The long awaited new edition of a classic offers memories, myths, and meanings of the largest contiguous piece of wild land in Michigan's Lower Peninsula.
This updated edition explores more deeply why and how the outdoors moves and compels us. It’s a book about mice who sing, elk who wear collars, deer who kiss, and birds who could dictate their compositions to Mozart. It's about the human species interacting in generous and sometimes misguided ways with the rest of life. It's about men trying to ripen pinecones into pineapples and women taking better aim with a revolver than expected. It's about poetry—from Mary Oliver, Lao Tzu, and Theodore Roethke—and seeing hawks dive in a night sky or feeling oil geologists shake the earth below. It's about finding fish dead in the river by the thousands and crouching behind a stump to watch beaver build a dwelling. While this book considers life beyond the boundaries of Pigeon River Country, it is steeped in the specifics of a place that lives mostly on its own, instead of human, terms.
The Pigeon River Country is a remote northern forest, ecologically distinct from most of the United States. Laced with waterways, it has a storied past. Dale Clarke Franz has collected personal accounts from various people intrigued with the Pigeon River Country—including loggers, conservationists, mill workers, campers, even the young Ernest Hemingway, who said he loved the forest "better than anything in the world." There are comprehensive discussions of the area's flora and fauna, guides to trails and camping sites, and photos showcasing the changing face of this hidden national treasure.

Pigeon River Country: A Michigan Forest

Franz, Dale Clarke

Travel

University of Michigan Press/Regional

An intimate look at Michigan's scenic, trout-filled Pere Marquette River and the larger resource-management challenges it represents

Cold Running River

History

Cassuto, David Nathan

Americas

Never before has the case been more compellingly made that America’s dependence on a free and abundant water supply has become an illusion. Cynthia Barnett does it by telling us the stories of the amazing personalities behind our water wars, the stunning contradictions that allow the wettest state to have the most watered lawns, and the thorough research that makes her conclusions inescapable. Barnett has established herself as one of Florida’s best journalists and Mirage is a must-read for anyone who cares about the future of the state.”
Mary Ellen Klas, Capital Bureau Chief, Miami Herald
Mirage is the finest general study to date of the freshwater-supply crisis in Florida. Well-meaning villains abound in Cynthia Barnett’s story, but so too do heroes, such as Arthur R. Marshall Jr., Nathaniel Reed, and Marjorie Harris Carr. The author’s research is as thorough as her prose is graceful. Drinking water is the new oil. Get used to it.”
Michael Gannon, Distinguished Professor of history, University of Florida, and author of Florida: A Short History
With lively prose and a journalist’s eye for a good story, Cynthia Barnett offers a sobering account of water scarcity problems facing Floridaone of our wettest statesand the rest of the East Coast. Drawing on lessons learned from the American West, Mirage uses the lens of cultural attitudes about water use and misuse to plead for reform. Sure to engage and fascinate as it informs.”
Robert Glennon, Morris K. Udall Professor of Law and Public Policy, University of Arizona, and author of Water Follies: Groundwater Pumping and the Fate of America’s Fresh Waters
Part investigative journalism, part environmental history, Mirage reveals how the eastern half of the nationhistorically so wet that early settlers predicted it would never even need irrigationhas squandered so much of its abundant freshwater that it now faces shortages and conflicts once unique to the arid West.
Florida’s parched swamps and supersized residential developments set the stage in the first book to call attention to the steady disappearance of freshwater in the American East, from water-diversion threats in the Great Lakes to tapped-out freshwater aquifers along the Atlantic seaboard.
Told through a colorful cast of characters including Walt Disney, Jeb Bush and Texas oilman Boone Pickens, Mirage ferries the reader through the key water-supply issues facing America and the globe: water wars, the politics of development, inequities in the price of water, the bottled-water industry, privatization, and new-water-supply schemes.
From its calamitous opening scene of a sinkhole swallowing a house in Florida to its concluding meditation on the relationship between water and the American character, Mirage is a compelling and timely portrait of the use and abuse of freshwater in an era of rapidly vanishing natural resources.

Mirage: Florida and the Vanishing Water of the Eastern U.S.

Barnett, Cynthia

Lives and Legends of the Christmas Tree Ships brings the maritime heritage of the Great Lakes to life, using the tragic story of the schooner Rouse Simmons as a porthole into the robust but often forgotten communities that thrived along Lake Michigan from the Civil War to World War I. 
Memorialized in songs, poems, fiction, and even a musical, the infamous ship that went down in a Thanksgiving storm while delivering Christmas trees to Chicago has long been shrouded in myth and legend. As a result, the larger story of the captain, crew, and affected communities has often been overlooked. Fred Neuschel delves into this everyday life of camaraderie, drudgery, ambition, and adventure―with tales of the Midwest’s burgeoning immigrant groups and rapid industrialization―to create a true story that is even more fascinating than the celebrated legends.

Lives and Legends of the Christmas Tree Ships

Neuschel, Frederick H.

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the University of Michigan Press/Regional publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by University of Michigan Press/Regional

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the University of Michigan Press/Regional publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Pigeon River Country: A Michigan Forest

Cold Running River

Mirage: Florida and the Vanishing Water of the Eastern U.S.

Lives and Legends of the Christmas Tree Ships