The Windward Shore: A Winter on the Great Lakes Contributor(s): Dennis, Jerry (Author) |
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ISBN: 0472118161 ISBN-13: 9780472118168 Publisher: University of Michigan Regional OUR PRICE: $20.66 Product Type: Hardcover - Other Formats Published: August 2011 |
Additional Information |
BISAC Categories: - Nature | Essays - Travel | United States - Midwest - General |
Dewey: 917.704 |
LCCN: 2011023784 |
Physical Information: 0.8" H x 6.1" W x 9" (0.90 lbs) 168 pages |
Themes: - Cultural Region - Midwest |
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
Publisher Description: Our country is lucky to have Jerry Dennis. A conservationist with the soul of a poet whose beat is Wild Michigan, Dennis is a kindred spirit of Aldo Leopold and Sigurd Olson. The Windward Shore---his newest effort---is a beautifully written and elegiac memoir of outdoor discovery. Highly recommended ---Maude Barlow, author of Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water In prose as clear as the lines in a D rer etching, Jerry Dennis maps his home ground, which ranges outward from the back door of his farmhouse to encompass the region of vast inland seas at the heart of our continent. Along the way, inspired by the company of water in all its guises---ice, snow, frost, clouds, rain, shore-lapping waves---he meditates on the ancient questions about mind and matter, time and attention, wildness and wonder. As in the best American nature writing---a tradition that Dennis knows well---here the place and the explorer come together in brilliant conversation. Grounded by a knee injury, Dennis learns to live at a slower pace while staying in houses ranging from a log cabin on Lake Superior's Keweenaw Peninsula to a $20 million mansion on the northern shore of Lake Michigan. While walking on beaches and exploring nearby woods and villages, he muses on the nature of time, weather, waves, agates, books, words for snow and ice, our complex relationship with nature, and much more. From the introduction: "I wanted to present a true picture of a complex region, part of my continuing project to learn at least one place on earth reasonably well, and trusted that it would appear gradually and accumulatively--and not as a conventional portrait, but as a mosaic that included the sounds and scents and textures of the place and some of the plants, animals, and its inhabitants. Bolstered by the notion that a book is a journey that author and reader walk together, I would search for promising trails and follow them as far as my reconstructed knee would allow." |