From Back Cover: This is a newspaperman's history of the Upper Peninsula. Intrigued by the place name Michigamme, Martin and his wife stopped there on their wedding trip in 1940 and became enchanted with the Upper Peninsula. Out of that attraction came more visits, a string of interviews and a series of tales told by miners, loggers, hunters and trappers. Originally published in 1944, it is a collection of nineteen lively stories told in convenient chunks for quick reading.-Detroit Free Press. The passage of time provides a better test of the quality of a book than litmus paper does of the acidity of a solution. This book was originally written in 1944 by one of our most powerful documentary authors. [Call it North Country] reads like a novel. If you're a history buff, it reads better than a novel. This book could not be written today. The witnesses to the development of upper Michigan would be missing and twice or thrice told tales would lose much detail and would not have the ring of truth which authenticates history.-Inland Seas.

Travel north from the upper Midwest’s metropolises, and before long you’re “Up North”—a region that’s hard to define but unmistakable to any resident or tourist. Crops give way to forests, mines (or their remains) mark the landscape, and lakes multiply, becoming ever clearer until you reach the vastness of the Great Lakes. How to characterize this region, as distinct from the agrarian Midwest, is the question North Country seeks to answer, as a congenial group of scholars, journalists, and public intellectuals explores the distinctive landscape, culture, and history that define the northern margins of the American Midwest. From the glacial past to the present day, these essays range across the histories of the Dakota and Ojibwe people, colonial imperial rivalries and immigration, and conflicts between the economic imperatives of resource extraction and the stewardship of nature. The book also considers literary treatments of the area—and arguably makes its own contributions to that literature, as some of the authors search for the North Country through personal essays, while others highlight individuals who are identified with the area, like Sigurd Olson, John Barlow Martin, and Russell Kirk. From the fur trade to tourism, fisheries to supper clubs, Finnish settlers to Native treaty rights, the nature of the North Country emerges here in all its variety and particularity: as clearly distinct from the greater Midwest as it is part of the American heartland.

Humorous and witty recollections of the author's journey from insecure graduate student to noted activist/scholar.

Warren presents a compilation of essays expressing her opinion on a wide variety of topics. (Practical Life)

Have you ever surrendered to the feeling of being engulfed? "...when, as it often does in Southeast Alaska, the sky lowers until it sits on your shoulders. Rain falls in a steady white-noise hiss, dulling your senses, numbing your mind. It's then, usually as you stand on a gravel beach, looking at the forest starting thick and menacing at the top of the scrim, a shiver hits you. Then your less rational side wonders who or what is staring at you from that forest, wanting you dead." Shy Ghosts Dancing: Dark Tales from Southeast Alaska presents stories of darkness, mythology, and danger, examining the mysterious and unpredictable nature of life in Southeast Alaska, where perception and reality intermingle and conflict with puzzling and sometimes deadly results. Watch a young man's feelings for a beautiful woman turn from attraction to horror when voices from the aurora borealis tell him her terrifying secret in Shy Ghosts Dancing. Be there when a man finally meets the predator he's lived his life dreading in The Fear. Join an adulterous young woman's nocturnal vigils in a gold rush town cemetery, and share her discoveries there in Long Black Veil. Learn how placing a want ad as a practical joke gets an unexpected response in Ghost Wanted. Experience a Scottish-American family's wonder as they discover that they live a legend of their ancestral homeland in Shelikof Bay. And more . . . . Mark A. Zeiger lives with his wife and daughter on a forested, off-the-grid homestead on the shore of Alaska's Lynn Canal, more than a mile from the nearest road. They make their living mostly by gardening, foraging, fishing, and hunting.