Minnesota Books

This book will stay in your memory for years! I keep a copy near me and often relate a story or two from it. There are lots of stories from people from all walks of life in Minneapolis and surrounding communities. Many towns and farms and places are described. If you live around here, you will recognize many of the places.

The stories that touched me the most had to do with the rural farmers - some readily accepted stranded guests and some did so reluctantly. Many risked their lives in saving people. Some people were prepared for the blizzard, but most were not. Some were struck with tragedy, and some with a lot of good luck!

It is fun to relate to your children some of the hardships that people in the 1940's had to go through during the winter back then and they might like to hear some of these stories during a rare "snow day" that we have now and again here in Minnesota!

I highly recommend this book. I picked it up at my grandparents' house and couldn't put it down. It tells the personal accounts of a devastating, unexpected Minnesota blizzard that caught hundreds of hunters out on what was expected to be a beautiful, mild Indian summer day. The details are memorable: women caught wearing sandals in the snow, people taking hours to walk 2 blocks, and more. This book is one of those valuable record-keepers of Minnesota history. Thanks to the publisher for publishing it.

Since the marginal films of " Boca do Lixo" until "Macunaíma", this book shows the post-Cinema Novo.

Since the marginal films of " Boca do Lixo" until "Macunaíma", this book shows the pos-Cinema Novo. Enjoy, 'cause here in Brazil we don't have hardcover of this book!

Someone gave me this book, and I am lucky, for I never would have read it otherwise. But it seems that almost no one has ever read "American Daughter"(originally published in 1967), though it should be listed as of the greats of American letters. Thompson is quoted in the preface as saying, "Usually an autobiography is written near the end of a long and distinguished career, but not taking any chances, I wrote mine first, then began to live." That's tongue-in-cheek, and characteristically self-effacing. Very much so. After writing "American Daughter", Thompson went on to be associate editor of the newly established EBONY magazine, as just the start of a distinguished publishing and writing career. But it is this memoir, which should be reissued for mainstream attention--that is her great triumph--a touching, beautifully written book that enriches the lives of all who read it.

Miss Thompson has done an incredible job here. Her autobiography is so personal and touching. In reading her story, I watched her grow up in North Dakota and saw how the family struggled when they first started farming. From the early morning sunrise to the bitter cold weather, Era Bell Thompson is a master of description. She paints a beautiful picture of life, and likewise how hard the death of her mother and father were on her.
Her early 1900 work ethic makes us pale in comparison. Her friendships blossom on the pages. Her sorrows, pains, joys, love, and strength of spirit are poignant and enduring.
She is brave and hard working. She wants to share her soul with us, the readers, and has done a trememdous job!
Please purchase this book and read it. I promise it will be hard to put down and you will have been blessed by reading it.
Come share with me what I experienced by learning about a true american daughter, Era Bell Thompson.

I ordered this book to use in my women's studies class. I know TV Reed and I knew it would be good. But I didn't realize how extraordinary this book was. I am reading it now along side my students, haven't even finished it yet, but I am so excited by it I just have to talk about it!

At one point Reed describes the pleasure that politics must have in various forms -- the book is full of the power and meaning of a range of arts, especially in community and popular culture. He refers to Hannah Arendt and the idea of public happiness, that sense of exhilaration that suffuses one's being in moments of political engagement and collective action. Reading this book is some kind of public/private happiness too. One feels taken up through his appraisals of arts into his histories of various movements. Murals, poetry, drama, music, graphic arts, movies -- they shape our creative politics and the possibilities of our attachments and engagements with each other and through and about political culture. All these connections are inspirational in their detail and for emulation.

Thus it is also a handbook for activists, full of wise counsel for how to do cultural work and how to participate in and care about mobilization, organizing and direct action.

I also love its great heart and intellectual breadth: activist honor, dignity and integrity. Reed's generous spirit combined with sharp analysis clarifies strengths and limitations within particular movement histories, things we have to know to do good political work and to be active beings creating social justice.

This is a history of social movements, a set of tools for cultural workers, an intervention into the way we critique each other's political practices, and a sharing of spirit among activisms and arts.

And I haven't even finished it yet! Now I want all my students to read it or to have read it! I want to give it to everyone I know!

Imagine the civil rights movement without freedom songs or the politics of women's movements without poetry. More difficult yet, imagine an America unaffected by the cultural expressions of the twentieth-century social movements that have shaped our nation. The first broad overview of social movements and the distinctive cultural forms that helped shape them, The Art of Protest shows the vital importance of these movements to American culture.

In comparative accounts of movements beginning with the African American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s and running through the Internet-driven movement for global justice of the twenty-first century ("Will the revolution be cybercast?"), T. V. Reed enriches our understanding of protest and its cultural expression. Reed explores the street drama of the Black Panthers, the revolutionary murals of the Chicano movement, the American Indian Movement's use of film and video, rock music and the struggles against famine and apartheid, ACT UP's use of visual art in the campaign against AIDS, and the literature of environmental justice. Throughout, Reed employs the concept of culture in three interrelated ways: by examining social movements as sub- or countercultures; by looking at poetry, painting, music, murals, film, and fiction in and around social movements; and by considering the ways in which the cultural texts generated by resistance movements have reshaped the contours of the wider American culture.

The United States is a nation that began with a protest. Through the kaleidoscopic lens of artistic and cultural expression, Reed reveals how activism continues to remake our world.

The above review is appropriately complementary to Michaels, thorough and fascinating work. Aboriginal Australians from all over the contient have been represented as Others by european settlers for just over 200 years. The story of colonisation is still very much a contmeporary issue for many Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. Accordingly, Michaels work is a fine contribution to an understanding of the need for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander self-determination and the ability to produce their own media and communications services.

Everything Michaels wrote was extremely interesting.

Eric Michaels, a social scientist from Texas who was a lecturer on media studies at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia, documents the development of aboriginal media in the book "Bad Aboriginal Art - Tradition, Media, and Technological Horizons." Published posthumously after his death in 1988 from AIDS, this rich volume contains Michaels' field essays and research papers exploring the impact of communications technology has had on the Aborigines in central Australia outside the margins of the "electronic grid."

When the Australian government launched the new AUSSAT satellite in the early eighties to broadcast network television to remote communities across the outback, Michaels, who spent three years living with the Warlpiri people at Yuendumu in central western Australia, witnessed the transition the new communications technology brought to the region. Like the early effort broadcast network television to Inuit communities, Michaels reports that the Australian Broadcasting Corporation had initially disregarded cultural sensitivities of Aborigines through the communications downlink.

Again, disparate interests between the Aborigines, the government and the ABC raised questions over cultural assimilation and sparked conflict over technological institutionalization. Michaels, who passionately supports the interests of the Aborigines, analytically details the situation throughout, including his 1987 essay "Hundreds Shot at Aboriginal Community: ABC Makes TV Documentary at Yuendumu."

He writes: "If the goal is to be cultural maintenance, not deterioration and assimilation, the only solution for traditional people will be developed at the local community level, where these comparatively small cultural and linguistic groups can buck the bias of mass media by filtering incoming signals through local stations and inserting local material." Motivated ot this end, Aborigines on their own seized the opportunity to produce their own pirate -- and legit -- television, broadcast locally produced material, and form their own broadcasting organizations such as the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association and its television subsidiary Imparja.

Rather than positioning his focus as a voyeur, Michaels approaches this insightful study with a participatory stance, rather than an interpretive one. As a result, he intimately relates his experience with the Warlpiri, their struggles for empowerment, providing a cultural context of aboriginal tradition and outlining their ethical parameters of image representation. For instance, he describes aboriginal taboos associated with deceased community members, and the nuances of community ownership in creative expression and dissemination.

Considering that aboriginal people have been defined through images from an outside European perspective for nearly 500 years, the role aboriginal people have in creating media is not merely about access. . . . In the long run, the importance of aboriginal television and video production to serve the needs of localized communities is a significant step towards self-determination and cultural preservation.

Dobie Gillis would NEVER fit into the modern university. Today's college kids are highly-disciplined, rigorously prepared, wildly ambitious. They pursue their training in highly-remunerative professions with single-minded dedication, and if they fall short of the grade needed to guarantee a Fortune 500 placement interview, their equally-determined parents raise Holy Hell until the poor professors (those who don't just pass everyone with an "A" so they can get on with writing books and articles while their TA's actually teach the class) cry uncle. Mind you, such students' idea of blowing off steam seems to consist of becoming poisonously drunk and either wrapping their vehicles around trees or becoming the perpetrator or victim of a date rape . . . Ah, Golden College Days.

Poor Dobie Gillis would just like to figure out what he's going to do when he grows up. At various times, he's studying literature, law, even Egyptology. His real major, of course, is girls. And like him, they're not quite sure what the future holds, but they're going to have fun getting there.

Beneath the surface silliness of these stories, which is often quite charming, lies a gentle portrait of kids becoming adults, and the many possibilities of making a complete idiot of yourself along the path. And a reminder that at one time colleges were not just expensive technical schools, but places where students went to learn about life and the wider world, and, of course, each other.
The junior Mr. Gillis may wind up a grocer (or a newpaper editor, or a banker) like his dad, but he'll be a really lively one for his college experiences.

You might not know it, but THE MANY LOVES OF DOBIE GILLIS: ELEVEN CAMPUS STORIES has been an influence on American humor for over fifty years. Already established as a key humorist by the breakthrough BEARFOOT BOY WITH CHEEK (1943), Max Shulman created an enduring type in a charming Minnesotan named Dobie Gillis, whose ineffable spirit and go-for-it quality has been charming readers ever since this book was published, in 1951.

It's no exaggeration to say that Schulman's brainchild, through Dobie, brought campus humor into the forefront of postwar American life and humor. Two years later the book came out again, just in time for a lackluster MGM musical, THE AFFAIRS OF DOBIE GILLIS, with Bobby Van playing the eternal teen and Debbie Reynolds as one of his many dreamboats (Bob Fosse, who also had a role in the 1953 movie, joked that it was the only black-and-white musical out of Metro since 1938, and he wasn't far from the truth.) Order the VHS if you want, but don't say I told you.

In 1959, CBS-TV turned THE MANY LOVES OF DOBIE GILLIS into a situation comedy starring Dwayne Hickman as Dobie, Frank Faylen as his irascible father and introduced Bob Denver to the world as beatnik "Maynard G. Krebs." The show's four-year run attests to its popularity and excellence, but please don't confuse it with the book, which, once again, seized on a marketing hook and was reissued in this format in 1960. On TV, most of Dobie's foils are adult or male, while in the book--again fortuitously released in this version during 1960--a glamorous if highly idiosyncratic parade of "dreamboats" populates Dobie's social and fantasy life. (Thalia Menninger, played by Tuesday Weld, was the main holdover.)

But the book, which is not a novel but a set of witty narratives, casts Dobie in any number of lights. He is by turns a high-school senior, college freshman, sophomore, senior and law school student with majors in English, Journalism, Engineering, and more, with a father who is by turns an irascible grocery-store owner (which survived into Frank Faylen's role on TV), but also a teacher, small-town Minnesota newspaper editor, and more. Dobie's encounters (or perhaps better-said, clashes with) the opposite sex extend beyond the high-maintenance Thalia Menninger to even less euphonious belles. In fact, the almost Dickensian relish with names that Shulman bestows on Dobie's belles is part and parcel of this book's fun, including Pansy Hammer, Poppy Herring, Chlotilde Ellingboe, and Lola Pfefferkorn. Situations include such horrors as an impossible-to-complete chemistry assignment, an attempt to secure a thousand-dollar dance band with $[...], a round of innocent plagiarism that threatens to turn deadly, and (shades of Seinfeld) - Dobie meets yet another wonderful girl but doesn't know her name!

Although the book runs not much more than 200 pages and the price, no matter what condition the book is in, is bound to run more than the $[...] the hardbound commanded in 1960, this is a definite go-for-it treasure of American wit and humor. Highly recommended. Those who get the Dobie habit big-time will probably also want to seek out some of Shulman's non-Dobie work: 1943's BAREFOOT BOY WITH CHEEK and the novel RALLY `ROUND THE FLAG, BOYS, which inspired the movie comedy with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward.

Whether Basic Needs has anything to offer you obviously depends on who you are. But whereas books like Jonathan Kozol's Savage Inequalities will outrage some and spur them to either imagine new ways of fixing an educational system that, despite what many say is better than what we had 50 years ago, still is not enough when students start hopeful and end homeless, or to throw money at that system and hope someone will do something useful with it, Landsman's book focuses your attention differently, in ways that are simultaneously more specific and just as broad.

Landsman writes about one specific group of kids during one school year, about kids who were already slipping through the cracks. The apparent lack of complete success in helping these children, coupled with incremental, inconsistent but spirit-raising breakthroughs, may leave you with needs you didn't know you had. It may remind those who have seen The Year of Living Dangerously of Linda Hunt's words to Mel Gibson, something along the lines of "You can't help everyone, you can only help those fate puts in front of you." Landsman makes you more willing to watch what's in your path, perhaps even to range further off of it to see if anyone needs help. And despite the subject matter, it warms, somehow. I wish I was still reading it.

The greatest praise I can give this book is that as someone who is not an educator, this book is surprisingly interesting and a very enjoyable read. It works both as a critique of the school systems in this country (and their failures) and as a quasi-novel of one very compassionate woman's struggle with the difficulties of teaching in a sometimes impossible environment.

This beautifully produced book is the summation of the author's life work in studying the Boundary Waters. Furthermore, it is the inspiration and groundwork for all subsequent work in the area. His intimacy with the ecosystem inspires awe at every turn. His great achievement was in using tree-ring analysis to reconstruct the entire fire history of the area, thus illuminating the dynamics of forest change.

I have traveled the BWCA for 30 years, but until reading this book never understood much about the history and ecology of the area. Bud Heinselman spent his life intently studying this magnificent forest, and left us a wonderful legacy in this book.

He spent decades studying the fauna and flora of the BWCA, especially the trees of the forest. Combining that information with his rich knowledge of the more recent history of the BWCA, especially of logging and mining, helps one understand just how the forest has come to be as it is today.

He covers all aspects of the BWCA's ecology: water, rocks, fish, trees, et. al. You may not realize how foreign the smallmouth bass is to the area, or even how close the area came to being developed and lost forever. He provides maps of the area with the forests dated to their most recent burn or logging: you are able to look up your favorite canoe routes and determine what trees are prevalent and why.

One of his major points is that modern fire fighting has altered the natural ecology of the area: as fire has been suppressed, fuel on the forest floor has increased, leading to the potential for more severe "crown" fires which destroy even the ancient white and red pines.

This book is a must-read for all BWCA visitors and deserves a place in the library of anyone that cares about ecology. TH Bracken MD srtrout@yahoo.com

Bill Holm, of Minneota, Minnesota creatively tackles the subject of the Boxelder bug. This thin volume includes cleverly written poetry, essays and music on the theme of the Boxelder Bug.

Example...from p. 26

The Minnesota UnderTaker, Thinking Perhaps of Future Business, Looks Me Square in the Eye During Men's Night at the Golf Course, And Says:

I thought of you last night as I flicked a boxelder bug off my lapel.

At times humorous, at times contemplative, and at times downright weird, Holm has created a truly unique book filled with off-the-wall poetry and prose.

The concept, in and of itself defies explanation -a work of art devoted to boxelder bugs.

As a child, I despied boxelder bugs. Their beady red eyes, their sleek black bodies, and their ability to fly, were too much for a four-year-old to bear. The bugs hung in massive colonies onto the green siding of our St. Paul home and frequently flew around my head and into my hair.

Bill Holm's book gave me an appreciation for this bug that I never could have imagined having before. The short volume is filled with witty poetry, stories, artwork, and essays that made me laugh-out-loud.

It will be the most unusual book that sits on your bookshelf, but you won't be disappointed.

I love this book and I hope that the author writes a continuation to this book. Where he actually tells of Annie Harding and Stewart Andersons trials and blessings to come. Like, if they had a baby or if she went to college and how Annies father and mother turned out.

This book is nice, easy reading. There's nothing difficult here. It reminded me of a cross between "Little House on the Prairie" and "Christy". It's your basic historical Christian family novel, with a good message. Don't think, however, that there's no storyline. You are taken into the lives and homes of the characters and you feel their struggles. There are even some good guy/bad guy themes involved, for those who lean toward elements of literature. If you're looking for an enjoyable Christian novel that you can finish in a few days, you'll love this book!!