Reviews for Shipwrecks of Isle Royale National Park: The Archeological Survey

The average rating for Shipwrecks of Isle Royale National Park: The Archeological Survey based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-05-04 00:00:00 Mark Doherty This book is based on events that happened during the Detroit riot of July 1967. I was 20 years old, a college student in Ann Arbor. My parents lived at Woodward Avenue and Fourteen Mile Road in the white suburb of Royal Oak. Would the riot reach beyond the Detroit city limit of Eight Mile Road? People thought it might and they paid attention fearfully. This book was rushed to print in January 1968. Author John Hersey initially was thinking about race riots in general, then examining the Detroit riot in particular, then ultimately the Algiers Motel incident specifically. As I explored Detroit's riot in those first weeks, the incident at the Algiers Motel kept insisting upon attention, and eventually I determined to focus on it. The episode contained all the mythic themes of racial strife in the United States: the arm of the law taking the law into its own hands; interracial sex; the subtle poison of racist thinking by "decent" men who deny that they are racists; the societal limbo into which, ever since slavery, so many young black men have been driven in our country; ambiguous justice in the courts; and the devastation in both black and white human lives that follows in the wake of violence as surely as ruinous and indiscriminate flood after torrents. I know John Hersey best as the author of the book Hiroshima, the nonfiction story of the atomic bombing by the United States of that city in Japan in 1945. I take his reporting as accurate and to the point. He writes early in this book that Perhaps the whole point of this book is that every white person on the country is in some degree guilty of the crimes committed at the Algiers. This book was published 45 years ago, in 1968. That event is part of my life. In selecting this book, I looked forward to being sensitized and to getting the point. Slightly more than halfway through the book author John Hersey speculates why the three young men were shot and killed at the Algiers Motel: . . . as it turned out the boys were not executed a snipers at all. They were executed for being thought to be pimps, for being considered punks, for making out with white girls, for being in some vague way killers of a white cop named Jerry Olshove, for running riot - for being, after all and all, black young men and part of the black rage of the time. The content of the book is predominantly vignettes of events and snippets of interviews, statements and court hearings that might be likened to a series of short clips in a documentary film. The myth of the 1967 Detroit riot was that it was the Great Sniper Battle involving 140 blocks in the heart of the city. Journalists writing for the Detroit Free Press concluded that "Both the number of snipers active in the riot area and the danger that snipers presented were vastly overstated. Only one sniper is among the riot victims and only three of the victims may possibly have been killed by snipers, two of them doubtful. In all, some 31 persons were arrested and charged with sniping" - out of 7,231 arrested altogether. The incident at the Algiers Motel began with a broadcast on police radio that the "Army was under heavy fire," a description that was untrue. But really the incident was spawned by the racism and injustice that was omnipresent In Detroit, Michigan in the summer of 1967. My experience growing up in a white suburb both insulated me from the injustice of racism while also sensitizing me to the inequity explicit in the racial divide. I came into my adulthood knowing that as a white male I benefited from racism and sexism that gave me unearned power. I think that The Algiers Motel Incident is an important documentation of injustice that made it a significant wake-up call when it was published forty-five years ago within a year of the incident. To me it seems more historic, examining issues that seem to need little argumentation these years later to be accepted as true and valid. But maybe that is more obvious and accurate for me than for the portion of society that may still hold firmly to its racism and sexism. I hope there are people who think that the 21st century has things to learn from this book. At least someone at the Johns Hopkins University Press thought enough of it to reissue it in 1997, almost thirty years after it was first published. I am wondering what college courses have this book as required or optional reading. In short, I am pleased that this book was reissued and is potentially still in use for educational purposes. What more could an author hope? Although I suppose in the publishing world a reissue 16 years ago is ancient history about a book that some might say is about even more ancient history. I am giving The Algiers Motel Incident four stars although it turned out that I had already learned the lessons and felt the guilt that was promised by the author. Maybe my four stars will encourage a couple of people to pick up and read the reissued trade paperback edition.

Review # 2 was written on 2008-05-23 00:00:00 Zachary Boult Very much worth revisiting if you've read it before--very much worth discovering if you haven't. A tense and meticulously told true crime story with real journalistic care about a profile act of racial violence (with more than a little police complicity) in Detroit in and around the 1967 riots. Hersey was an interesting and versatile writer. His portfolio is diverse--both lyrical and pragmatic, but in this work he opened important doors for the hard-edged reporting style of prose into the new more complex sociological terrain of the Civil Rights/there's a riot goin' on era. This book can be enjoyed as a stand-alone novel...or as part of the "muckraking" social advocacy stream in American literature, which dates back in it strength to the 1870s. I think Hersey is a writer, famous in his day, who deserves reappraisal. He did a lot of different things well. Not easily categorized in the totality of his work, which may be why he's not appreciated as much as he should be.