Featured Selections

70% Water

by Rob Ganson
Poetry/Local Interest
Little Big Bay, LLC
Paperback, 242 pages
$15.95

70% Water is a book in the tradition of the activist-poet - the spoken word advocate. While encompassing the human condition; the inner workings of the poet-citizen; nature; even love; it also paints a picture of an area under attack by mining interests and corrupt politicians. The Penokee Hills sit atop the great divide in far Northern Wisconsin. Its watershed feeds streams and rivers that feed Lake Superior, and an aquifer that supplies pure drinking water. More than anything, this book is about the efforts of a wordslinger to save that water; to protect Native Americans living downstream; and to safeguard 10% of the planet's fresh water.

Ways of Going Home

by Alejandro Zambra
General Fiction
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Hardcover, 160 pages
$23.00

At first blush this is a slight book – just 5” x 9” and 160 pages of fairly loose type. But deeper within it is the haunting story of the Pinochet legacy upon the generation of Chileans who were children or yet unborn (as in the case of Zambra) on September 11, 1973. Its four chapters swing back and forth between the “story” and the life of the author writing it. The boy is a 9-year-old living under the dictatorship with his family in a 1980’s suburb of Santiago. He is drawn into a mysterious intrigue by a 12-year-old girl with whom he has become infatuated. The novelist appears in the second chapter and, curiously, his life bears uncanny resemblance to that of the fictional boy. The stories wind themselves around each other and fuse until it is difficult to see where one begins and the other ends. Fundamental is the novelist’s point that, at the deepest level, revision is inherent in every description of one’s past. “That’s why we lie so much in the end," he says.

The Wildwood Chronicles

by Colin Meloy
Middle Readers
Balzer + Bray
Hardcover, 592 pages
$17.99

Are your middle readers looking for another series to hold their attention? Author Colin Meloy, in collaboration with illustrator Carson Ellis, have created a trilogy to be enjoyed by all ages!

Prue McKeel is keeping out of trouble. Or trying to. Then her baby brother is abducted by crows and hauled off to the woods beyond the city. It is up to Prue to bring him back. On her mission she is plunged into the world of Wildwood and there she meets more trouble - and magic - than she ever thought possible.

This adventurous trilogy, set in modern day Portland, begins with Wildwood, and Under Wildwood. Wildwood Imperium is the third and final installment.

We Need New Names

by NoViolet Bulwayo
General Fiction
Reagan Arthur Books
Hardcover, 304 pages
$25.00

NoViolet Bulawayo grew up in Zimbabwe and emigrated to the US at 18 to study law. The photo image of a child sitting atop the rubble of his bull-dozed home in her home country changed her mind and this debut novel is the result. The story is told from the perspective of a ten-year-old girl “Darling” who roams her corner of Zimbabwe with her posse of Bastard, Chipo, Godknows, Sbho and Stina stirring-up adventures each of which is a metaphor for the condition of her failing country under the rule of the aging Robert Mugabe. The writing is lyrical and captivating as Darling then finds herself an immigrant in “Destroyedmichygen” with a new posse of Nigerian and African-American girlfriends. Widely praised and prized, the book was shortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize.

Brown Dog

by Jim Harrison
Short Stories/Anthologies
Grove Press
Hardcover, 448 pages
$27.00

Summer in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (the “UP”) has been described as “three months of bad sledding." Brown Dog, “BD”, a bawdy, free-spirited, down-on-his-luck, maybe Native American lives there and is the protagonist of six novellas (one newly published here) that Harrison has written over the years. Harrison came from just south of that country and grew up there in Hemingwayesque style. In Harrison’s hands, BD becomes an everyman stuck in the grind, but defiantly alive and profane. His first caper is the discovery, deep in Lake Superior, of the perfectly preserved body of an Indian that he fantasizes might be that the father he never knew. He measures every expense by its equivalent in six-packs, but he spends his life trying in his way to keep himself and his family safe, sheltered, warm and fed. There’s a rough charm to it and it’s not for everybody, but Harrison fans are a special breed.

The Monuments Men

by Robert M. Edsel
History
Center Street
Paperback, 512 pages
$16.99

The movie is pedestrian at best, but the book is quite good. While the story needed to be told neither the book nor the movie knock it out of the park.  But, what a great untold story it is!  The bottom line is that the Nazis (and Hitler himself and his pal Goering), in addition to their well-known atrocities, were common, vulgar thieves on a vast scale.
 
Grand Theft Art! Trainload after trainload left France filled with the art objects stolen from the Jewish aristocracy of Paris, the patrimony of the French state, and churches throughout Western Europe. The movie concentrated on this sexier element of the story and the eclectic unit of the Allied forces that was tasked to find and return the treasure.
 
 An equally or, perhaps, more interesting, task for the Monuments Men was the safeguarding of historic artifacts – churches, monuments, buildings and so on – in the heat of battle as the allies moved across Europe and into Germany. The trade-offs between the military exigencies and the cultural objectives create interesting tensions and tricky decision-making stories. Lives or art?  Definitely worth reading.

Stillwater

by Nicole Helget
General Fiction
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Hardcover, 336 pages
$24.00

Clement and Angel are fraternal twins separated at birth; they grow up in the same small, frontier logging town of Stillwater, Minnesota. Clement was left at the orphanage. Angel was adopted by the town’s richest couple, but is marked and threatened by her mother’s mental illness. They rarely meet, but Clement knows if he is truly in need, Angel will come to save him.

Stillwater reveals the hardscrabble lives of pioneers, nuns, native women, fur trappers, loggers, runaway slaves and freedmen, outlaws and people of conscience, all seeking a better, freer, more prosperous future. It is a novel about mothers, about siblings, about the ways in which we must take care of one another and let go of one another. And it’s brought to us in Nicole Helget’s winning, gorgeous prose.

How to Babysit a Grandma

by Jean Reagan
Childrens
Knopf Books for Young Readers
Harcover, 32 pages
$16.99

This wonderful book has been long awaited by our customers who loved How to Babysit a Grandpa.

A young girl heads over to her grandma's house for a sleepover babysitting session with the child providing clear and humorous instructions to readers on how to care for a grandma. The to-do list contains many choices for Grandma to select from, including a walk to the park, reading, taking photos, playing dress-up, and adding sugary sprinkles to her meal items. The child wisely allows plenty of time for Grandma to look at the pages while reading a book, peek at the stars, and choose the best spot to sleep. Any grown-up who has calmly been the object of a child's flights of fancy will chuckle at the scenarios, as Grandma, never mugging or rolling her eyes, participates fully and patiently in all of her granddaughter's ideas.

Shotgun Lovesongs

by Nickolas Butler
General Fiction/Regional
Thomas Dunne Books
Hardcover, 320 pages
$25.99

It's no secret that we at Apostle Islands Booksellers are huge fans of Peter Geye and his novels, The Lighthouse Road and Safe From the Sea. Peter has recommended many titles to us and has never steered us wrong. He recently wrote the following review in the Minneapolis Star Tribune for Shotgun Lovesongs by Wisconsin author Nickolas Butler:

"We all have them, right? Those songs that indelibly mark the milestones in our lives? Songs that stir up our deepest feelings and remind us of who we are: the anthems of our youth, our wedding songs, the old classics that are as much a part of our lives as our feet beneath us. It’s what makes music so powerful, the head and the heart and the gut all working in concert.

Only the best, most emotionally resonant novels work in the same way. Nickolas Butler’s Shotgun Lovesongs is one of those novels. In prose that is as plain-spoken and honest as a Midwestern farmer, he tells the story of five friends and lovers in the fictional Little Wing, Wis." (read full article here)

We can't wait to read it, and look forward to Peter's next recommendations!

Lawrence in Arabia

by Scott Anderson
History
Doubleday
Hardcover, 592 pages
$28.95

Well, we’re now one hundred years down the road from those fateful days of August, 1914. The stories have been told and retold and will be again come summer. One of the best is that of Thomas Edward Lawrence – T.E. Lawrence. Most of us know him as Peter O’Toole who played the role in the 1962 movie Lawrence of Arabia. There he is portrayed as a swashbuckling romantic leading the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Turks.
 
Here we go not only deeper into the man, but deeper into the context as well. Lawrence’s story is woven together with that of three other characters on the scene – Curt Prufer, a German spy conspiring to drive the British out of Palestine; Aaron Aaronsohn, a Jewish agronomist immigrant in Palestine; and, William Yale, an American aristocrat working for Standard Oil and occasionally the Department of State. Together they mix the Middle Eastern pot seasoned with the meddling of a variety of foreign-based others and the more sympathetic locals such as the then Prince Faisal.
 

Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin

by Bruce Chatwin
Memoirs
Penguin Books
Paperback
$20.00

Bruce Chatwin was an enormously complicated man and, as these letters reveal, not terribly likable. He was pretty much A.D.D. in terms of relationships and a serial back-biter regarding friends and foes alike. None of this takes away from the fascination of this chronicle of letters that date from his boarding school days up until just before his death at 48 years old. His best known works – In Patagonia and The Songlines - remain the standard for what is commonly known as “travel writing,” but for him the conventional boundaries of the genre are way too confining. His correspondence helps put his work in context as well as reveals the mind behind the pages of the books. His wife Elizabeth (with Nicholas Shakespeare) selected and edited the letters and provides a running footnote commentary that is, at times, interesting, but, at others, simply catty.

Discovering the Penokees

by Joel Austin
Sustainability
Paperback
$28.95

No issue touches our region so deeply as the potential permanent scarring of the magnificent Penokee Hills that stretch across Ashland and Iron Counties. They hover gracefully above the Kakagon Bad River Sloughs – some 16,000 acres of wild rice, grasses, sedges, trees, streams, and open water along Lake Superior’s southern shore. The threat is the proposed open pit iron mine 22 miles long, one-half mile wide and nearly 1000 feet deep cut through the heart of this unique and special place. While the splendid photos say all that needs to be said, the accompanying text from a variety of writers from Mike Wiggins, Jr. (Chair of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe) to Bill Heart (past Chair of the Wisconsin Council of Trout Unlimited) tells the story of the Penokees in graphic and loving terms. We recently visited the Chuquicamata open pit copper mine in the Atacama Desert in Chile. While the devastation of the pit itself is impressive, the most telling image is that of the abandoned city of Chuquicamata itself. It once had a bustling population of 25,000 people. 25,000! Now it is a ghost town. The last resident left in 2008 driven out by the effects of the still operating mine. Not here!

Apocalyptic Planet

by Craig Childs
Sustainability
Vintage Press
Paperback, 368 pages
$16.95

Apocalyptic Planet is a combination of science and adventure that reveals the ways in which our world is constantly moving toward its end and how we can change our place within the cycles and episodes that rule it. In this riveting narrative, Childs makes clear that ours is not a stable planet, that it is prone to sudden, violent natural disasters and extremes of climate. Childs refutes the idea of an apocalyptic end to the earth and finds clues to its more inevitable end in some of the most physically challenging places on the globe.

The Invention of Wings

by Sue Monk Kidd
General Fiction
Viking Adult
Hardcover, 384 pages
$27.95

In simple terms, this book is the fictionalized history of the Grimké sisters, Sarah and Angelina (Nina), who were at the forefront of the abolitionist and women's rights movements, wound around the narrative of a young slave, Hetty, who was given to Sarah as an 11th birthday present. Sarah despises slavery, even at that early age, and out of principle attempts to reject the gift.

Much of the Grimkés' story is historically based: Kidd has fleshed out mountains of research — facts, figures, dates, letters, and articles — into a believable and elegantly rendered fictional first person account of Sarah's life.

This book asks some very poignant questions. What does it mean to be a sister, a friend, a woman, an outcast, a slave? How do we use our talents to better ourselves and our world? How do we give voice to our power, or learn to empower our voice?

Cub's Big World

by Sara L. Thomson
Children's
HMH Books
Hardcover, 32 pages
$16.99

One day, Mom and Cub venture out of their den, and amid all the wonders Cub realizes how easy it is to lose Mom. Even the one thing that makes Mom stand out in a “white, white world”—the black of her nose—can’t be counted on: ermine have black tails, and seals have black noses. Illustrator Joe Cepeda continually reveals the landscape from different angles and with surprising colors; in the seal vignette, he looks up at Cub as she peeks through a hole in the ice into the green-blue water below. Thomson’s calm voice makes it clear that Mom’s absence is only temporary, so readers can snuggle up and relish this big polar world, gorgeously imagined.

Unknown Patagonia: Chile’s Secret South

by Linde Waidhofer
Travel
Western Eye Press

This is a jaw-dropping visual exploration of a precious and unspoiled part of the world – the Central Chilean Patagonia, the Patagonia that no one knows. Waidhofer’s photographs are stunning and document a land threatened by mega-dam projects on the emerald green Rio Baker and other pristine glacial rivers and valleys. The book has been a key element in the so far successful grassroots and top echelon effort to stave-off the development of the hydroelectric complex. Because it is so important to tell the story of this special place, Waidhofer is distributing the eBook version completely free from her website. A beautiful, large-format coffee table book, with an original signed archival photo print from the book, is also available.

The Luminaries

by Eleanor Catton
General Fiction
Little Brown & Company
Hardcover, 848 pages
$27.00

Twelve men meet at the Crown Hotel in Hokitika, New Zealand, in January, 1866. A thirteenth, Walter Moody, an educated man from Edinburgh who has come here to find his fortune in gold, walks in. As it unfolds, the interlocking stories and shifting narrative perspectives of the twelve--now thirteen--men bring forth a mystery that all are trying to solve, including Walter Moody, who has just gotten off the Godspeed ship with secrets of his own that intertwine with the others' concerns. Primarily, The Luminaries is an action-adventure, sprawling detective story, superbly plotted, where the Crown Hotel men try to solve it, while sharing secrets and shame of their own.

The layout of the book is stellar: the spheres of the skies and its astrological charts. One doesn't need to understand the principles and mathematics of astrology, but it is evident that knowledge of this pseudoscience would add to the reading experience, as it provides the structure and frame of the book. The characters' traits can be found in their individual sun signs (such as the duality of a Gemini). The drawings of charts add to the mood, and the chapters get successively shorter after the long Crown chapter. The cover of the book illustrates the phases of the moon, from full moon to sliver, alluding to the waning narrative lengths as the story progresses.

Author Eleanor Catton is only 28 years old and has just won the 2013 Man Booker Prize for this masterfully told story! At over 800 pages, this is a hefty read, but Catton's descriptions and characters are bound to hold your attention.

Packers Pride

by Leroy Butler
Sports
Triumph Books
Hardcover, 352 pages
$25.95

LeRoy Butler invented the Lambeau Leap! ‘Nuf said! He played defensive back for the Pack for twelve years and was named to four Pro-Bowls as well as the NFL’s 1990’s All-Decade Team. Reischel has covered the Packers for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel since 2001 and has written several books on the team. This book is a compilation of short pieces sharing the stories of several dozen players, coaches and executives who have been key figures for the team over the years. Great for the bedside as there is no particular order or sequence and you can dive in anywhere for a few minutes and relive some great memories. There is a touching Foreward by Packer great Willie Davis. Nice, upbeat book!

Countdown

by Alan Weisman
Sustainability
Little, Brown & Co.
Hardcover, 528 pages
$28.00

Ah…denial! That favorite comfort zone of humankind! Weisman makes it hard to stay there with this no-punches-pulled examination of the state and apparent future of our habitat. Overpopulation and overconsumption provide the deadly synergy of this meticulously researched survey of our prospects. In a way it is a “prequel” to his fascinating best seller, The World Without Us, which describes the likely aftermath of the disappearance of homo sapiens from the earth and the fate of the works and detritus that we leave behind. His fieldwork takes us from Palestine to the Great Wall and from Utah to Teheran and beyond where he interviews and travels with experts, activists and the local populace. He got the chops of his reverence for nature here in the Great Lakes region and his hometown of Minneapolis. Compelling. Sobering.

Soup & Bread Cookbook

by Beatrice Ojakangas
Food/Cooking
Rodale Books
Paperback, 320 pages
$23.99

Beatrice Ojakangas has written some of the most popular midwest cookbooks out there. The Soup & Bread Cookbook is no exception! This broad collection of soups, broths, bisques, and chowders ranges from summer coolers and hearty, warming stews to smooth, creamy soups and fiery broths. And the bread recipes alone could fill a cookbook. Loaves, buns, sticks, and flatbreads are just a few. Organized by season and complemented by stunning photographs, this is ideal for anyone who takes comfort in the essential pleasures of a bowl of soup and warm bread.
 

The Goldfinch

by Donna Tartt
General Fiction
Little Brown & Co.
Hardcover, 784 pages
$30.00

We love an author who takes time and care to perfect her art. Donna Tartt roared onto the literary scene in 1992 with her internationally bestselling psychological thriller The Secret History. While her plot and characters were compelling, elegantly drawn and deeply textured, it was her absolutely stunning use of the English language that thrilled many readers. An agonizingly long 11 years later she published her second novel, The Little Friend, which turned out to be a disappointment to many. Quel dommage! How could this happen to such a gifted writer? Now, ten years later, Tartt has brought us The Goldfinch.  With great relief, we can say that the Donna Tartt, who wrote The Secret History, has been returned to earth by the aliens who had abducted her. Described by many as Dickensian, The Goldfinch is a masterful, sprawling, character-driven drama. Tartt’s uncanny ability with language is evident throughout in her settings, descriptions, characters and insights. She manages to make even the most mundane activities interesting and alive in the reader’s mind. We are happy to wait as long as it takes for her next book!

Gigi and Her Girl

by Kathy Brandt
Children's
Hardcover, 32 pages
$16.99

Those who have visited our store and fallen in love with our miniature husky, Kia, will fall in love with this book. Inspired by the real life antics of the author’s daughter and her beloved dog, Gigi, the story is told from the alternating points-of-view of the little girl and her dog. They don’t quite see things the same way! Ay, there’s the rub! The author has also done the beautiful illustrations that accompany the rhyming text.