Lake Country: A Series of Journeys - Softcover

Stocking, Kathleen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0472065165 ISBN 13: 9780472065165

Publisher: UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN REGIONAL, 1994

Synopsis

One writer's quest to locate herself within the wet, wild, and diversely human cultural heritage that has shaped her

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews:

In this sequel to Letters From Leelanau (not reviewed), Stocking sets out from her farmhouse on Michigan's Leelanau Peninsula to explore her home state--``as good a microcosm'' as any, she asserts, for an examination of contemporary American culture. Her series of deliberately haphazard journeys produces a thoughtful collection of essays and sketches about the lasting diversity of the daily round in the small towns and back roads of the country's rugged northern edge. Drawn particularly to the islands of the Great Lakes, Stocking is in search of an ``island of `unchange' in a sea of change'' where life is simpler and people know and trust their neighbors. She finds it on Bois Blanc, an insular community that admits the best modernity has to offer- -computers in its one-room schoolhouse, an ``astonishingly sophisticated'' bookstore--and staves off the worst. On Drummond Island she follows the public battle between a crusading journalist and Tom Monaghan, the Domino's Pizza magnate, over a rustic community's future. On Sugar Island she hopes to show her daughter Gaia, whose father is an Ottawa Indian, ``people who look like her just living their lives.'' For Stocking, island life is a welcome anachronism, and she records its rhythms lovingly: the daily arrivals and departures at ferry landings; the seasonal wax and wane of the population; and the distinctions that separate natives from outsiders and the islands themselves from the mainland. A constant is the author's own introspection, an earnest self-examination that only seldom wears thin as she interweaves personal history with more far-reaching questions about society, fate, democracy, morality, and the nature of God and the universe. Stocking's sharp descriptions of the natural world help ground these abstractions, and her enthusiasm for travel and for the lives of strangers enlivens a richly detailed narrative. (Illustrations by Mary Harney, not seen) -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

Stocking's first collection of personal essays, Letters from the Leelanau , proved her an exceptional observer of our last primitive human impulses. Michigan's sparsely populated LeelanauPeninsula, where the author has lived most of her life, served as a metaphor for such remaining vestiges as our need to escape to simplicity. In her second collection of personal narratives, Stocking broadens her exploration to how a people and a place coexist while also broadening her geographical purview to all of Michigan--"as an attempt to get beyond what's known into something or someplace that will shift perspective." The result is 21 lucid essays that tightly weave together nature, spirituality and humanity's connection to each. Some, like "The Deer," lament our ever-dwindling wildlife populations; others, like "Michigan's Oldest Living Synagogue," attempt to put religion and nature into perspective. "Tent Ladies" chronicles the bravery of single mothers who live illegally with their children in tents to avoid rent and welfare, while in "Ann Arbor Again," Stocking takes inventory of the college town and finds a changed world from her college days. Stocking's explorations uncover a world that for all of its confusion and irony always holds some hope.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN REGIONAL
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0472065165
• ISBN 13: 9780472065165
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 246