Minnesota Books

I bought this book for an employee who had decided to move from sunny San Diego back to the town where she grew up, Minneapolis.
It's cold there and this book was quite appropriate. She loved it, as did others in our work group. For 5 bucks, don't hesitate - this is a great gift.

Cathy McGlynn and Bonnie Stewart have put together a collection of one-liners sure to tickle your funny bone and warm your heart. Order one for yourself and a friend who lives in the South!!

Noa Steimatsky (associate professor of film studies and art history, Yale University) presents Italian Locations: Reinhabiting the Past in Postwar Cinema, a thoughtful examination of how fascism and World War II forever changed Italy, as reflected through the works of four Italian filmmakers. From the documentary work of Michelangelo Antonioni on the River Po to the creations of Pier Paolo Pasolini, Roberto Rossellini, and Luchino Visconti, Italian Locations is fraught with works that defined a sense of place - a place transformed and reconstructed in the wake of destruction. A handful of black-and-white photographs illustrate this thoughtful analysis, especially recommended for college library shelves and students of historical Italian cinema.

Steimatsky describes images and the tone in which they are pictured of the Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini's 1966 film "The Earth as Seen From the Moon" as "reconstruct[ing] the ramshackle, marginal world, seeing its humility as grandeur, its muteness as eloquence, its tragic-comedic resourcefulness as a 'desperate vitality'." Such circumstances and characteristics applied to large sectors of Italian society in the post-World War II decades. Steimatsky's timeframe for the postwar cinema stretches to about the latter 1960s. As with the foregoing comments on aspects of Pasolini's films, the author does not basically engage in interpretation (which often becomes overwrought or fanciful with many critics) nor in explanation (which can become didactic or wallow in the elementary). Instead, her style is basically explication, or clarification for properly orienting the reader as a premise for moving on to other matters regarding the subject at hand.

Steimatsky, who teaches film studies at Yale, considers the study of film as a part of cultural studies. In so doing, the author regards Italian film as having a major role in restoring and in so doing reinventing to considerable degree Italian society after its decades of Fascism under Mussolini and alliance with Hitler and the society's devastation in World War II. This is a large claim going beyond the perspective of many critics, film historians, and such of expounding how film can represent situations or issues; make impressions on masses of viewers; and stir imagination. These and more inhere in this author's appreciation of the Italian film. Notwithstanding the novelty and even possible hyperbole of the author's regard of Italian film, one agrees with it. Film in Italian culture is seen to have had such a role considering the weakness of institutions such as government and the military in Italian society.

Taking the top directors of Rossellini, Visconti, and Antonioni with Pasolini, Steimatsky devotes a chapter to each; in which she focuses on each director's primary theme or distinctive style. Antonioni's films, for example, are characterized by their display of modernism. Rossellini depicted "corpse-cities" where children and adults and sometimes foreigners tried to live a normal life in a pre- or post-civilizational condition while also trying to comprehend the enormity of the changes they face symbolized by the destruction of buildings, familiar places, etc.

It is when Steimatsky departs from her spare identifications of elements of a scene that the critique opens into the area of cultural studies around theme of the renewal of post-War Italian society. The author's insights and formulations range from the sociological to the religious to the psychological. In discussing the "Altered Terrain" created by the director Antonioni's camerawork and varied subjects, the author sees "[b]etween quotidian detail and a movement of emptying-out of the landscapes, fragments of river life, less-than-episodes, and unpursued plot clues traverse...the documentary body" of one of his films. Cinematic aspects, images, and subjects of Pasolini's films present an "aesthetic system [which] draws on the potency of the devotional image, whose reverential archaism also carries a realist claim."

This is film study at its most engaging, stimulating, and informative.

Joe Amato's book on his family is an excellent demonstration of how family history should be written. It combines genealogy, local history, European and American history, and most important, family stories, to give the reader much more than the pedigree skeleton we genealogists are accustomed to. This book gives us the whole body - the muscle and flesh of history, the brain of stories and memories, and the heart of the descendant's own feelings about the ancestors he knew and loved. I am using this approach as a guide to writing my own family story.

Amato has written an unusual, nay a unique book, that blends his substantial skills as a professional historian with the tools of the anthropologist, geographer, philosophy, and genealogy in order to trace the history of his family back seven generations. He writes of the struggle of his poor "mongrel family," tracing their roots to Ireland, Prussia, Sicily, French Acadia and elsewhere, describing the difficult struggles against poverty, disease, wars, and discrimination, in a relentless but mostly futile quest for the American Dream. This is much more than a family history. It is a "bottoms-up" look at the underside of American history as generation after generation struggled to survive against great obstacles, moving inexorably westward in a largely failed search for productive farmland, and then in the twentieth century, joining the new migration to industrial cities in a renewed quest for decent wages and a modicum of security. Written eloquently, solidly documented, and well grounded in historical literature, "Jacob's Well" subjects Amato's ancestors to the harsh scrutiny of historical fact. This is a must read for those interested in a new type of family history, and for those interested in the plight of the American poor from early colonial times to the near-present.

This was wonderful. So insightful to learn about the man behind the stories.

I picked this long out of print book up at the Monterey Aquarium - kudos to Western Flyer Publishing for bringing this fantastic book back.

There are two "bibles" for people who want to know about John Steinbeck - Jackson Benson's biography and this one. Personally, I prefer this one because it covers the golden age of Steinbeck and his friendship with marine biologist, philosopher and brilliant mind, Ed Ricketts.

If you've read Cannery Row and Grapes of Wrath (among others), you've gotten a glimpse of Ed RIcketts. In Richard Astro's book, you get the "toto-picture" of the man. Steinbeck's literature has been called simple. Yeah, simple as a Zen painting. Richard Astro shows how the collective (and at times drastically different) philosophies of these two men spawned one to create some of the greatest stories ever told. Stories that can be read and appreciated by a kid in middle school and then upon rereading, it is discovered how many layers lie beneath the tightly plotted tales. Astro's book digs deep too and is a valuable, readible and thought provoking journey into a remarkable friendship.

Edited by William S. Saunders (Assistant Dean, Harvard University's Graduate School of Design), Judging Architectural Value is an anthology of essays by experienced authors seeking to answer the questions: what do people value in architecture, how do changing values affect opinions about architecture? From "Why Are Some Buildings More Interesting Than Others?" to "Learning from St. Louis: The Arch, the Canon, and Bourdieu" to "Eyesore or Art? On Tyree Guyton's Heidelberg Project", the essays offer a scholarly, measured debate, and ultimately indicate that making judgments about architecture involves much more than aesthetic sensibility. Especially recommended as a "big picture" supplement for professionals and aspiring architects.

This is a great collection of essays, mostly from the late 1990's, that raise a number of serious questions for architects and critics. Some of the contributors deal with questions of value in abstract terms while others focus on specific projects to draw out issues. Saunders own essay is a good review of contemporary architectural criticism. I highly recommend this to students or practicing professionals struggling with questions about what makes architecture "good."

Deleuze has long apprehended the *Critique of Judgement* as that rarest of philosophical achievements, a work of hoary old age whose radical and "deeply romantic"(xi) precepts are somberly misunderstood by students, most of whom pass it off as a clunky, fossilized curio of old-school aesthetic theory. As argued in this text, however, Kant's project is sensible (one might even say consummated) only in the light of this penultimate work, the keys to which are well worth questing for: "What is in question is how certain phenomena which come to define the Beautiful give an autonomous supplementary dimension to the inner sense of time, a power of free reflection to the imagination, an infinite conceptual power to the understanding.... It is a terrible struggle between imagination and reason, and also between understanding and the inner sense, a struggle whose episodes are the two forms of the Sublime, and then Genius. It is a tempest in the depths of a chasm opened up in the subject. The faculties confront one another, each stretched to its own limit, and find their accord in a fundamental discord: a discordant accord is the great discovery of the *Critique of Judgement*, the final Kantian reversal...the source of time"(xii-xiii).

Radically, Deleuze follows De Quincey's *The Last days of Emmanuel Kant* by casting the later Kant as a grizzly King Lear of sorts, exiled from his "reasonable" philosophical kingdom and stepping precariously to a mad song of Romantic apperception. Hamlet's "time out of joint" becomes the unhinged temporality of movement subordinated and conditioned by time, or the Borgesian "labyrinth which is composed of a single straight line, and which is indivisible, incessant." While Rimbaud's "I is another" becomes the form under which the I affects the ego, or the mind affecting itself, an interiorized temporality that constantly divides us from ourselves, "a giddiness, an oscillation which constitutes time"(ix). Kafka's "The Good is what the Law says" reminds us that there is nothing to "know" in the law, simply that it *is*, and that we only come across this "ism" through action and execution, by which we must deduce the Good. Finally, Rimbaud's "disorder of all the senses" becomes that autopoetic civil war of the faculties pushing themselves to act and cooperate in unique and unprecedented ways, leading one faculty to an achievement or realization it would never have had on its own, pushing the known boundaries of genius and creativity, onward to mutation.

This is a "brief" treatise whose length should not be underestimated. As always, Deleuze's exegetical style is diamond-sharp, tracing an analytical razorline through the architectontic reversals of Kant's ever-burgeoning spiritual maturity, from the brilliant technician and moral demiurge of the first two critiques, to the wild, discordant Kant of old age.

For those uncomfortable with Deleuze's controversial approach to Nietzsche and Spinoza, this volume is much more Kantian than Deleuzian. But its originalities are impossible to deny, its exegetical precision a godsend. Deleuze's extraordinary personality is stamped on every page, while the unchained spirit of the later Kant shines provocatively through. This treatise should be special-ordered for all university courses on Kant's philosophy. It is an outstanding 20th-century reaction to a now misappropriated philosophical visionary, the grandeur of whose final work is too often obscured by the first two Critiques, which are merely its prologue or conceptual training-ground.

This is a slim volume, unusual because it operates at a very general level across all three of Kant's Critiques instead of the more usual focus on a single Critique. Deleuze's aim is architectonic: to show how the three Critiques fit together to form a coherent whole. This is a valuable undertaking since it's very easy to get lost in the Kantian thickets, which are arguably the densest in all of Western philosophy.

Deleuze organizes the three Critiques around the core notion of faculties and the objects over which they legislate. For example, understanding legislates in the faculty of knowledge, while reason operates over the faculty of desire; taken individually, the study of each makes up the content of the first two of Kant's celebrated Critiques. Their respective functions are shown by Deleuze to culminate in the third Critique (i.e. *Critique of Pure Judgement*), wherein the notion of "ends", both moral and cognitive, reach synthetic fulfillment. Hence, it is in the third Critique, instead of the first two, in which the capstone of Kant's Copernican revolution is reached. Here in the arena of art and aesthetics, no faculty legislates, nor are generic objects present. Rather aesthetic judgement involves the faculties and imagination in a kind of free play aimed at some type of overall harmony. Rather than knowledge, which can only be phenomenal, culture represents humankind's highest achievement and its measurement; and the highway into 19th century Romanticism opens.

Kant is a giant of Western philosophy. This book aids in an understanding of his overall undertaking.

Another excellent book from Fink.

In particular, it was truly rewarding to read Fink's detailed exposition of Lacan's critique of ego-psychology and his instructive breaking down of the rather overwhelming graph of desire.

What's more, lots of other details fell into place, such as the lack in the Other S(A/) and the notion of separation (as opposed to alienation). Indeed, this book clarifies why the Lacanian subject finds itself between language and jouissance, cf. the title of Fink's first book (I have to admit I wasn't quite sure after having read his book about the Lacanian subject).

Overall, everything Fink has written is highly recommended. Fink is without a doubt my number one reference when it comes to clinical psychoanalysis and the registers of the imaginary and the symbolic. As regards the symbolic/real-connection, it still seems that one has to turn to Zizek & the eccentric Slovenians.

As an undergraduate philosophy student, I'll never forget the day I stumbled across Fink's "Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalytic Theory." I remember reading the first couple of pages and being immediately sucked in. People come to therapy not because they want to rid themselves of their symptoms - they come to therapy, rather, because they can't get themselves to stop wanting to keep their symptoms! I was amazed at the profundity of this Lacanian insight. I knew I had to read on. So, this past year I picked up the Ecrits and Fink's commentary on it. Lacan's writing is nigh unto impossible to get through; but Fink's "Lacan to the Letter" is, again, some of the easiest reading I've ever done - and it blows my mind! For some of the most readable commentary on Lacan, you can't go wrong with Bruce Fink. What appeals to me the most, I think, about Lacan, is reading him as a philosopher, as someone who talks about the human condition - not so much as a "psychologist", but as a thinker who is doing a complex and amazing philosophical anthropology. He (accurately) shows how tied up with speech and language the being of the human being is. Lacanian theory astutely points out that we do not have a self outside of our linguistic contacts and exchanges with others, and of course, these exchanges largely shape how everyone, ultimately, thinks and feels about him or herself. Anyhow, if you are interested in knowing why people are crazy, healthy, or what the real (scandalous and negligible) difference between the two are, check this out. Fink offers clear readings of Lacan's phenomenological and anthropological explanations that shed light on the unconscious aspects of our being in ways that no biological-reductionistic or cognitive-behavioral approach ever could.

Ms. Morse-Kahn's affinity for this region and its' history comes through loud and clear. This book is engagingly written, and sure to draw in those interested in more than the surface of Lake Superior's North Shore.

I grew up in Wisconsin/Minnesota and lived in Duluth so I can claim a small affinity for the area myself. Reading this book made me long to take that breathtaking North Shore Drive again--but this time with a deeper understanding of it.

As two Minnesotans one native and one not we both enjoy traveling along the North shore of Lake Superior.
This book outlines some of the major things and not so major things to see along this fantastic scenic backdrop.
We would recommend this book to people who are both Minnesotan and non Minnesotan who want to explore this region.
It is compact enough to take along whether hiking, biking, or in the car glove box.
Hit the road with this book along route 61 and you will be in paradise from Duluth, to Two Harbors, to Grand Marais.
Explore historic sites like Split Rock Lighthouse, visit State Parks like Gooseberry Falls and wander along the lakeshore.

Once again, Siluk has descended from his heavenly perch to gift us with words that flow like holy wine from his poetic vision. This laurette poet's deftness with a turn of a poetic phrase inspires epiphanal ecstasy with each word, letter, cockeyed comma, and period-less sentence. Siluk must be viewed by any serious fan of the verses as the Ayatollah of Poetry.

His talent sticks out like a tumescent elephant ready to be mounted by equally excited packaderms of loving readers, ready to be satisfied in the way only Siluk can.

God bless you, Siluk, my sweet lovely Prince of Poetry!

It is an excellent book in poetry.
If you have been in Minnesota you will identify with the poems in "Last Autumn and Winter," and if you have never been in Minnesota you will know it, about these excelent poems.

Being that my family imgrated to Minnesota from Mexico, I found that the book gave me good overview of the Latio community growth in Minnesota. Great book for my children and grandchildern.

The upper-Midwest American state of Minnesota is principally noted for its waves of immigrants from Norway, Sweden, and Germany. What is not so well known are the waves of Spanish speaking immigrants that came north from Mexico, Central and South America to settle in the 'land of a thousand lakes'. Minnesota historian Leigh Roethke has traced Minnesota's vibrant, diverse, and growing Latino communities which, since around 1910, have provided the principal and core labor group for Minnesota's agricultural, food processing, manufacturing, and service industries. Profusely illustrated throughout and highly recommended for personal, academic, and community library American History reference collections and supplemental reading lists, "Latino Minnesota" is the story of individual and collective Latino accomplishments and contributions to Minnesota's increasingly diverse popular and popular culture. Here is the story of Latino settlement, cultural and political injustices, and the strength that arises from community, history, and hard work.