Minnesota Books

Dean's book brought back many great memories of when I lived in Rochester; the beautiful sights, the fun places to go, the basic flavor of this great midwestern city. His abilities with the camera are wonderful, thanks for providing Rochester fans with a priceless souvenir!

For anyone who has visited, lived in or is currently living in Rochester, MN, Dean's book is a beautiful keepsake to remember the beauty of the city. An update of Rochester: The Images, this book is really much more of a entirely new book with a wider range of pictures and informative captions (along with a history of the city).
Dean's has an amazing ability to capture the beauty in everything the city has to offer - from the Mayo Clinic to the Plummer House. Its a beautiful book and a worthy addition to anybody's library.

Having lived in Rochester for a time, I know that Dean has effectively captured the essence of the city with this book of photographs. Everything here could be framed and put on my living room wall. Looking through this book makes it seem as though I still live there. Great work!

A fantastic collection of images of the city of Rochester. Whether you were just a visitor to the city or are a lifelong resident of the community, Riggott's book captures the beauty of the city in page after page. The images are beautiful, timeless and are perfect memories of the incredible city.

The author has done an incredible job covering the history of this area in Minnesota. The book was great to read and very informative.

This book is filled with wonderful photos of all the original settlers of this rural Minnesota community. There are many facts and stories to go along with the images throughout the book.

I recommend this for anyone who wants to know more about the community they live in or if you aren't from the area, you will enjoy the historical significance of how this area of Minnesota was settled.

Olson's use of sensory description is a powerful tool in his writing, particularly Ghost Camps of the North (an essay in Ruins of the North). Olson takes the reader on a fantastic adventure in each and every one of his essays. Not only does he take the reader to various geographical locations, but he also takes the reader back to the days of the French/ Canadian Voyageurs, and trappers. Ruins of the North contains work that traces the path the voyagers took from Montreal to Grand Portage, and into the far North The careful description of the Hunting Moon rising has a majical quality about it. Olson is a master nature/ wilderness interpreter that has given the canoeist/ camper a wealth of stories to tell. Reading an essay from Ruins of the North just before one retires at night insures a night filled with vivid dreams, and sound sleep. This can best be illistrated by the Essay The Dream Net.

Olson's use of sensory description is a powerful tool in his writing, particularly Ghost Camps of the North (an essay in Ruins of the North). Olson takes the reader on a fantastic adventure in each and every one of his essays. Not only does he take the reader to various geographical locations, but he also takes the reader back to the days of the French/ Canadian Voyageurs, and trappers. Ruins of the North contains work that traces the path the voyagers took from Montreal to Grand Portage, and into the far North The careful description of the Hunting Moon rising has a majical quality about it. Olson is a master nature/ wilderness interpreter that has given the canoeist/ camper a wealth of stories to tell. Reading an essay from Ruins of the North just before one retires at night insures a night filled with vivid dreams, and sound sleep. This can best be illistrated by the Essay The Dream Net.

These books are spectacular. I am in love with the idea of using medeival techniques to make a book of this size and importance. This one is beautiful. I've never read the prophets before but now I am.

This is an excellent addition to the previous volumes of the St. John's Bible that have come out. I can't wait for the last three! As with the other volumes, the calligraphy is a bit hard to read, but it is being true to the art form. Grogeous illuminations. I recommend that the collector also purchase "The Art of the Saint John's Bible" by Susan Sink or a similar volume for a complete explanation of the illuminations.

Louis Jenkins is a wonderful prose/poet and Sea Smoke, in my opinion is one of his best books. If you like reading about everyday life in detail that will have you nodding in agreement, then read this book. He captures each moment perfectly and very often with humour and/or irony.

My only grouse is that his books are not available in England, but thanks to Amazon I get them from the USA site.

The writers and critics who love Louis Jenkins' poems usually don't start out by saying that they are tremendously entertaining. They are. I've heard Jenkins give readings where the audience responded to him as to a stand-up comic. But the glint of humor that is present in almost every one of his prose poems shines out of his thoughtful and sometimes dark enjoyment of life.

Sea Smoke is a fine new collection of his prose poems. Take the poem "Popples." Here in Minnesota, where Louis Jenkins lives, popples, or "poplars," or "aspen," are trees as common as weeds, and we forget to look at them. Jenkins looks and listens, with a little smile: "Popples are excitable, quivering all over at the slightest hint of a breeze, full of stupid chatter, gossip, rumor, and innuendo." And he takes off from there, his impressions getting a little more bizarre: "The proletarian tree, growing, optimistic, got the kids all working, grandkids on the way."

But the comic view might miss the beauty of the popples, and Louis Jenkins doesn't: "Popples are lovely in fall when the leaves turn yellow and gold, or in winter with a new moon caught in the branches, and in spring when the rain enhances the delicate grey-green color of the bark. I wouldn't mind a view like this when I come to the bottom of the slide into old age and senility: a stand of popples judiciously framed by the bedroom window to exclude the junk car and the trash cans just to the right."

If you're curious about why Robert Bly said of Louis Jenkins, "Every generation has eight or ten good poets, and he is one of those in his generation," and why Garrison Keillor keeps bringing him back to read his poems on A Prairie Home Companion, and why one of the foremost literary critics in the U.S., Sven Birkerts, has extolled Sea Smoke and loves, as I do, the "elusive alternation of comedy and pathos" in the poems, read this book.

Bill Booth

...and I highly recommend reading it before touring Glensheen. I have toured the mansion 3 different times now - the most recent time being in September '06. It differed this time in that the guides will answer questions about the murder, yet don't elaborate. In talking to one of the guides, they found this particular book to have several errors in it... so it was not a favorite of theirs. They did not say what the errors were.

"Secrets of the Congdon Mansion" is a fast, fun read. I sure got my money's worth. I can see why this is one of Minnesota's best known murders. It feels like a game of Clue, except it's all true. This book has good villains and victims. It also also has the right mix of news and gossip. I especially enjoyed the author's behind-the-scene stories about the case, like being the only nonfamily member allowed to attend the killer's funeral. I was pleased that it was very update and included very recent events. You don't have to tour Glensheen to appreciate the tale, but if you do this book has helpful maps and diagrams of the rooms.

Perhaps more than any other individual, the paintings of Seth Eastman have become associated with the pictorial history of early Minnesota. Extremely detailed and devoid of the romanticism which often clouds later and, too frequently, lesser works, Eastman's paintings and sketches beautifully and accurately capture the landscapes and lifestyles of the Minnesota Frontier.

The written narrative offered by Boehme and Johnston provides both interesting details and a historical context which enhances the paintings. However, the true power of this book remains the illustrations themselves. Anyone interested in Minnesota history, Native American history, or American frontier and landscape artistry will find this book thoroughly enjoyable as an addition to their coffee table. For those with more than a passing interest in these subjects, this collection of Eastman's paintings provides a valuable historical resource beyond the its coffee table appeal.

Seth Eastman: A Portfolio Of North American Indians showcases fifty-six watercolor paintings by a career army officer who was assigned to frontier duty (including a seven-year stint at Fort Snelling in the 1840s). The artist was also a gifted pictorial historian of the Native Americans who was scrupulous in his accuracy of portraying the whole complex fabric of Native American dress, culture, and daily life. This outstanding compendium of his work ranges from temporary summer encampments to winter villages; courting and marriage customs; the making of maple sugar, protecting cornfields from birds, spearing fish, gathering wild rice; the menstrual lodge, how Dakota women sat, the medicine man; as well as breaking camp and traveling. Enhanced with informative, insightful, descriptive commentaries by Sara E. Boehme, Christian E. Feest, and Patricia Condon Johnston, Seth Eastman: A Portfolio Of North American Indians is a superb addition to any Native American collection and will prove to be of immense interest to students of the 19th Century American art history as well.

I picked up this book because I met Professor Doyle socially and I am into art. I particularly enjoyed her chapter on Tracey Emin and her introduction, wherein she discusses Moby Dick in decidedly non-academic terms. Most academic prose is like soap without water, but Doyle manages to get a good lather going. Her work is deep but accessible in the best way, not because it's easy, but because it actually makes you think about thinks that matter, and mean something.

You know that any book of criticism with Thomas Eakins, the notorious pornographic film "Moby Dick," Andy Warhol, Vanessa Beecroft, and Tracey Emin in it is going to be quirky. What links all of these quirky artists in this work by an associate professor of English at the U. of California-Riverside and co-author of "Pop Out: Queer Warhol" is their approaches to handling sexuality. With Eakins, the approach in his time and place of Victorian era America was subtle and ambivalent. With Warhol, the approach was ironic and often detached. With Beecroft, forward and multiplicitous. These and the other unconventional treatments of sexuality are critiqued with reference to "the queer theory that addresses the limitations of dominant (largely binary) models for sexual identity for describing our sexual lives and for understanding representations of sexual difference and sexual desire." Doyle demonstrates a sure understanding of the latest methodology and critical possibilities of queer theory.

The filmmaker and associate professor of new media at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago sees that despite being "unapprehendable" though being "often sensed," the shadows, specters, and shards of the title "are nevertheless part of the energy of the past and exert themselves as a force on the present." It is the avante-garde filmmakers rather than the mainstream or conventional ones relying on narration, chronology, and cultural symbols who tap into such "unseen forces" in their films to create an "awareness of other temporalities in which linear chronologies are called into question in favor of other temporal structures such as simultaneity and virtuality." This not only better reflects the way individuals and societies are aware of history, but also reflects the innumerable heterogeneous incidents, events, personalities, tendencies, etc. which make for history and have little coherence. Skoller goes beyond analysis of the shards, etc., as characteristics of postmodern culture; and as these have often been used by writers and artists to reflect this culture or to comment on or in some cases criticize it. Skoller puts these characteristics in a useful and in some respects productive light by examining them as techniques rather than simply effects. His material is not laudatory, however; nor does it especially commend the techniques; for history does not lend itself to stable definition or complete comprehension by means of any techniques. The author is concerned mainly with noting that the shadows, specters, and shards despite their elusiveness, incompleteness, and even insubstantiality are better suited to not only recording but also conveying history. The material of the book is in large measure illustration of this central point by considering how movies by leading and influential avant-garde filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard, Daniel Eisenberg, Ken Jacobs, and Patricio Guzman have dealt with historical issues and material even though this has not been widely recognized or accepted.

I've been reading film criticism for two decades, from my first experiences with Bordwell `s film histories to Laura Mulvey's treatise on visual pleasure to the densely layered cinematic revelations of Deleuze. But it wasn't until I read Jeffrey Skoller's Shadows, Specters and Shards that I discovered the kind of lively, intellectually rigorous observations of a "film thinker" who allowed his adventurous imagination to tackle the sadly undervalued world of avant-garde film. As a teacher of film production and studies, I was thrilled to discover this erudite series of essays which have provided my New York University film students with a remarkable introduction to the works of contemporary experimental film artists. By describing and then interpreting their aesthetic processes, Skoller guides his reader through the political and historical dimensions of works by such illustrious makers as Ernie Gehr, Craig Baldwin, Leandro Katz, Dan Eisenberg and Zoe Beloff. If you are lucky enough to have seen these brilliant works of filmmaking, then you will find that Skoller's engaged observations will enhance your initial understanding. If you have not yet had this viewing opportunity, don't worry! Skoller provides such a vivid sound/image recounting in his analysis that your vicarious experience will prove surprisingly rewarding!