studying plants, creating new gardens, and opening the world of plants and flowers to others through her writings. As a combination biography and gardening book, the reader finds new connections between the presonal and the petal. This is a great book for anyone with a love of gardening, of cultural anthropology, and of the curiousity to find out how a woman grows.

Richard has one of the best eyes for capturing beauty at unexpected times and places. Once you get to know Richards work, you will imediately pick it out of the crowd of the very best!