The most recommended books on the Great Lakes

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. 

This award-winning work is the best account of naval rivalry and warfare on the most important of the Great Lakes. Malcomson clearly explains the details of the various vessels employed and the wider context of the naval contest. He shows how the mobility that naval forces provided to each side significantly affected all aspects of land warfare.

Mindy Meija is another author I recently met at a conference. She is, appropriately enough, an accountant who lives in the Twin Cities and uses her expertise to craft thrillers that keep you on the edge and guessing what will come next.

Nora Trier is a forensic accountant, hired to check into missing prize money for a big kickboxing tournament. Expected to find both the thief and the cash, Unfortunately, Nora has a secret connection to the company sponsoring the tournament which made her reluctant to take the job until she came under pressure from her partner. 

Kirkus Reviews called Strike Me Down a tense and unpredictable thriller that “crackles with obsession, greed, lust, and plenty of ambition, and it’s loaded with more twists and turns than a spy novel.”

I wanted to include a work of fiction on this list and if it was to be fiction about the Great Lakes region it had to be Jim Harrison. If it could only be one Harrison book, then The River Swimmer is the book that best captures the freshwater magic of the Lakes.

This is not like the other works on my list—the title story follows the adventures of a northern Michigan teen named Thad who is an adept swimmer and uses his skill as a river traveler to journey all the way to Chicago. Sprinkled with elements of fantasy, Indigeneity, and bawdiness all together, the work is classic Jim Harrison.

But the reason it belongs on my list is because of the way it captures the magic of these interconnected waterways.

Egnal shows that the causes of the war were indeed complex and multifaceted rather than resting on a single simplistic issue. His is a thorough treatment of the many economic factors involved in the war that resulted.

Geoff Herbach is the award-winning author of YA books. His latest, Cracking the Bell, deals with a major issue in contact sports—concussion. After several years of online writing with him, we met in person at a big mystery convention. A college professor in Minnesota, Land of a Thousand Lakes, he has produced radio comedy shows and toured rock clubs telling weird stories. 

When the main character, Isaiah, is knocked out on the field, the consequences reach far beyond his ability to play, forcing him to think about life with football. He has to consider tough decisions that will have an impact on his family, his team, and his future. How do you decide your path to the future when none of your choices are good?

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. 

Another Great Lakes writer, Meredith Doench is an Ohio native who teaches in the English Department at the University of Dayton. Meredith, another member of my writing group, is the author of the Luce Hansen series, Whereabouts Unknown is a standalone introducing Office Theodora Madsen of the Dayton P.D.

Theo is investigating the case of two missing teenage girls, who vanish, each leaving behind a bloody handprint. When Theo is injured and faces a lengthy recovery, the case goes cold while Theo tries to piece together the connection between the two girls before time runs out.

If you want to know how the British and Canadians view the war, this is the book for you. The original edition was published in 1965 but lacked documentation. For the revised edition, a team of Canadian scholars headed by Donald E. Graves added a host of appendices with new material and tracked down sources to give the volume appropriate documentation. 

As someone who has never been to Chicago and knew nothing about the Great Lakes shipping industry, the book was fascinating in so many ways. Sara Paretsky has a compelling, strong female lead but also takes us places we never conceived of. Paretsky’s murder investigation is thrilling, and the characters are well crafted and ones that the reader will care about. It is an excellent book that has stayed in my memory for decades.

I first met Patricia Skalka when I joined Off-Campus Writers’ Workshop, the oldest continuous writer’s group in the Chicago area. She divides her time between Chicago and a cottage in Door County, Wisconsin. It’s not surprising that Park Ranger Dave Cubiak, her sleuth, moved from Chicago to Door County. 

Cubiak, a former Chicago homicide detective, quit his job and moved to Door County after the death of his wife and daughter. Six deaths among visitors to the popular tourist area entangle an unwilling Cubiak in the search for a clever killer who may be planning more murders as a popular festival floods the charming waterfront villages with more prospective victims. New to the area, Cubiak doesn’t know who to suspect and who to trust.

This fictional account of the life of an English fur trader is a sentimental favorite for me out of my respect for historian Charles Cleland.

Cleland tells the story of Alexander Henry who was captured by the Odawa Indians during the attack on Fort Michillimackinac in 1763. Henry lived among the Indians through the seasons, giving an eye-witness account of their lives as hunter-gatherers. Cleland is better as a historian than a novelist, but this is still a fun read and would also be a good book on any Young Adult list.

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.

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… show more.

Best Kept Secrets by Great Lakes author Tracey Phillips is a psychological mystery set in and around Indianapolis, Indiana. When I met Tracey at the Writers’ Police Academy in Appleton, Wisconsin, we ended hung out together and became fast friends. We bought each other’s books. And became fans.

Morgan Jewell is a homicide cop with a dark secret. Her best friend, Fay, was murdered years ago and Morgan, who can barely remember what happened that night, worries that she was somehow to blame. Now, as other bodies start surfacing, Morgan and her partner try to piece together the puzzle that might lead to catching a serial killer and resolve the mystery of Fay’s death. The twists and turns and the breakneck pace meant I could hardly put it down.

What Calloway does for Washington, Wallace does for Jefferson. Even more than Washington, Jefferson talked one game and played another. He could be splendidly eloquent on how much he wanted the Indian nations to become Americans, yet that could only happen, in Jefferson’s mind, if they surrendered their identity as Indians. If anything, the situation was even worse than Wallace suggests, as I point out in detail in my book on William Wells. While there is much to admire about Jefferson, his Indian policy shows how idealism can serve as a front for blatant exploitation and near genocide.  

This is a novel about loss, family, and reconciliation, and it moved me deeply. It’s set in Minnesota, where I spent about half my childhood, and it deals with personal and family histories, which I find quite compelling. In the novel, Noah’s father, Olaf Torr, lives under the weight of survivor’s guilt. Years earlier, thirty men went out on the ore boat, the Ragnorak, and only three returned. One was Olaf. As the novel begins, Olaf is dying, and he contacts Noah, from whom he’s estranged. But Noah still hasn’t forgiven Olaf for his alcoholism. Also, Noah and his wife, Natalie, are struggling with infertility issues. But Noah and Natalie come to see Olaf, who starts telling Noah what happened on that boat. 

Historians of the Midwest were deprived of one of their finest by the early death of Andrew Cayton. Frontier Indiana is the best of a series of books published by Ohio State University Press on the states of the Old Northwest. Combining chapters on various men and women, Little Turtle’s Miami resistance, and William Henry Harrison’s land-hungry settlers, Cayton’s impressive research and thoughtful writing go a long way toward illuminating the frontier of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.  

The Middle Ground is by far the best overview of the Great Lakes frontier over a period of almost two hundred years. White traces how French fur traders were able to establish a fluctuating “middle ground” with the Indian nations of the region that allowed for a degree of respect, understanding, and intermarriage. When the French were succeeded by the British, this middle ground began to shrink, as English traders wanted to let the cash nexus determine their business practices. When the Americans came to dominate the situation, the middle ground, with the exception of a few figures like William Wells, almost entirely disappeared. The result was devastating for the Indian nations, whose cultures nearly disappeared. White’s thesis has been challenged by Alan Taylor and other historians of the period, but the book remains an essential classic.