Great Lakes books for your holiday gift list

By Eric Freedman, Capital News Service

LANSING–Looking for a holiday gift for a reader who loves the Great Lakes?

Here are five prospects to consider—and what our reporters learned from interviewing their authors this year:

When you think about the culture of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, pasties, fishing, hunting and deep, deep snow immediately come to mind.

But author Candice Goucher hones in on another cultural aspect—the picnic—in “Picnics and Porcupines: Eating in the Wilderness of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula” (Wayne State University Press ($26.99).

The book covers topics from Indigenous people’s summer gatherings for the wild rice harvest that brought families together in outdoor camps to immigrant communities that brought their own picnic traditions which evolved in response to the local environment.

For example, Goucher told reporter Isabella Figueroa Nogueira how UP railroads opened their iron ore trains to passengers on Sundays. “These trains would stop and people would pay a small amount of money to get on them and be taken to a picnic ground where they could join others and enjoy the afternoon.”

In “Dead Moose on Isle Royale: Off Trail with the Citizen Scientists of the Wolf-Moose Project” (Michigan State University Press, $24.95) a veteran volunteer at Isle Royale National Park explains the passion of the people who sustain one of ecology’s longest-running studies. They’re the ones who find and photograph moose carcasses and haul them back to the researchers for scientific analysis.

Author Jeffrey Holden recalled to Figueroa how he joined up because “I was willing to literally dig in and get my hands dirty.”

The book evolved from a journal he kept, Holden said. “I was writing for non-scientist people, and I wanted it to be kind of informal and conversational, so it’s not a technical sort of text.”

There’s been a long-running debate about whether cougars live in Michigan or whether reported sightings are misidentifications, wishful thinking or hoaxes. Author Aaron Veselenak is a true believer in their presence.

He explains why in “Silent Springs the Panther: Historic Accounts of Michigan Big Cat Attacks” (Mission Point Press, $17.95), a book that combines his love for cougars with stories of encounters drawn from newspapers and historical documents.

Wildlife officials have since confirmed there are cougars in the state but say they likely were passing through from elsewhere. They say there’s no growing, native population in the state.

In defense of cougars, Veselenak told reporter Anna Barnes, “I think the large majority of people can read this book and conclude that just because it’s an animal that occasionally—but very rarely—harms people, it is worthy of our love, our respect and our protection.”

“Horse-drawn carriages clatter down car-free streets. The mouth-watering smell of fudge wafts from quaint storefronts,” Figueroa wrote. “Ferries glide across the Straits of Mackinac, carrying visitors to Michigan’s most famous – and most charming – tourist destination.”

Wonder how a onetime strategic but remote military base and later a fishing village became home to the elegant Grand Hotel and an annual Lilac Festival? Author Frank Boles relates the story in “Visiting Mackinac, 150 Years of Tourism at Michigan’s Fabled Straits” (Michigan State University Press, $37.95).

“It may be beautiful but tourist sites are made by people. And people have different ideas. Tourism is not necessarily about promoting beauty,” Boles said. “It’s about the people who are doing it as an industry, making money,”

“Shelter and Storm: A Home in the Driftless” (University of Minnesota Press, $19,95) is a collection of essays that draw on experiences of survivors who rebuilt their communities after a devastating 2018 flood in Southwest Wisconsin’s Driftless Area, a region that evaded the glaciers that carved the Great Lakes in the last Ice Age.

Author Tamara Dean and her friends launched the project for people to talk about their experiences, what they had lost, whom they had saved, who had helped them and what they had learned.

Dean told reporter Clara Lincolnhol that she hopes the book inspires enthusiasm and curiosity about her life in the Driftless, such things as blue-glowing fireflies, the wisdom of prairie fires and the silver-linings of tornadoes.