Michigan Books

The Copper Country of Michigan has long been my favorite place in the world to visit, because of the matchless combination of water and mountains, unique in Michigan. And now I feel as if I know the area even more intimately.
The storytelling blends all the elements in such a way that I read the book from beginning to end at one sitting. It's a wonderful addition to my library, one I will always treasure.

Although this book is really just a family genealogy of a rather ordinary immigrant family, I found this very interesting as I was living in the Keweenaw peninsula when I read it and could imagine all the places mentioned. The mine owners are portrayed is quite over-the-top benevolent in the labor relations. The story is very well told.

I checked this book out of our library so much when I was a little girl. When my son was about 9, I read it to him during our nightly reading sessions. He loved it, too. Inspires imagination.

I grew up in Lapeer county where this story takes place. So as a child I read and loved this book. Now, as an adult I live in teh very house the story takes place in and once again have discovered the magic of this story. There is a biography of the author which contains other short stories about her father which didn't make it into Copper Toed Boots, to anyone who enjoys this book I would also suggest the biography.

Note: These are true stories about the author's father. A great way to teach children about life in the late 19th century and get them started reading at an early age. Shad's adventures are fun and the writing is mature enough that adults won't feel talked down to. Enjoy!

This is quite an extraordinary book: a combination of "Little House on the Prairie" and one of my grandmother's old cookbooks. It was pressed on me by a friend whose reading tastes I don't normally share. I started reading "The Country Kitchen" to be polite, and ended up reading straight through to the end. Even though I wasn't even born until well after this book had gone through twenty-three editions, it had the power to evoke memories of my own childhood--at least the stories my grandfather used to tell me about his life on the farm.

Della Lutes was born in 1872 and lived on a farm near Jackson, Michigan until she was sixteen, when she left home to teach school. She eventually became the editor of "American Motherhood," "Today's Housewife," and in 1923 the "Modern Priscilla" magazine. When the publishing firm she worked for went bankrupt during the Great Depression, Della became a freelance writer and produced "The Country Kitchen," which started out as a series of articles in "The Atlantic Monthly." Her book was named "The Most Original Book" of 1936 by the American Booksellers Association and was described by Christopher Morley as a 'gastronomical autobiography.'

I don't know whether I'll ever try the recipe for "salt-risin' bread" or buy a quarter of beef to be "nicely ripened by hanging a couple of weeks or so in the woodshed," but I'll long remember the story of how Della's father entertained the Ladies' Church Aid Society by turning a baby skunk loose during their annual dinner. And then there's the story of Little Runt, who was fated to be the Thanksgiving pig, and Old Wart, the garden toad. Della's story wheels you through the complete cycle of seasons with all of the sights and smells of rural Michigan (you might not want to know what some folks used for home insulation, come late Autumn).

This author deserves a place on your shelf right next to Laura Ingalls Wilder. She has saturated this book with the tastes and smells of a late nineteenth-century rural kitchen, bringing back recollections I never knew I had. Maybe it's got something to do with ancestral remembrance, since nearly all of our folks were rural up until the early decades of the last century.

All I can urge you to do is read it and remember.

Mildly intrigued by the title of this book, I bought a used copy...a flea market in Lunenberg, Mass. this past fall. It turned out to be a real gem. Superbly well-written, it weaves together accounts of the author's family life in rural Michigan at the turn of the Twentieth Century with recipes of the food the family ate. The effect is very much along the lines of MFK Fisher's books about her life in France. But unlike Mrs. Fisher, Ms. Lutes is no self-conscious bohemian. Very much a woman of her time and place, she is nonetheless independent, intelligent, and very funny. That is, there is nothing genteel and Victorian about her, and nothing pretentious. She is modern, one of us. Who was Della T. Lutes? Hard to tell at this late date. My 1965 edition of "The Reader's Encyclopedia" has no entry on her. Amazon.com has only this title for sale. But she must have had a considerable following in her day. My copy of "The Country Kitchen," printed in 1948, was apparently the 22nd printing of a book originally published in 1936. The flyleaf lists four other titles by her. I gave "The Country Kitchen" to my wife, a chef, for Christmas. She has yet to stop raving about it. More than a cook book, a culinary history or a social history, "The Country Kitchen" qualifies as capital-L Literature.

Lynn M. LoPucki has described and documented the insidious corruption that has taken hold of the U.S. bankruptcy courts. Almost no one in the bankruptcy field will talk openly about what has happened to the practice of their profession. But the corruption and prevalence of greed are very real. Lynn M. LoPucki has decoded their playbook and exposed the pattern of corruption. The "case placers" (bankruptcy lawyers and professionals) choose where to file the cases; judges compete for big cases by appealing to them. Compromised judges readily approve lucrative fees for the lawyers and bankruptcy professionals with whom they have cozy relationships, while allowing them to suppress, muzzle and trample on the rights of shareholders and creditors who dare to object. Disturbingly, corrupt bankruptcy lawyers and professionals are becoming more artful at their game. The plays are now so well understood that case placers do not need to spell out their conspiratorial actions to one another. They have mastered the quick Section 363 sale (minimum time, maximum fees). They can effectively hijack companies through their counsel to boards of directors, then be opportunely positioned to generate millions in legal and professional fees, all readily approved by the judges who reward their brethren who bring cases to their courts, even praising them for their "hard work." The U.S. Trustee's office is no help in ferreting out the abuse. Nor is the SEC. Bankruptcy fraud and corruption are not even among the SEC's priorities. So it is "businessperson beware," and especially beware of your lawyers and professional advisors, their motives, and their connections to the bankruptcy world. No serious business person can afford not to know what is happening to the bankruptcy courts. LoPucki's book is required reading.

Great book, explains how companies can abuse the bankruptcy court system. Very well written, and interesting for a general audience.

I couldn't put it down! The characters were so well written that I felt like I was losing an old friend when I finished the book. The twists and turns in plot kept me hooked, and the ending was great. But I think the best part about the book was the feel of reality to it. Its placed in a small town with people who have normal abilities, normal reactions, and regular jobs, yet they overcome great difficulties.

Overall, out of the hundreds of mysteries I read each year, this is one of the best I've read.

CPA P.J. Benson moves away from Kalamazoo into a small house she inherited from her paternal grandfather in Zenith Michigan, a farming community where nobody locks their doors. This proves to be a mistake as P.J. discovers when she is taking a walk in the woods and she hears shots ring out. She rushes home finding a blood trail that leads to her kitchen until she reaches a dead man.

Detective Wade Kingsley is put in charge of the case and feels that P.J. is a possible suspect even though she doesn't know the man. Her closest neighbors John and Julia think they know who the victim was and they believe he stole bioengineered lady bugs from a lab. They can't tell the police because John brought them home from work without permission. Several times P.J. feels someone has been in her home but the police think she is crazy (a sore spot for her because her mother is a schizophrenic) but she knows where each pf her belongings are supposed to be. When certain evidence comes to light, Wade believes her and wants her to stay at his sister's house until they can figure out what is going on. P.J. refuses and almost gets them both killed from a ghost out of her past.

Since mental illness runs in her family, P.J. ponders if the things that are happening to her are hallucinations like a jealous lesbian poisoning her food or her hearing the voice of someone dead for eighteen years over the phone. She comes to realize she is as sane as anyone else and somebody is playing mind games with her. The mystery is well constructed with different neighbors at different times coming under suspicion. THE CROWS is a creative well written psychological suspense thriller.

Harriet Klausner

This is a great introduction to the medieval Crusades with eye candy to boot! It's a very even keeled overview - without all the political biases that so often get in the way of explaining a subject objectively. This book educates the reader on the various crusades within the context of their times.

"Crusades - The Illustrated History," Thomas F. Madden, Editor, shares all the strengths of Madden's "Concise History of the Crusades." It is a refreshing and positive look at the falable but devoted knights and kings of Christendom who deeply desired to see the holy sites of Christianity delivered from the hands of their unbelieving conquerors. It is eminently fair in its approach to historical facts. It also incorporates much new knowledge of the period.

Besides being a facinating account of the period, it is a beautifully designed book. Its sections are broken up into short studies with rich colored illustrations. You can read it in short stages, and absorb the material at leisure. It also shares the strength of a perspective shared by several historians, so you are aware that the research is not just one man's ideas but the fruit of much fresh information.

This one is worth the money and time you will put into it.

Wm. H. Scarle, Jr. - BA, M.Div., Th.M - Tampa, FL

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!

Doesn't get any better than this. I love Jon Jacksons Mystery writing! Keeps you on the edge of your seat!

Jon Jackson always delivers the goods...never predictable wordsmithing that often reads like a musical score...

Interesting plot. Humorous and colorful description of characters living along small port town on Lake Huron.

Unable to work homicide ever since his pregnant spouse Cindy was murdered in a drive-by killing, fortyish widower Tyrone Trotman retires from the Detroit Police Department to accept the job of police chief of Port Ottawa. He makes an offer on a historical home with the famous Last Tree located in the yard. Tyrone meets the owner, Jane Blane, the love child of the town's recently deceased leading citizen; to his shock he wants her and she reciprocates. They even discuss marriage as love at first sight strikes both of them.

Meanwhile, Deputy police officer Billy Budd informs Tyrone he found a corpse in the cemetery that was not primed for burial; not long afterward a second murdered body shows up in the same locale. While the townsfolk insist it is the spirit of the Last Tree calling out to all the trees cut down in the last century, Tyrone seeks a more mortal culprit.

This is an entertaining paranormal police procedural romance starring a wonderful protagonist who does not believe in the legends yet talks to the Last Tree and heeds otherworldly advice to save his beloved. The romantic subplot is fun as the lead duet knows they belong together and don't waste time or energy otherwise. The townsfolk and the Detroit witch augment a fun lighthearted bewitching who-done-it that will have the audience wondering if the tree spirits or a Lorax like human is speaking violently for the long gone forests by killing people.

Harriet Klausner

This book is an excellent history of the different eras of logging in the U.P. It thoroughly covers the pine era, hardwood era, and the pulpwood era. It also goes into detail about many of the most important men behind the lumber companies, both large and small. If you are at all interested in the history of logging, or have an interest in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, this book is an excellent choice.

Highly recommended if you have any interest in the timber industry's history. Book includes commentary on the results of some poor management practices and the attempts to farm clear-cuts. A good history of logging and the lessons learned. Lots of interesting characters and stories, as well. Obviously a well researched book.