Reviews for Peninsula: Essays and Memoirs from Michigan

The average rating for Peninsula: Essays and Memoirs from Michigan based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-08-13 00:00:00 Anna Introcaso Thirty some essays, short stories, a poem or two. A few are the kind of romanticism for the state that so many southeast Michiganders display bombing back and forth from Canton to Ann Arbor every day on M14 with a million different Great Lakes stickers on the backs of their SUVs. I always wonder if Kansans have little silhouettes of the state stuck on their car windows. Jim Harrison is probably the star with a typical reminisce. He lived in Reed City, where my parents raised my brothers and I. Undertaker Thomas Lynch contributes some elegant advice on funeral observances. Maureen Stanton's piece on gardening in the midst of the damaged lives in a rundown Lansing neighborhood is funny and moving. Lawrence Joseph is a lawyer and poet from Detroit's Lebanese community who writes of the spiritual power of words. Looking him up I came across his poem "Sand Nigger", an eloquent statement on growing up Lebanese American. Tori Derricotte's essay on growing up in the black middle class in Detroit is illuminating, I wish there were more like it in the collection. Carol Sanford's essay on building a wilderness cabin after the death of her son, an Air Force pilot, is from a literary genre I love, detailing some mundane real world activity as a gateway to spiritual, philosophical, or emotional matters. Daniel Minock has a nice piece about owls, and must have put in a lot of time bird watching to write this little closing passage: "Two days later, when I went to check on the nest in Kensington Park, the owls had abandoned it - perhaps because the eggs did not hatch or the nestlings died. A week later Great Blue Herons dismantled the nest, and I have not hear from a Great Horned Owl since." The essay most worth seeking out for me is Kathleen Stocking's memoir about her father Pierce Stocking, who purchased land and constructed the eponymous scenic drive now part of the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. Stocking operated the drive as a commercial tourist attraction from 1967 until his death in 1976, at which time the land was assumed into the National Lakeshore. Kathleen Stocking's piece is frank and intriguing - her father sounds like he was a complicated man. Overall I learned some things and got pointed down some new pathways. I'm trying to emphasize that in my reading now.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-11-14 00:00:00 Martin West This is a really remarkable memoir, and more interesting because its first edition predates the more famous narrative of Frederick Douglass by 20 years, and because it was published without white sponsorship. The added historiographical and personal information by the editors is also quite interesting.