Reviews
New York Times “A dictionary wrapped in some serious dialectology inside a gift book trailing a serious whiff of Relevance.” Lansing City Pulse “A delightful romp through the dialects and vocabulary of the region.” Inside Hook “In his delightful new book, Edward McClelland argues that the dialect of the Midwest is one of the country’s most linguistically . . .
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Reviews
Jordan Michael Smith, Christian Science Monitor “With Young Mr. Obama, Edward McClelland finishes what The Bridgestarted, showing how Obama navigated Chicago political life, which can be as rough as a Blackhawks game… McClelland’s book is long on reporting and narrative, and short on meditation and analysis – for which readers can be thankful…. For the . . .
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Reviews
June Sawyers, Chicago Tribune Ted McClelland, who hails from Michigan, makes no bones about it. He doesn’t particularly care about state, provincial or, for that matter, national boundaries. To him, the North is a state of mind, and it is the Great Lakes region that fuels his imagination. In spring 2005 he began his almost . . .
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Excerpt
Chapter Twelve: A Long Way From A Long Way From Anywhere Isle Royale is a long way from a long way from anywhere. To catch the once-a-day ferry to the dolphin-shaped island in the northwestern corner of Lake Superior, you have to drive to Copper Harbor, the northernmost village in the U.P. It lies at . . .
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Excerpt
Chapter 1: The Sit-Down Striker The Flint Sit-Down Strike, which lasted from Dec. 30, 1936 to Feb. 11, 1937, was to the American labor movement what Lexington and Concord was to the American Revolution. At Lexington, a gang of farmers stood up to the British Empire, the most powerful nation in the world. They lost . . .
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Michael Dirda, Washington Post “Nothin’ but Blue Skies” is structured as a series of reports from the field, detailing how Detroit fell into urban decay, drugs and bankruptcy; how Cleveland became “the Mistake on the Lake”; how Buffalo has struggled since the St. Lawrence Seaway took away much of its water traffic; and how Chicago’s . . .
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Excerpt
Chapter 7: The First Campaign A sex scandal created the opening Barack Obama needed to get into politics. Chicagoans are used to seeing their politicians misbehave, but usually the transgressions involve a lust for money. A secretary of state is found dead in his Springfield hotel room, alone except for $900,000 in kickbacks, stuffed into . . .
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