Colby Waller's Mountain Biking Wisconsin is a complete, up-to-date guide to mountain biking anywhere in Wisconsin. Waller provides detailed information on bike tire tread type, aerobic and difficulty levels, easy-to-read maps and route descriptions, as well as practical information on Wisconsin camping, flora, and fauna. Mountain Biking Wisconsin is an ideal and enthusiastically recommended guidebook for mountain bikers seeking off-road biking opportunities for health, recreation, and adventure!

Sometimes the events in one's life seem to go beyond our plans and expectations and exceed beyond the best fiction of anyone's imagination. So it is with "My Blue Heaven" as the life and times of one lonely soul confronts reality in his pilgrim's journey to never stop learning.
It's a book that reads quickly and one that is difficult to put down once you start to read it. All the events progress rapidly as history is being made in parallel.

Original version published by Paul Fessler in H-Net Book Review for H-GAGCS listserv

An academic's recommendation of a book as a "good read", however, can often be regarded as suspect by undergraduates and general readers. Perhaps our overexposure to dissertations and monographs have perverted our sense of what constitutes an enjoyable and easy to read book. To counteract such biases and perversions, I asked my wife to read Hauser's book. This book passed my wife's test. If only all books published by academic presses could boast such accessibility.

Originally published in Germany in 1950, My Farm on the Mississippi was clearly written for a non-academic audience. In this brief, very accessible book, Heinrich Hauser, an opponent of the Nazi regime and wartime German refugee, turns his three years from 1945-1948 on a Missouri farm near the German-American community of Wittenberg into an engaging adventure story. This book caught the eye of Curt Poulton, a historical geographer and translator at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, who translated this work into English. Poulton argues that Hauser, as a German living among a German immigrant community in the wake of World War II, offers invaluable commentary upon this 1940s "postimmigrant America" where immigrants' native language and customs were still alive.

In 1939, Hauser, a prolific writer of fiction and non-fiction, escaped from Germany with his Jewish wife and two children. After unsuccessfully trying his hand at farming in upstate New York and then at city life in Chicago, Hauser and his wife yearned for the romantic fresh air of the proverbial American heartland. With no prospects or firm destination, Hauser set off for St. Louis and points southward in an old 1928 Packard in search of his dream farm. South of St. Louis and just north of Cape Girardeau, Hauser and his wife began passing signs to "Stuttgart", "Dresden", "Altenberg", and "Wittenberg". In Cape Girardeau, Hauser spotted a "Dr. Schultz" and paid this German-speaking physician a visit to inquire about the region and the German-sounding places. Working through the German-American subculture, Hauser soon bought a farmstead south of the town of Wittenberg, Missouri on the Mississippi floodplain.

Hauser recounts how his wife Rita and son Huc struggled to make the farm a working proposition for the next three years. Most of the profits, however, were used to provide care packages and other aid to their German friends and relatives back home. During the rest of the time, his family survives horrific floods, raging forest fires, and a comic shipwreck. During the summers, his son Huc devised plans and adventures such as making a boat with an outboard motor in ways reminiscent of a Little Rascals episode. By 1948, however, low crop prices and homesickness convinced the reluctant Hausers to return to Germany and abandon their Missouri farm.

Nevertheless, Hauser offers a useful window into this German-American society on the banks of the Mississippi. As Hauser notes, it is this region's rural isolation that permitted its German culture and language to survive both World War I and World War II and beyond. Hauser knew he was among his own kind when he saw women working the fields---a practice Americans generally avoided. In the local bars, these German-Americans would add salt to modify the sweet American beers like Falstaff and Budweiser. When the war in Europe was over, Hauser's family celebrated with a crowd of itinerant German-American lumber workers playing "schottiches" and singing songs such as "Am Brunnen vor dem Tore" and sea tunes like "In Hamburg da bin ich gewesen". Also particularly interesting (and useful for immigration and ethnicity courses) are Hauser's recollected interactions between these German-Americans and the nearby African-Americans.

Just as Alexis de Toqueville's Democracy in America offers an outsider's critique of early nineteenth-century America, Hauser's observations present a valuable perspective of postwar America, its rural traditions and ethnic relationships. Hauser is an "outsider/insider" within the postwar German-American community. Though an outsider as a recent German refugee, he can speak the language (both linguistically and theologically). This allowed him to enter into the culture and bring a unique perspective to bear upon it.

Because this book was originally written for a German audience unfamiliar with many aspects of American society and culture, Hauser's narrative is particularly instructive to an American audience today. For many undergraduate students in particular, Hauser's emphasis on the basics of everyday American life proves more fascinating to American readers today than when it was originally published. Approaching the daily life of the post-World War II America from the cultural distance of a foreigner is in many ways similar to the approach of today's readers and students separated from that cultural landscape by the passage of fifty years. Thus, Hauser's cultural observations, which may have seemed less interesting to an American reader in the 1950s when the work was first published are met with a much different perspective.

Without Poulton's sparkling translation, however, these observations would have lost much of their power to English readers. Poulton's work arouses comparisons to other recent and notable translations such as W.C. Kuniczak's translation of Heinrich Sienkiewicz's monumental Trilogy beginning with the novel "With Fire and Sword" (popular Polish nationalist fiction written during the late 19th century-a useful assignment for courses dealing with 19th century European nationalism, by the way). Poulton remains faithful to Hauser's intent to provide his readers with an adventure story. So dependent upon narrative flow and colorful description, this value and attraction of this work would have been irreparably harmed by a poor translation.

Readers interested in this approach should also see the superb collection of immigrant letters in News from the Land of Freedom by Kamphoefner, Helbich, and Sommer (Cornell University Press, 1991).

There are those of us from the Great Lakes region who become infected with these sweetwater seas--and I am one of them. The Great Lakes offer so much in the area of recreation in swimming, fishing, boating and just watching. They also offer much in stories and tales of people, places and events on or by the water.

I was accompanying my son on a grade school field trip and came across this book in a gift store. I picked it up and found that I could not put it down...so I bought it and read it straight thru.

This book is filled with the people and events that occured on many of the islands that exist in this lake system. Stories of people and places that are rarely found in our history books, or at most hinted at.

This book is a must have for anyone who collects tales of the Great Lakes.

This is the book you need if you're new to this area, or even if you're not.

The descriptions of the locales and people are fascinating and are easy to read. If you are headed for Nebraska, or live in Nebraska, take this book with you on your next trip. You'll learn a lot!

This is a wonderful, detailed book, containing places which take only one tank of gas. They are entertaining and fun for the whole family. Definately recommended for reading and planning great family trips or trips for two.

Manhattan in "Jewel-Box"

Tamas Revesz's photo book on New York in its black/white jacket looks like a Jewel-Box. When you open the box, you can see the images, like pieces of jewelry. Each of them is unique and precious one. The composition, the vision, the message, the humor, the sense of humanity, etc are together in the pictures. If you read the lyric text of Introduction, you can understand the sensitiveness of the photographer. He came from Eastern-Europe, Hungary, and has got the same wit, as his late colleagues had got and became famous in the United States, Robert Capa, Andre Kertesz. The image on the front of the jacket looks like a painting. The towers of the World Trade Center under the grayish, before the storm clouds, in front the ruins of the old dock of the age of Ellis Island and the free bird flying. All of them are a kind of symbol. But on the back of the jacket you can see the lion of the Public Library in stovepipe-hat and butterfly-bow made you laugh. The lion is so gentle, sweet, as you can grab a sample of the contrapuntal approaching, which is the most important attribute of Tamas Revesz. The jewelries in the book have got the same message. The hectic, hustle-bustle city sometimes looks like a quiet, sleepy small town in the country because of the long shadows, the sunbathing people during lunchtime, the sitting and watching people on the street. The main point are not the glossy glass skyscrapers, as in the most photo books for tourists, but the humankind in these circumstances. You can enjoy these images either a native of New York, or a tourist from wherever.

I needed to do some research on Minneapolis/St. Paul since I am relocating there this spring. I have bought several books on the subject and this one is by far the most helpful book ever! The others had general overviews, but this book goes into detail! It has everything in there that anyone moving to the area could possibly need: finding a city to live in and descriptions of each, opening a bank account, finding a realtor in the area, and tips on just about everything you will need to move to the area. If I had bought this book first, I could have saved so much money by not buying the others. This is the only book I really needed! This is a great book!

No-Account Angels is a soulful account of small town life, one surprisingly filled with extraordinary events.

This book not only journeyed with me on many an airplane ride, in which I found myself most reluctant to put it away, but also captivated my interest into the wee hours of the morning on more than one occasion.

Never before have I felt so connected with an author. It was as if I was reading about myself...not so much in the events of her life, but in her thoughts and feelings throughout these events. Like the author, I laughed and cried when reading this earnest portrayal of life in a small Illinois town. We possess the power to change our own lives...perhaps with a little help and protection of a guardian angel.