|
|
|
|
|
|
Greetings!
Ah! Nature! She’s been a bitter partner so far this winter – deep snow and even deeper temperatures for six weeks and more. Feels like the old days. Hey! This climate change thing must surely be a hoax! But, before we get too comfortable with that notion, let’s listen to Craig Childs whose book, Apocalyptic Planet, won Northland College’s 2013 Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award. Craig will be with us in Ashland on January 30th to receive the award and will speak to the sweeping and perilous challenges facing the planet and the prospects for the survival of humanity on it. Don’t miss this: January 30th at 7:00pm, Sigurd Olson Environmental Institute, Northland College, Ashland.
We can’t whine too much about the weather since we bailed on it in mid-December for a month in Central Chilean Patagonia where summer (such as it is there!) reigned. We spent time with Doug and Kris Tompkins who have privately acquired and conserved over two million acres of magnificent wilderness terrain in southern Chile and Argentina converting it to national parks. See their website for more information. Together with their other related conservation and advocacy projects, it is clear that they reside in the absolute top tier globally of private individuals in terms of efforts to preserve threatened wild lands. We were in the Chacabuco Valley (site of the new Patagonia National Park) which lies 5-6 hours south of the closest airport (Balmaceda, Chile) on rough, mountainous, sometimes harrowing one-lane dirt roads.
And then we get back to Bayfield and - Wow! After five years of unstable ice, the cold spell has opened access to the incredible mainland ice caves of the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore. The caves are reached from Meyer’s Beach landing about three miles east of Cornucopia and require a one-mile hike across the ice of Mawikwe Bay. This is perhaps the most unique and awe-inspiring feature of the park and last weekend attracted over one thousand visitors. It was the largest single visitor count in the park’s history – summer or winter! So, best to come on a week day. Access has been facilitated by The Friends of the Apostle Islands, the Bayfield Chamber of Commerce & Visitor Bureau, and the Town of Bell. There’s a nice section on the ice caves in the definitive Apostles Islands book Jewels on the Water: Lake Superior’s Apostle Islands with text by Jeff Rennicke and photographs by Layne Kennedy. We’ll send you a copy for $24.95 plus 99 cents shipping. Give us a call or just stop in and save the 99 cents!
Thank you all for your loyalty over the past year. We are very, very grateful and it sees us through the winter lull and keeps us open year-round. We wish you a Happy and Prosperous New Year and look forward to seeing you here at Apostle Islands Booksellers.
Remember, if you’ve lost yours, we are your local bookstore!
All of us at AIB
|
|
|
What we're reading...
 Unknown Patagonia: Chile’s Secret South
by Linde Waidhofer
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.
|
|
 Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin
by Bruce Chatwin
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.
|
|
 BahÃa de los Misterios
por Roberto Ampuero
Roberto Ampuero, novelista chileno, es professor en la Universidad de Iowa y entre 2011 y 2013 desempeñó como embajador de Chile en México. Actualmente es Ministro de Cultura de Chile. En su tiempo libre es el autor de un serie de novelas policÃacas en las que figura un detective que se llama Cayetano Brulé. Brulé es un expatriado cubano asentado en el puerto de ValparaÃso. En este episodio, Joe Pembroke, un historiador norteamericano, ha sido asesinado y decapitado mientras estaba de paseo en ValparaÃso. Un año después, su esposa, quien está muriendo de cáncer, quiere saber qué pasó. ¿Fueron narcotraficantes? o ¿fueron sus propios colegas académicos quienes tuvieron miedo de que sus investigaciones socavaran la historia convencional del encuentro entre los nativos del Nuevo Mundo y los europeos? Cayetano Brulé acepta el caso y se embarca en una nueva aventura que va a llevarlo alrededor del mundo en busca de la verdad. (Sorry, not yet translated to English! Try Ampuero’s The Neruda Case and wait for this one!)
|
|
Final Thoughts... 
Apostle Islands Booksellers is a member of the Midwest Independent Booksellers Association (MIBA), and as a member we are fortunate to be a part of a diverse network where we will hear about titles that might otherwise be overlooked.
 Books with a regional personality often resonate best with the readers who live there. Midwest Connections gathers some of the best books that have a connection to the Midwest. MIBA selects three titles every month to feature as some of the best books with a connection to the Midwest. We would like to share these titles with you more regularly. Authors such as Micheal Perry, William Kent Krueger, and Peter Geye are just few who have been selected in the past.
 This month’s selections portray three very different relationships to the Midwest. Benjamin Percy, author of the thrilling and bestselling Red Moon, came to the region only recently and now calls it home. Kent Nerburn, author of The Girl Who Sang to the Buffalo, has been writing about the Native American diaspora of the Midwest for more than fifteen years.
 And Laurie Lowenstein, author of Unmentionables, is a native Midwesterner who re-imagines the events that spawned the women’s rights movement in the Midwest, helping to make our region the place it is today. These three paperbacks celebrate the many and varied voices that contribute to enriching the Midwest.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
