Wisconsin is lucky to have Zane Williams so he can capture our lovely state. Another book that captures Wisconsin's beauty is The Spirit of Door County with photographs by Darryl Beers. Darryl is to Door what Zane is to Wisconsin!!! Thanks to both of you!!!

Please note that the author of this book is Tracy Will, not Charles Calhoun, and that the photgrapher is Zane Williams

This book is a must-have gem. I've been acquainted with Kansas City, my mother's hometown, all my life, and never had any idea of the richness and diversity the city has to offer. This book is an extensively (one could even say obsessively) researched tool that has chapters on every conceivable topic, from the outdoors to religious organizations to fine cuisine. Volunteer opportunities and other ways to really engage in the community abound. Connect with Kansas City is a truly unique resource that will improve your experience in Kansas City whether you are a first time visitor, an infrequent visitor (like myself) or a lifetime resident. The author's insights about the value of "social capital" were clearly a guiding force in both the conception and the implementation of the book. Worth its weight in gold!

Order this book now! It is full of things to do and ways to engage in our community. Sandy James makes it easy for us to enjoy Kansas City and all our community provides. A must read for anyone new to our city but also for those of us who have been here for awhile and need some fresh ideas.

Dr. MacDonald's book is a welcome remembrance to those who lived in Northern Minnesota in the 40's & 50's. His stories of survival (and sometimes not surviving) are very descriptive and detailed. When he tells of a trip through a swamp he carried his wife through to help a patient, you almost feel as though you are sloshing through the mud with him. His stories are NOT about heroics that he performed on helpless rural Minnesota residents, although he certainly could do that as well. They are about the heroics of those people he cared for. This story has it's humorous parts as well as parts that make you cry for the brave and futile attempts at life of his patients. I am grateful to Dr. MacDonald for this book, and I hope to see more from him in the future.

A Country Doctor's Casebook: Tales From The North Woods is an anthology of autobiographical stories by Dr. Roger A. MacDonald, a physician who has served the people living in a remote region of northern Minnesota during the years after World War II. Vignettes of sickness, compassion, feuds, dangers, births and deaths make A Country Doctor's Casebook unforgettable and very highly recommended reading.

COUNTRY TOWNS OF WISCONSIN: Charming Small Towns and Villages to Explore By Ann Hattes Reviewed by Marty Martindale, Largo, FL Hattes, a Wisconsin resident, still feels the state is full of surprises. With the towns she has chosen for the book, she makes each seem a bit like a trip to another land, and in some cases, it almost is. This is not a guidebook in the traditional sense with lots of restaurants, B & B's emboldened in most every paragraph. Instead, Hattes uses her gift to blend history with the curious. This is not to say she neglects information on some of Wisconsin's fascinating annual fairs, events, celebrations and their origins. Each destination chapter ends with phone numbers for "Places to See, Eat and Stay." The book is well indexed. Her opening chapter concerns the town of Spring Green where Frank Lloyd Wright was a large presence. She describes places a visitor would want to see and how he was invited to get involved in each project. We gain a little insight into his personal life, as well. The rails and trails of Elroy and Reedsburg, also Norman Rockwell territory, share another chapter. You'll learn Bicycling magazine ranked this area's bike trails in the top three in the nation. One of Rockwell's museums is in Reedsburg where all of his magazine covers from Saturday Evening Post, Literary Digest, Country Gentlemen and Life magazine covers are on display. Hattes' Lake Geneva and Delavan chapter, subtitled, Playboy Bunnies and Circus Capital, is a great glimpse into the history of this resort area. In the following chapter, she captures the flavor of Wisconsin's Road America area of Elkhart Lake and the history of being pampered by plumbing at Kohler Co.'s so-carefully planned employee community There's also a Celebration of Chocolate feast each year. In her chapter, Washington Island, Looms and a Stavkirke, Hattes tells of this 23-square-mile island of fields and forests which is the oldest Icelandic settlement in the U.S. It's also home of the Sievers School of Fiber Arts where 600 students come each summer to nurture their craft. From the drumbeats and moccasins of the Ojibwe Indians of Lac du Flambeau, Hattes takes you to the lumber, iron ore and snow country of Hurley and Montreal, Wisconsin. In Trempealeau County the Trempealeau Hotel still stands. This Mississippi River town is the originator of walnut burgers. In the chapter, Maiden Rock, Stockholm and Prescott: River Country Sampler -- Birds, Art and Antiques, Hattes says of the guests at the Harrisburg Inn B&B, "They awaken to the sound of train whistles and migrating, trumpeting swans. In summer they breakfast on the porch watching the antics of hummingbirds and pelicans while bald eagles and turkey vultures soar overhead." Hattes ends the book with her chapter, Madeline Island, Bayfield and the Apostle Islands. Here the reader can pretty well think a week in Bayfield at the "Carnegie Hall of Tent Shows," otherwise known as the Lake Superior Big Top Chautauqua, might well be the be-all and end-all escape from the workaday world. Wisconsin's senator Gaylord Nelson tabbed the Apostle Islands, as "emeralds scattered in a sapphire sea." Unlike most books for travelers, Country Towns of Wisconsin is a good cover-to-cover read, even if you plan no visit to Wisconsin in the near future. ###

I was surprised to learn how much Wisconsin has to offer. Everything from outdoor sports and recreation to antiques, chocolate, festivals, and so much more. Organized as a guidebook to facilitate easy reference, with a comprehensive index and chapter by chapter lists of names and phone numbers, Country Towns of Wisconsin, in addition to being informative, has the engaging readability of a novel. Avoiding the dry, pedantic nature of some travel guides, Ann Hattes's writing style is reminiscent of a conversation with a good friend as she invites the reader along on her journey. Historical anecdotes and modern-day perspectives intertwine to provide a reading and travel experience as unique and delightful as the people and places of Wisconsin themselves. This book will appeal to travelers and Wisconsin residents alike... as well as those just looking for a sampling of Americana.

B.H. Fairchild's *Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest* had to be a daunting task not because of its one hundred twenty plus pages but because it follows Fairchild's *Art of the Lathe* (Alice James Books 1998), winner of around a dozen national awards.

The difference between the new book and the last is, primarily, two-fold: a long narrative poem forms the centerpiece of the book rather than introducing the book and a tighter formal reign keeps these poems more measured/steady, so they sound more like poems. In fact, Fairchild's formal talents ("Weather Report" and "Delivering Eggs to the Girls' Dorms") whose excellence draw him closer to major poets like Anthony Hecht and Richard Wilbur and away from minor poets Philip Levine and Donald Justice. (Justice can write a formal poem, but he has always gotten too much credit for it.) And, as with Levine and Justice, the working man and nostalgia are the subject matter for many of the poems, but Fairchild's workers are more stoic and more complex than Levine's. What's more, Fairchild's nostalgia for the past not only honors the past (see Justice) but informs the present and even movement into the future. See "History," The Death of a Psychic" and "The Memory of a Possible Future." Fairchild's memories ask questions about themselves, never afraid to doubt out loud.

The best poems in the collection are the shorter lyrics. There are fine poems that will go over well at readings ("Brazil" "Rave On" and "Luck"-who wouldn't want to hear these read aloud?), but these are not the poems that mesmerize the close reader into closer and closer readings alone in a room. You want to read a poem like "Brazil" aloud to all your friends. But "Delivering Eggs to the Girls' Dorm"-this needs to be seen in print in all its formal intricacy. This poem is so palpable and sweet with language, you could eat it. The diction of the poem emasculates the speaker while intensifying the sexuality around him. He is the one with the eggs, remember, while the girls are "eggless." And the words throughout taunt the speaker: "pregnant," "underwear," "moon," "kissed," "snakes," "cherry," and "bare" almost innocently appear in this fairly short poem. The sexual tension is maddening, in the best way possible. If I had space in this review, I could write a short treatise on effective line breaks here ("The flour / in her beard" or "Outside / stood" or "emptiness / became") and on other subtleties like the many internal rhymes and the anagramatic "bells" reduced to "the broken shell" in that wonderful last line.

If the book is "about" anything, it's about memory. The bookend poems are memory poems: "Memory" in the titles and Memory (with a capital M) at the heart of the meditations. But Fairchild's is not the kind of memory that most of our budding contemporary poets use as a tool. Not just personal memory, however valuable, however genuine and poignant. A reader gets a sense here, because of the quality of setting and scope through language, that memories, however acutely personal, should have the power of history.

Shakespeare, in *The Sonnets,* understood that Time is a bother, a nuisance, and a frustrating hope. In Fairchild's title poem, he, as a boy, discovers a way to control at least one aspect of time, namely memory. This poem, however limited in its effect, gives us some instruction on where the book will take us. The boy "holds time in memory with words" through simple vocal repetitions, e.g. "night, this night" or "Blue, this blue." There is, as in Shakespeare, a powerful play between words, repetition, and time. That's why, in this book, it's so fitting that Fairchild is moving more and more toward traditional formal structures (whose repetitions are more in number and complexity-rhyme, meter, lines, stanzas, etc.)

Alice James Books must hate (and love) to watch Norton publish this one. They can comfort themselves in the fact that poetry buyers, however few there may be, will be going back to the shelves to find out how Fairchild's genius emerged so vividly in Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest. Good for these readers that *The Art of the Lathe* (Alice James Books, 1998) and *The Arrival of the Future* (Swallow's Tale Press, 1986-reprint by Alice James Books, 2000) remain in print.

Fairchild has done it again with this new collection. EARLY OCCULT MEMORY SYSTEMS OF THE LOWER MIDWEST depicts the fading American midwest and the characters who inhabit it with grace and meditative intensity. Like its predecessor, THE ART OF THE LATHE, Fairchild's new book seamlessly weaves narrative with lyric epiphany. Poems such as "Moses Yellow Horse Is Throwing Water Balloons from the Hotel Roosevelt," "Rave On," and "The Blue Buick" entertain with their eccentric characters and sweeping narratives; while poems like "Delivering Eggs to the Girls' Dorm," "Luck," and "Brazil" are just plain entertaining. The variety of highs and lows in this book is reason enough to read it. Fairchild simply surprises the reader in every poem.

EARLY OCCULT MEMORY SYSTEMS OF THE LOWER MIDWEST offers a decidedly more complex perspective of the machine shop and the Kansas surrounding it. Poems such as "The Memory of a Possible Future," "The Memory Palace," and the title poem all suggest a conceptually bold collection searching for a "system" of memory, a way of crafting memory into art. From vantage points as far away from the midwest as Paris and the Villa Carlotta on Lake Como, Fairchild has gathered his pasts, both lived and unlived, "a tableau vivant / that all the while recedes-though held briefly / as we allow a rare Bordeaux to pool upon our tongues."

Fairchild has the uncanny ability to catch familiar characters, or those that ought to be familiar, while their brief moments of glory and fame, despair and madness, play out. Moses Yellow Horse, unable to endure his haunted past of having played one-and-a-half brief seasons in the major leagues, throws water balloons from the Hotel Roosevelt in final parodic rebellion. Mrs. Hill pounds maniacally on the door with "the cracked / porcelain of her hands" as her husband threatens her life with a shotgun. Travis Doyle and his buddies roll their car, just for kicks. A welder, on the side of the road, is visited by the angel of mercy. Characters appear incapable of distinguishing between past and present, fact and fiction, while Fairchild himself willingly amalgamates them. In "The Death of a Psychic," for instance-a subject most befitting the collection's difficult attempt at a backward gaze into the future-the psychic is "haunted by the knowledge of a certain year" when his own death visits him as he lies down "beneath, at last, the wide wings of the present tense." And if the characters to whom his previous books gave voice still appear to be quite vibrant and capable of surprise, that is because Fairchild himself is still capable of experiment and exploration.

Very moving, timeless poetry..

A heartfelt collection of poetry that is sometimes profound sometimes silly...something for everyone from the citizen of Smalltown, USA to the most jaded New Yorker.

Excellent book, telling of a wealth of Detroit history that has seemingly been forgotten. A must have for anybody interested in Michigan history.

I loved the book. I lived in Detroit most of my life and wasn't aware of the history of Elmwood and the characters buried there. The pictures were wonderful! I do wish a complete list of all the graves were included in the book. Since family genealogy is so popular right now it would of been a real asset.

My wife and I vacationed in St. Louis with our 2-year-old son and used this book to plan our trip. It was invaluable, pointing out activities we never would have known about otherwise. This book helped make our trip one of the best vacations we've ever had.

I keep 2 copies of this book handy: one in the car and one by the phone. I have recently purchased an updated copy and found the information current and accurate. It gives information on places as diverse as parks, restaurants, bookstores, museums, and the zoo. There are many fun ideas included that I would have never thought of myself. For example, you can ride the Amtrak train from Kirkwood to Downtown very cheaply and the kids have a ball. My 4-year-old son used the facilities twice in the 1/2 hour it took just because it was such a unique experience! Anyone living in St Louis or just visiting shouldn't be without this book!

Reading this book was a wonderful experience. What a touching story of a family that develops as all families do; realizing we love our family members even more when we accept them loving us the only way they know how. All this against the backdrop of a still unspoiled area of America. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in this region, history or living.
Allen

People from the prairies of South Dakota and North Dakota aren't pretentious. Well, some might be, but they tend to stand out in miserable ways. Linda Hasselstrom's writing is like the people of her home: careful, persistent, simple, surprisingly complex, fascinating. Your own family and home may be very different from Hasselstrom's, but through her writing you'll gain a better understanding of your own people and place of origin. Hasselstrom is a master; she shows us how to cherish the tribes we were born into, despite the inevitable losses and disappointments of life. She ranks right up there with Kathleen Norris and Patricia Hampl.

This Book is for the student of malacology or professional. It has magnificant photos of the representive mussels in the region and the author (Cummings) is the national expert on Unionids. A must get for the professional, Student, or thoes who wish to know more about these Freshwater Friends.

No dichotomous key but excellent descriptions and useful color plates. Physically small in size, will fit in a back pocket.