Here are 100 books that The River Swimmer fans have personally recommended if you like
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I grew up in Ohio, just south of the Great Lakes. As a kid, I spent time on the Lakes fishing with my dad. I’ve been fascinated with these freshwater seas and their ecological richness ever since. My love for the Lakes eventually merged with my passion for early American history when I attended graduate school at Notre Dame. There, I began researching how Native peoples understood and utilized the unique geography of the Lakes. That work grew into my first book, Muddy Ground, and I anticipate the rest of my career as a historian will be dedicated to studying the environmental and human history of the Great Lakes region.
Jerry Dennis is a true believer when it comes to the wonderment of the Great Lakes.
As someone who has lived on Lake Michigan’s shore for much of his life, he’s an ideal author for sharing his love of the Lakes, their history, and their ecological wealth.
He travelled through the Lakes on an antiquated sailing ship to the Erie Canal and eventually the Atlantic Ocean as part of this book, and that perspective brings a special clarity to just how wild and unruly this part of the continent remains, even in an age where cities line the shores and technological advances might lead us to take the Lakes, and their valuable freshwater resources, for granted.
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…
I grew up in Ohio, just south of the Great Lakes. As a kid, I spent time on the Lakes fishing with my dad. I’ve been fascinated with these freshwater seas and their ecological richness ever since. My love for the Lakes eventually merged with my passion for early American history when I attended graduate school at Notre Dame. There, I began researching how Native peoples understood and utilized the unique geography of the Lakes. That work grew into my first book, Muddy Ground, and I anticipate the rest of my career as a historian will be dedicated to studying the environmental and human history of the Great Lakes region.
As you can already tell, I love a good travelogue. And as someone who was drawn to the Great Lakes originally via canoe, I found a fellow-traveler in Margaret Wooster.
Her vantage point comes from the hull of her boat, as she canoes and portages her way around the rivers that drain into Lake Ontario, Lake Erie, and the St. Lawrence River. In canoeing these waterscapes, she recounts the many centuries of history of the area but also shares her perspective as a conservationist when it comes to the challenges of protecting the Lakes and their rivers in our current moment.
Her attention to ecological detail, her rapt descriptions of wetlands riches, and her local storytelling invoke the intwined human and aquatic histories of this region.
I grew up in Ohio, just south of the Great Lakes. As a kid, I spent time on the Lakes fishing with my dad. I’ve been fascinated with these freshwater seas and their ecological richness ever since. My love for the Lakes eventually merged with my passion for early American history when I attended graduate school at Notre Dame. There, I began researching how Native peoples understood and utilized the unique geography of the Lakes. That work grew into my first book, Muddy Ground, and I anticipate the rest of my career as a historian will be dedicated to studying the environmental and human history of the Great Lakes region.
The first two books on my list are, in many ways, positive. Dan Egan’s
book is not.
Egan tackles the ongoing ecological threats to the Great
Lakes from a realist’s telling of its past environmental changes and
future problems. Readers learn how a bombardment of human-induced
invasive species have wracked the Great Lakes ecology in the recent past
(think sea lampreys, alewives, and zebra and quagga mussels) and
threaten to do so yet again in the near future, in the form of Asian
carp entering the Chicago River.
Even welcomed biological introductions
from the human perspective, such as the proliferation of Pacific salmon,
have altered the Lakes’ environments. At the end, we’re left with the
uneasy reality that the Lakes are a fragile set of freshwater ecosystems
that remain at the mercy of humans, who can either protect or destroy
them through future actions, or inaction.
The Great Lakes-Erie, Huron, Michigan, Ontario and Superior-hold 20 percent of the world's supply of surface fresh water and provide sustenance, work and recreation for tens of millions of Americans. But they are under threat as never before, and their problems are spreading across the continent. The Death and Life of the Great Lakes is prize-winning reporter Dan Egan's compulsively readable portrait of an ecological catastrophe happening right before our eyes, blending the epic story of the lakes with an examination of the perils they face and the ways we can restore and preserve them for generations to come.
I grew up on a family farm surrounded by larger vegetable and dairy operations that used migrant labor. From an early age, my siblings and I were acquainted with the children of these workers, children whom we shared a school desk with one day and were gone the next. On summer vacations, our parents hauled us around in a station wagon with a popup camper, which they parked in out-of-the-way hayfields and on mountainous plateaus, shunning, much to our chagrin, normal campgrounds, and swimming pools. Thus, I grew up exposed to different cultures and environments. My writing reflects my parents’ curiosity, love of books and travel, and devotion to the natural world.
After her mother is killed in a rare Northern Michigan tornado, Sadie Wixom is left with only her father and grandfather to guide her through young adulthood. Miles away in western Saskatchewan, Stefan Montegrand and his Indigenous family are displaced from their land by multinational energy companies. They are taken in temporarily by Sadie’s aunt, a human rights activist who heads a cultural exchange program.
Stefan promptly runs afoul of local authority, but Sadie, intrigued by him and captivated by his story, has grown sympathetic to his cause and complicit in his pushback against prejudiced accusations. Their mutual attraction is stymied when Stefan’s older brother, Joachim, who stayed behind, becomes embroiled in the resistance, and Stefan is compelled to return to Canada. Sadie, concerned for his safety, impulsively follows on a trajectory doomed by cultural misunderstanding and oncoming winter.
After her mother is killed in a rare Northern Michigan tornado, Sadie Wixom is left with only her father and grandfather to guide her through the pitfalls of young adulthood. Hundreds of miles away in western Saskatchewan, Stefan Montegrand and his Indigenous family are forced off their land by multinational energy companies and flawed treaties. They are taken in temporarily by Sadie's aunt, a human rights activist who heads a cultural exchange program. Stefan, whose own father died in prison while on a hunger strike, promptly runs afoul of local authority, but Sadie, intrigued by him and captivated by his…
I grew up in Ohio, just south of the Great Lakes. As a kid, I spent time on the Lakes fishing with my dad. I’ve been fascinated with these freshwater seas and their ecological richness ever since. My love for the Lakes eventually merged with my passion for early American history when I attended graduate school at Notre Dame. There, I began researching how Native peoples understood and utilized the unique geography of the Lakes. That work grew into my first book, Muddy Ground, and I anticipate the rest of my career as a historian will be dedicated to studying the environmental and human history of the Great Lakes region.
I’m a historian, and I didn’t want to bog down this list with academic history books exclusively. But if I had to recommend one history book, written by a top-notch scholar that offers an accessible and accurate picture of the history of the Great Lakes, it would be Tanner’s Atlas.
This is so much more than just a collection of maps; it is a labor of love by an expert who dedicated her career to understanding the human geography of the Great Lakes region. Readers will find guides to everything from the region’s environmental resources to military clashes between Europeans and Native peoples.
The beautiful maps are further contextualized with text sections laying out the history of the Native peoples of the Lakes from pre-contact through the end of the treaty era in 1871. As someone who believes geography is crucial to understanding history, this is one of my…
The Indian history of the Great Lakes region of the United States and Canada, and particularly of the Ohio Valley, is so complex that it can be properly clarified only with the visual aid of maps. The Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History, in a sequence of thirty-three newly researched maps printed in as many as five colors, graphically displays the movement of Indian communities from 1640 to about 1871, when treaty making between Indian tribes and the United States government came to an end.
History was shaped in this part of North America by intertribal warfare, refugee movements, epidemics…
My passion and expertise for writing Christian Military Romance stems from the fact that I was a military wife—twice. My first husband, an Army officer died eight years into our marriage. I then married a petty officer in the Navy—all this on top of growing up all over the world as my father worked in the foreign service. As someone who views the world through the lens of faith and who relies on God to overcome hardship, I'm convinced that the elite warriors who protect us and who fight giants on our behalf must also rely on faith. Tie all those elements together, and, voilá, you have a Rebecca Hartt Acts of Valor book!
Can you imagine losing your entire family to a plane accident? That’s what the heroine of this first-in-a-series book by Colleen Coble has to deal with.
With so many unanswered questions, Bree Nichols puts her K-9 search-and-rescue skills to work, looking for the bodies of her husband and son in the wilderness of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Having been widowed young, my heart went out to her from the start.
Working with Park Ranger Kade Mathews, Bree stumbles upon a terrible crime that may be linked to the plane crash. I think this book speaks to the importance of never giving up on faith and hope, even when everything looks absolutely bleak.
The best thing about Ms. Coble’s books is her character development. The pacing is less of a thriller than a cozy mystery with a good dose of romance. While lacking a military hero, I do like that there is…
When a plane crash claims her husband and son, Bree Nichols and her search-and-rescue dog won't rest until they recover the bodies. But when quiet Rock Harbor is shaken by a violent crime, Bree discovers links to her husband's fatal accident. Would solving this crime bring her peace-or more incredibly, reunite her family?
It's been months since the crash. K-9 search-and-rescue worker Bree Nicholls knows the chances of finding her husband and son in the vast wilderness of Michigan's Upper Peninsula grow more remote by the day. But her heart and her faithful dog, Samson, demand she keep searching.
I’ve lived in Detroit for nearly 15 years, where I built my house with my own two hands out of the shell of one I purchased for $500. A longtime journalist, I grew up in a small town in the countryside of Michigan. When I moved to Detroit after college people told me I was throwing my life away, but I looked at it as a moral decision, as “staying home” when it seemed like most other people were leaving. I’m glad I did—it offered me a look into a world more strange and beautiful than I could have imagined, potentially even a vision into a brave new future. I hope this world comes across in A $500 House in Detroit, and I hope we can make it last.
Love him or hate him, it’s undeniable that LeDuff is a tremendously charismatic writer. A Pulitzer Prize winner, a breathtaking reporter, and a denizen of Detroit for decades, this is one of the most compellingly written books on Detroit ever.
This book has a Mustang eight-cylinder engine on it, and I hoovered this up over just a couple of hours. If you want a barn-burning page-turner of a tale, showcasing Detroit as its most broken and beautiful, this is the one for you.
An explosive expose of America's lost prosperity by Pulitzer Prize -winning journalist Charlie LeDuff
"One cannot read Mr. LeDuff's amalgam of memoir and reportage and not be shaken by the cold eye he casts on hard truths . . . A little gonzo, a little gumshoe, some gawker, some good-Samaritan-it is hard to ignore reporting like Mr. LeDuff's." -The Wall Street Journal
"Pultizer-Prize-winning journalist LeDuff . . . writes with honesty and compassion about a city that's destroying itself-and breaking his heart." -Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A book full of both literary grace and hard-won world-weariness." -Kirkus
Fresh out of journalism school I stumbled on a strike at a machine shop in Pilsen, a neighborhood once home to Chicago’s most famous labor struggles, by then becoming a hip gentrified enclave. Drinking steaming atole with Polish, Mexican, and Puerto Rican workers in a frigid Chicago winter, I was captivated by the solidarity and determination to fight for their jobs and rights, in what appeared to be a losing battle. After covering labor struggles by Puerto Rican teachers, Mexican miners, Colombian bottlers, Chicago warehouse workers, and many others, my enthusiasm for such stories is constantly reignited -- by the workers fighting against all odds and the writers telling their stories, including those featured here.
The name “Detroit” too often conjures images of poverty-porn: gorgeously crumbling buildings, post-apocalyptic urban decay, lost souls wandering cracked streets. Detroit: I Do Mind Dying shatters this image with unfettered energy. It chronicles the League of Revolutionary Black Workers in the auto plants of the 1960s-1970s, a refreshing reminder of the power of intersectional labor organizing; a raw look at the racism of the mainstream labor movement; and a very human chronicle of the struggles and flaws of courageous everyday workers at this critical time and place in history.
Detroit: I Do Mind Dying tracks the extraordinary development of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers as they became two of the landmark political organizations of the 1960s and 1970s. It is widely heralded as one the most important books on the black liberation movement.
Marvin Surkin received his PhD in political science from New York University and is a specialist in comparative urban politics and social change. He worked at the center of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers in Detroit.
Dan Georgakas is a writer, historian, and activist with a long-time interest…
Masuda Hajimu (family name Masuda) is a historian at the National University of Singapore. He specializes in the modern history of East Asia, the history of American foreign relations, and the social and global history of the Cold War, with particular attention toward ordinary people and their violence, as well as the recurrent rise of grassroots conservatism in the modern world. His most recent publications include: The Early Cold War: Studies of Cold War America in the 21st Century in A Companion to U.S. Foreign Relations; “The Social Experience of War and Occupation” in The Cambridge History of Japan (coming in 2022), among others. He has served as a residential fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (2017-18); Visiting Fellow at the University of Cambridge (2020); and Visiting Scholar at Waseda University (2020).
I like this book because it forces us to rethink what the Cold War really was. The book identifies key figures in anti-communist crusades in post-World War II Detroit: workers, white homeowners, city officials, Catholics, and manufacturing executives, and argues that the core elements of their “anticommunism” were not fears of Soviet incursion, but sociocultural tensions at home that derived from drastic changes in wartime and postwar Detroit, which observed a sudden influx of African Americans, Southern whites, and immigrants.
Thus, the book argues that Cold War Detroit’s “anticommunism” was not a new development in the postwar era, but a continuation of what had previously been labeled anti-unionism, white-supremacism, anti-secular Catholicism, and anti-New deal sentiments, all of which can be characterized as expressions of ongoing “anti-modernist” tensions within American society. Such a reexamination of Cold War anti-communism is significant because it could open up new territory for rethinking what anticommunism…
Detroit's Cold War locates the roots of American conservatism in a city that was a nexus of labor and industry in postwar America. Drawing on meticulous archival research focusing on Detroit, Colleen Doody shows how conflict over business values and opposition to labor, anticommunism, racial animosity, and religion led to the development of a conservative ethos in the aftermath of World War II. Using Detroit--with its large population of African-American and Catholic immigrant workers, strong union presence, and starkly segregated urban landscape--as a case study, Doody articulates a nuanced understanding of anticommunism during the Red Scare. Looking beyond national politics,…
I’ve always been fascinated by the role of women in war: men may be on the front lines, but women deal with its impact and often struggle to have equal standing. I was inspired by stories told by my mother who was a nurse in World War II and participated in surgery under gunfire and helped liberate a POW camp in Germany. Yet, no one wanted to hear from her because she was “just a nurse.” Fast forward to Vietnam where women were still being marginalized. I wrote The Fourteenth of September to even the playing field by telling a story that was largely based upon my own experience in college during l969-1970.
A great story about the dark side of trying to do the right thing:
A radical, anti-Vietnam War protestor is involved in an incident where someone is inadvertently killed and is forced to go underground, where she builds a new identity and law-abiding life. Thirty years later she is recognized by a former classmate and, facing a long-delayed jail sentence, must find a way to explain it all to her family, friends, and above all, her daughter.
While reluctantly accompanying her husband and daughter to freshman orientation at Indiana University, Nora Quillen hears someone call her name, a name she has not heard in more than 25 years. Not even her husband knows that back in the '60s she was Jane Barth, a student deeply involved in the antiwar movement. An American Tune moves back and forth in time, telling the story of Jane, a girl from a working-class family who fled town after she was complicit in a deadly bombing, and Nora, the woman she became, a wife and mother living a quiet life in northern…
I’ve been writing poetry for most of my life and only recently began a real crash course in fiction with my first novel. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but not for the reasons I thought. In poetry, you learn to locate meaning, but you don’t learn narrative structure. Who knew being an existential genius was easier than finishing a sentence? Once I started studying literature that I felt embodied both, I was able to visualize how my poetic voice wasn’t just applicable, but useful, in the world of fiction.
The first time I read this book, I had the whole-body sensation of having my mind simultaneously read and fed. Nelson put words to fantasies and fears I’d never thought to vocalize, while also functioning as an educator, leaving me with an entirely new understanding of true crime as a media sensation. This is a memoir about the process of writing her book of poems, Jane. Jane chronicles the story of her aunt, who was murdered as a young college student, while The Red Parts goes into Nelson's personal process and how the investigation of a murdered family member can become all-consuming. I highly recommend reading both in succession because the dialogue between them is astounding.
Selected as a Book of the Year 2017 in the Guardian
'Maggie Nelson's short, singular books feel pretty light in the hand... But in the head and the heart, they seem unfathomably vast, their cleverness and odd beauty lingering on' Observer
In 1969, Jane Mixer, a first-year law student at the University of Michigan, posted a note on a student noticeboard to share a lift back to her hometown of Muskegon for spring break. She never made it: she was brutally murdered, her body found a few miles from campus the following day.
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