Ohio Books

In many cities in the U.S., including such places as Toledo, we stand at Deli counters ordering our cheese from men with heavy accents and lives we know little about. The Georges and Yusefs, Nadias and Sourayas in these bodegas have rich lives we know little about until this collection Through and Through. Geha brings to life this Middle Eastern community, not by only showing how these characters are strangers in a strange land, but also how they are our neighbors as well. We learn a little of Arab customs, something of what it is to be an immigrant. What one values when they are successful and what they hope for when they fail. These stores are human and humane, enlightening and funny. They take the chance for self-irony and even farce. I would recommend Through and Through for enjoyment, for a class in ethnic or immigrant lit, as well as for a source of understanding.

This is a wonderful story of the Tiltonsville, Rayland Area-So full of History and fact and even a little romance. The author really captured the time and is so well informs his readers. I had checked this out of the Library for my Son's Scout project and I really hate to return it.

Deftly written by the talented author Virginia Hamilton (whose Children's Literature awards include the Hans Christian Andersen Medal, the Newberry Medal, and the Coretta Scott King Award), Time Pieces: The Book Of Times is an audiobook coming-of-age story for young people. An eleven-year-old African-American girl named Valena lives with her family in rural Ohio; as she deals with daily events, the threat of a tornado, the excitement of going to a circus, and the oppressive pallor of racism, she also listens to her mother's tales of her family's proud history. A remarkable story of the importance of family ties and taking pride in one's heritage, skillfully narrated by Lisa Renee Pitts. 3 CDs, unabridged, tracks every 3 minutes for easy bookmarking.

Usually books of this nature send me to sleep, but this was different, it did the opposite. 'Evolution and Healing' deals with the idea of evolution, but specifically applying to a medical setting, asking such pertinent questions as 'Why do we Die?'. With an narrative more suited to lecture than a lenghtly scientific tome it explains with clarity and coherence an argument that you cannot fail to understand. Buy now and never regret.

Thank you Chad. America should know this "awful truth". By the way, we in Appalachia are still holding the same protest signs that these brave people held up in this book 30 years ago.
Help us America.

The earliest photograph in this book is dated 1874 and shows a one-horse sleigh, and behind it a horse drawn car of the Monroe Street Line. The horsecar line was converted to electricity and operated until 1949. This is a magnificant collection of photographs of the trolleys that served Toledo during those years.

It is both interesting and educational to look at the trolley cars. But perhaps it is even more so to look at the backgrounds of the pictures. You can watch the buildings of Toledo grow during these years. You can see the early years of horse drawn sleigh, and wagons giving way to early and then later automobiles.

Unfortunately 1949 came along, and the trolleys were converted to buses. Here are pictures as the trolleys were being scrapped. With the current price of fuel for the busses (and of course going up), I wonder if someone somewhere in Toledo isn't wondering if scrapping the trolleys was such a good idea.

This is BY FAR the best book on Toledo, it has very beautiful pictures and very informative on the city of Toledo. It is a very nice coffee table book. YOU MUST BUY THIS!!

... a beautiful book full of extraordinary poems. I too am haunted by the stars & nebulas that stream away through Pascal's Abyss. They are all fine poems, but best I like The First Law of Thermodynamics, perhaps because I wish I had written it. -- Kenneth Rexroth

"I brood a lot about Gamov and Sandage and Hoyle... Curved Space. What marvelous/ phrases they have! Red giants, holes in the void." Love, all that holds things together on our human level, can bind too tight. In "..Go Free" a son longs to [hurt] his mother, to free her and himself from the pain and the sleazy technology of her hospital.. In "..Together" an old man in a supermarket, treasuring the few minutes' release from his wife at home, stares "at the small heap of food in the cart/ and thinks-- 'If I could only get her to eat.' As he is moving toward the cashier
it suddenly happens then that he knows
fifty years' love
seeping..
through stunned membranes into his lungs...
Tornado Watch is the first book of a very mature, accomplished poet. --Robert E. McDonough

Wrapped in a striking dust jacket displaying the Great Nebula in Andromeda and partitioned with full-page comet-heads, the book reminds the reader that he inhabits a magnificent, violent universe with which he must strive to become reconciled. In 53 intense poems, Mr. Grigsby deals with human passion, pain, and joy. He speaks, usually in the first person, of both triumphant and disappointing loves, of a ..mother, ..at men's hands and from natural disasters, of the ravages of man-made pollution, of human blindness and hope -- and always of the infinity of the stars. --Wil Margeson

I have the greatest possible respect for the poet who goes his own way, unfashionably, personally, honestly, and that's the way Gordon Grigsby has chosen. The poems are simple in their structure, often craggy in tone, and almost always passionate in their perceptions. If the term cosmic is suspect as used in reference to some, here it is most appropriate, for the poet is sublimely aware of the mysteries, above us and within us, and as in his fine title poem, which ends with a tremendous question, "Now, what shall I do with my life?", the spatial range is extraordinary, is felt, is earned....there are other themes and moods, when we see the poet intensely in love with the earth, compassionately involved in the lives of his fellow humans, so vulnerably part of it...a fully adult volume: no tricks, no currently fashionable modes, no dishonesty. Anyone interested in the possibilities of poetry, of what it can accomplish for the poet and the best of his readers, should read this book. --Lucien Stryk

To the past, Grigsby is beholding and beholden. "Everywhere on earth [he has written,] small farmers disappear, small towns, small tribes. Whole cultures that have endured since the Stone Age vanish in 20 years. The wonderful variety and inwardness of life, rain forests, mountain meadows, African villages, the whole of Tibet: eaten alive by Western ideas, whose true and banal symbol is the bulldozer.... It is the honor of poetry that poets have opposed this for centuries." Grigsby's poems, in praise of what has slipped into darkness, are incantatory but not always celebrative. The tone of his work comes more from the dark side of the moon, where the length of shadows is immeasurable. --George Myers Jr.

Gordon Grigsby has also written Mid-Ohio Elegies and Greatest Hits 1975-2000, Pudding House Publications.

Massillon is a city in North Central Ohio. Margy Vogt has written an excellent history from the 1830's to today. She considers all aspects:
interesting people, business, culture, architecture, politics This book features
many great pictures from the 1850's to the present. Towpath to Towpath refers to Massillon's beginnings as a canal town, to the excellent public park system of today that follows the old Towpath.
Massillon was the home of many interesting people from the Gish sisters, to Paul Brown to General Coxey of "Coxey's" army. Vogt tells the stories very, very well.

Thomas Shevory (Professor of Politics, Ithaca College) presents Toxic Burn: The Grassroots Struggle Against the WTI Incinerator, the environmental true story of East Liverpool, Ohio, which has suffered from a massive hazardous waste incinerator located in the eastern Ohio River Valley since 1993. The incinerator burns 60,000 tons of hazardous waste each year, has encountered dozens of accidents, and is only 100 yards away from an elementary school. Toxic Burn tells of the grass-roots movement against the incinerator. Interviews with key members of the movement, copies of official documents, and more spell out how the incinerator came to be, and the obstacles and victories that the counter-movement faced. An in-depth case study of how ordinary people are a necessary counterbalance to the power of corporations, and how new environmental models devoted to protecting the life and health of those at greatest risk is desperately needed.