Onigamiising
Season of an Ojibwe Year
by Linda LeGarde Grover,
University of Minnesota Press • ISBN: 978-1-5179-0344-2 • $14.95 Softcover
As a teacher and an author, Linda LeGarde Grover must be an astute observer of people and the world. It is her thoughtful yet penetrating eye plus the apple crispness of her writing that makes Onigamiising such a gentle gem. The book’s title means “place of the small portage,” the Ojibwe name for where Duluth sits. These 50 essays track along the four seasons. Much as in Linda’s own life, they blend cultures and traditions, present and past, reflecting relationships of family here or parted, as people portaging through their lives and, via Linda, into ours.
– Konnie LeMay
Dead Man’s Rapids
by William Durbin & Barbara Durbin,
University of Minnesota Press • ISBN: 978-15179-0223-0 • $16.95 Hardcover
Are you 12 or 13 and into books? The Durbins’ wrote this tale for you.
The story has a canny way of teaching about every detail of a log drive down a long Minnesota river back at the turn of the century while keeping you entertained all the rough-and-tumble way.
In the book, a couple of kids your age, Ben and Nevers, live in the wanigan – the floating cook shack that keeps the loggers fed while they are coaxing the logs downstream. “Blackwater Ben” appeared in an earlier book by that name, making this one in a series. In this book, the boys are cookies (apprentice cooks) with plenty of time for adventure when they are not peeling spuds or exchanging guff with the loggers to learn about the timber trade.
Today, of course, all that hazardous and fascinating work of wrangling cut logs from forest to destination is done by trucks and trains, but even at your tender age, you might regret that this time is gone and that there are no jobs for cookies on a wanigan anymore.
– Donn Larson
More Than You Think You Know
by Cyndi Perkins,
Beating Windward Press • ISBN: 978-1-940761-31-2 • $16.85 Softcover
Cyndi Perkins’ name may be familiar to our readers. She’s written for the magazine and now you’ll see her name on press releases for Michigan Tech, where she works.
So although this book takes three women in a stolen sailboat on a discovery journey from Chicago to the Gulf of Mexico and not to Lake Superior, we still wanted to give a local author a plug for an intriguing read on her first novel. You’ll appreciate this thoughtful ride with a writer well attuned to the wind in the sails from her own Big Lake adventures.
– KLM
The books reviewed here, unless indicated, should be available through local booksellers by using the ISBN number.