Enjoy fast, free delivery, exclusive deals, and award-winning movies & TV shows with Prime
Try Prime
and start saving today with fast, free delivery
Amazon Prime includes:
Fast, FREE Delivery is available to Prime members. To join, select "Try Amazon Prime and start saving today with Fast, FREE Delivery" below the Add to Cart button.
Amazon Prime members enjoy:- Cardmembers earn 5% Back at Amazon.com with a Prime Credit Card.
- Unlimited Free Two-Day Delivery
- Streaming of thousands of movies and TV shows with limited ads on Prime Video.
- A Kindle book to borrow for free each month - with no due dates
- Listen to over 2 million songs and hundreds of playlists
- Unlimited photo storage with anywhere access
Important: Your credit card will NOT be charged when you start your free trial or if you cancel during the trial period. If you're happy with Amazon Prime, do nothing. At the end of the free trial, your membership will automatically upgrade to a monthly membership.
-33% $11.99$11.99
Ships from: Amazon.com Sold by: Amazon.com
$8.86$8.86
Ships from: Amazon Sold by: Brantley Trading Company
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
OK
Audible sample Sample
The Living Great Lakes: Searching for the Heart of the Inland Seas Paperback – Illustrated, June 1, 2004
Explore your book, then jump right back to where you left off with Page Flip.
View high quality images that let you zoom in to take a closer look.
Enjoy features only possible in digital – start reading right away, carry your library with you, adjust the font, create shareable notes and highlights, and more.
Discover additional details about the events, people, and places in your book, with Wikipedia integration.
Purchase options and add-ons
Award-winning nature author Jerry Dennis reveals the splendor and beauty of North America’s Great Lakes in this “masterwork”* history and memoir of the essential environmental and economical region shared by the United States and Canada.
No bodies of water compare to the Great Lakes. Superior is the largest lake on earth, and together all five contain a fifth of the world’s supply of standing fresh water. Their ten thousand miles of shoreline border eight states and a Canadian province and are longer than the entire Atlantic and Pacific coasts of the United States. Their surface area of 95,000 square miles is greater than New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island combined. People who have never visited them―who have never seen a squall roar across Superior or the horizon stretch unbroken across Michigan or Huron―have no idea how big they are. They are so vast that they dominate much of the geography, climate, and history of North America, affecting the lives of tens of millions of people.
The Living Great Lakes: Searching for the Heart of the Inland Seas is the definitive book about the history, nature, and science of these remarkable lakes at the heart of North America. From the geological forces that formed them and the industrial atrocities that nearly destroyed them, to the greatest environmental success stories of our time, Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, and Ontario are portrayed in all their complexity.
A Michigan native, Jerry Dennis also shares his memories of a lifetime on or near the lakes, including a six-week voyage as a crewmember on a tallmasted schooner. On his travels, he collected more stories of the lakes through the eyes of biologists, fishermen, sailors, and others he befriended while hiking the area’s beaches and islands.
Through storms and fog, on remote shores and city waterfronts, Dennis explores the five Great Lakes in all seasons and moods and discovers that they and their connecting waters―including the Erie Canal, the Hudson River, and the East Coast from New York to Maine―offer a surprising and bountiful view of America. The result is a meditation on nature and our place in the world, a discussion and cautionary tale about the future of water resources, and a celebration of a place that is both fragile and robust, diverse, rich in history and wildlife, often misunderstood, and worthy of our attention.
“This is history at its best and adventure richly described.”―*Doug Stanton, author of In Harm’s Way: The Sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis and the Extraordinary Story of Its Survivors and 12 Strong: The Declassified True Story of the Horse Soldiers
Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award Winner
Winner of Best Book of 2003 by the Outdoor Writers Association of America
- Print length320 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherSt. Martin's Griffin
- Publication dateJune 1, 2004
- Dimensions5.5 x 0.85 x 8.25 inches
- ISBN-100312331037
- ISBN-13978-0312331030
Frequently bought together
Similar items that may ship from close to you
Editorial Reviews
Review
savvily blending the factual with the picaresque." -- Kirkus Reviews
"I would compare [Dennis's] style to John McPhee's. Both are masters at
interweaving a narrative, of spending time with the focus of their articles
and books. A must for summer reading."--The Weather Doctor
"The Living Great Lakes is the best history, nature, and adventure book I've
ever read...I couldn't put the damn thing down."-- Great Lakes Angler
About the Author
Jerry Dennis writes for Smithsonian, Sports Afield, Gray's Sporting Journal, and The New York Times. His books, including It's Raining Frogs and Fishes, A Place on the Water, and The River Home, have won numerous awards and have been translated into five languages. In 1999, he was the recipient of the Michigan Author of the Year Award presented by the Michigan Library Association. He lives in Traverse City, Michigan.
Product details
- Publisher : St. Martin's Griffin; Reprint edition (June 1, 2004)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 320 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0312331037
- ISBN-13 : 978-0312331030
- Item Weight : 9.3 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.5 x 0.85 x 8.25 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #41,571 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #3 in Ecology of Lakes & Ponds (Books)
- #40 in Natural History (Books)
- #321 in U.S. State & Local History
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Jerry Dennis (www.jerrydennis.net) is an acclaimed nature, science, and outdoor writer whose books have appeared on national bestseller lists, have been translated into seven languages, and are taught in many universities and high schools. His essays and stories have appeared in such publications as The New York Times, Smithsonian, Orion, American Way, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Gray's Sporting Journal. Among the awards he has received are the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award, the Michigan Author of the Year Award, the Great Lakes Culture Award, and four Best Book of the Year awards from the Outdoor Writers Association of America.
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
Though Dennis has driven around the lakes (more than once), he takes you through the lakes the only way any explorer can really meet the lakes - by boat, a sailing boat to be precise - and he is a skilled enough writer to make you feel like your reading chair must certainly have been magically transferred to the poop deck.
The Great Lakes, like the other incredible and enigmatic regions here; the Great Plains, the Rockies and Sierras, Appalachia, et al, are a region of amazement and Dennis helps his reader savoir that wonder through a very deft and enjoyable immersion.
"The Living Great Lakes" is a hearty brew of history, lake lore, science, ecology, appreciation, sailing adventure, Great Lakes culture, weather wisdom, and Irish wit. Your entertainment is guaranteed.
Jerry Dennis Intro
Those of us who identify as book-lovers, those of us who lived inside stories throughout our childhoods—we know the work of a living legend when we encounter it on the page. Similarly, those of us who have built careers out of the well-shaped sentence, the fully-formed paragraph, the intentionally crafted essay—we know what it’s like to learn from a colleague whose body of work represents a deeply significant contribution.
Today’s Keynote Speaker, Jerry Dennis, is that kind of writer. He has given us work that ignites the imagination, while also infusing it with facts. Woven into his book The Living Great Lakes, which is part memoir, part research, part adventure—the facts alone don’t invite story, but they do stay with us long after the final page has been turned—the story that’s there is, indeed, a page-turner. There’s an important kind of intentionality to that approach. We learn as we go along, but we hardly notice that we’re learning.
Whether reading a brief personal essay Jerry published 20 years ago, or a new blog post published last month, his careful focus, smart craft, and generosity of spirit that infuse the page instill readers with a sense of possibility. “You have to open yourself to natural spectacle,” Jerry writes in The River Home. “Like a child, you have to be empty of expectation, have to possess eyes that see and ears that hear. It takes practice, like anything. Sometimes you can be surprised.”
Jerry’s writing gives us those eyes and ears, as well as surprise. His place-based work, infused with facts and the imagination, adds up to what I call slow and steady eco-activism. The result is body of work that has brought the Great Lakes Region to life for thousands of readers, above and beyond its residents. His work helps people find a way into caring, into breathing fresh air, and into appreciation of natural resources—even if they aren’t looking for it. Even if they’ve never caught a fish in their lives. Even if they’ve never seen a Great Lake.
If you’re not familiar with his work, I want you to know that Jerry is an internationally acclaimed author who has earned his living as a freelance writer since 1986. His books, including A Walk in the Animal Kingdom, The Living Great Lakes, The Windward Shore, and A Place on the Water, have won numerous awards, have been translated into seven languages, have appeared on national bestseller lists, and are required reading in many universities and colleges. His essays, poems and short fiction have appeared in more than 100 publications, including The New York Times, Smithsonian Magazine, American Way, Michigan Quarterly Review, PANK, and Mid-American Review.
But his bio wasn’t always so chalk-full, and his life—as much as we may like to romanticize the life of the writer—is just as busy, exciting, boring, overbooked, full of love, full of confusion, muddled by injustice, and full of uncertainty as the rest of ours.
So what can we learn? After thirty years of making a living as a writer, I won’t go so far as to say that Jerry’s seen it all, but I will tell you that I invited him to be today’s Keynote Speaker with great confidence that he’s not going to sugar-coat what he has to tell us. He’s seen changes in the publishing industry that impact everyone in this room, and many of those changes, he’s seen from more than one angle.
I’m as eager as you are to learn more, and while he won’t be reading from his published work today, I hope you’ll take the hard facts he’s going to share during this presentation and water them with a healthy dose of Great Lakes imagination by reading his books when we’re done.