Midwest Book Review on Mikel Classen’s True Tales: The Forgotten History of the U.P.

Review by Carolyn WIlhelm for MBR

Pioneer days conjure up romantic, sentimental ideas of simple living and being close to nature. However, the truth also included lawless, rugged, difficult times. Native Americans and those from Europe mined, traveled, worked, logged, and sailed Lake Superior’s frontier wilderness amid uncivilized criminals, kidnappers, and slavers. Laws were few, enforcement was scarce, violent events were often, and shipwrecks were many. Wonderful life-saving deeds of kindness and compassion are also recorded on these pages as opportunities to be a hero were many.

Consider mining. Yes, rarely paired with pioneers such as Laura Ingalls Wilder, yet it is part of history at the same time. And Lake Superior! So few people understand how cold it is year-round (about 40 degrees) or how many shipwrecks (about 350) have taken place in the deepest waters of the Great Lakes. Before modern mariner tools, sailors had a strenuous, grueling life when pirates were plundering boats. Surviving crashes in winter required ingenuity and persistence unless a body became an icicle. And slavers trafficked women to stockades, as detailed in the book.

Classen does history an excellent service by revealing the truth. Sometimes we think humanity has advanced little. An attitude quickly challenged in these pages. Readers will feel gratitude for all they have today after finishing these tales.


True Tales: The Forgotten History of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula
Mikel B. Classen
Modern History Press
https://www.modernhistorypress.com
B09WJMKV12, $5.95 Kindle
9781615996353, $29.95 HC, $18.95 PB, 162 pp.

Carolyn Wilhelm, Reviewer
Wise Owl Factory LLC

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A Bigfoot Bestiary and Other Wonders

SKU 978-1-61599-834-0
$18.95
Poems
1
Product Details
UPC: 978-1-61599-834-0
Brand: Modern History Press
Binding: Paperback
Edition: 1st
Author: Martin Achatz
Pages: 98
Publication Date: 10/01/2024

A Bigfoot Bestiary and Other Wonders is a compendium of natural and unnatural astonishment, anatomizing all those big, hairy monsters that haunt the human condition. Follow their footprints through these pages, and Martin Achatz may just make you a believer in the greatest mystery of all: Love with a capital "L".

"Martin Achatz knows what it is to be big and hairy and to express the animal inside us. To paraphrase the Zen koan, live as if you were already Bigfoot. If Iowa Poet Laureate Marvin Bell has his Dead Man poems, Michigan's Achatz has rendered poetical the great ape of the Northwoods, and he eloquently and determinedly immerses us in the dream, meanwhile paying homage to Robert Frost, Pablo Neruda, Wallace Stevens, Flannery O'Connor, and all the other wonderful monsters." -Bonnie Jo Campbell, author of The Waters and American Salvage

"Martin Achatz reimagines the legendary Bigfoot in his newest book, a funny and moving collection of poems that is playfully serious. Achatz melds cryptozoologic wonder with the heartrending stuff of the everyday world ... a fierce Sasquatch howl that illuminates and reveals the fragile state of our collective humanity." -W. Todd Kaneko, author of This Is How the Bone Sings

"Newsflash! Bigfoot has been found! He resides in the mind of Martin Achatz who rides with 'love as big as Kong' this doppelgänger of a beast straight into the mystery that is his own life. And with abundant humor as well-Bigfoot has late fees at the Carnegie Library, goes trick-or-treating, auditions for Picasso to replace the Minotaur." -Dennis Hinrichsen, author of Dominion + Selected Poems

Author of The Mysteries of the Rosary and a former U.P. Poet Laureate, Martin Achatz lives in Ishpeming, Michigan with his family. In his spare time, he chases comets and Bigfoot.

From Modern History Press

www.ModernHistoryPress.com

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