We are the Central Minnesota Libraries Exchange, a multitype system serving all types of libraries. I’m Angie/Mary. We are here to help you find new books, for yourself or for your library.

This season we are moving through the state of Minnesota, looking at an interesting fact about each county and giving you a book prompt from that fact. We will share six book suggestions to meet that prompt, to get you started on reading new books. You can also take that prompt and find any other book to meet the challenge!

This week we admire Itasca County. Our prompt comes from Lake Itasca, source of the Mississippi River. We suggest you celebrate by reading a book with someone who visits the Mississippi River!

We give you links to each of these books on our show notes page, taking you to Amazon.com. If you click on any of them, and buy anything at all – including a nice book – Amazon will send us a small percent of the profits they made on these sales. Thank you for supporting CMLE!

Bayou Magic by Jewell Parker Rhodes

A magical coming-of-age story from Coretta Scott King honor author Jewell Parker Rhodes, rich with Southern folklore, friendship, family, fireflies and mermaids, plus an environmental twist.

It’s city-girl Maddy’s first summer in the bayou, and she just falls in love with her new surroundings – the glimmering fireflies, the glorious landscape, and something else, deep within the water, that only she can see. Could it be a mermaid? As her grandmother shares wisdom about sayings and signs, Maddy realizes she may be the only sibling to carry on her family’s magical legacy. And when a disastrous oil leak threatens the bayou, she knows she may also be the only one who can help. Does she have what it takes to be a hero? Jewell Parker Rhodes weaves a rich tale celebrating the magic within.

Dead Water: The Klindt Affair by Pat Gipple and Matthew Clemens
The wife of a prominent chiropractor is missing. A month later a woman’s torso is found floating in the Mississippi River. Can a forensic procedure using genetics prove that the torso and the missing woman are the same person? If so, who killed Joyce Klindt and butchered her with a chain saw? DEAD WATER is a fast-paced thriller of a manhunt and two court trials to catch and convict a brutal killer. The introduction of genetic testing in this case set precedent and actually made law.

Fevre Dream: A Novel by George RR Martin
Abner Marsh, a struggling riverboat captain, suspects that something’s amiss when he is approached by a wealthy aristocrat with a lucrative offer. The hauntingly pale, steely-eyed Joshua York doesn’t care that the icy winter of 1857 has wiped out all but one of Marsh’s dilapidated fleet; nor does he care that he won’t earn back his investment in a decade. York’s reasons for traversing the powerful Mississippi are to be none of Marsh’s concern—no matter how bizarre, arbitrary, or capricious York’s actions may prove. Not until the maiden voyage of Fevre Dream does Marsh realize that he has joined a mission both more sinister, and perhaps more noble, than his most fantastic nightmare—and humankind’s most impossible dream.

Wicked River: The Missisppi When it Last Ran Wild by Lee Sandlin

A riveting narrative look at one of the most colorful, dangerous, and peculiar places in America’s historical landscape: the strange, wonderful, and mysterious Mississippi River of the 19th century.

Beginning in the early 1800s and climaxing with the siege of Vicksburg in 1863, Wicked River brings to life a place where river pirates brushed elbows with future presidents and religious visionaries shared passage with thieves. Here is a minute-by-minute account of Natchez being flattened by a tornado; the St. Louis harbor being crushed by a massive ice floe; hidden, nefarious celebrations of Mardi Gras; and the sinking of the Sultana, the worst naval disaster in American history. Here, too, is the Mississippi itself: gorgeous, perilous, and unpredictable. Masterfully told, Wicked River is an exuberant work of Americana that portrays a forgotten society on the edge of revolutionary change.

 

Island in a Storm: A Rising Sea, a Vanishing Coast, and a Nineteenth-Century Disaster that Warns of a Warmer World by Abby Sallenger
In the mid-nineteenth century, the Isle Derniere was emerging as an exclusive summer resort on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. About one hundred miles from New Orleans, it attracted the most prominent members of antebellum Louisiana society. Hundreds of affluent planters and merchants retreated to the island, not just for its pleasures, but also to escape the scourge of yellow fever epidemics that ravaged cities like New Orleans each summer. Then, without warning, on August 10, 1856, a ferocious hurricane swept across the island, killing half of its four hundred inhabitants. The Isle Derniere was left barren, except for a strange forest standing in the surf.

Drawing from a rich trove of newspaper articles, letters, diaries, and interviews, Abby Sallenger re-creates the chain of events that led a group of people to seek refuge on an exposed strip of land in the sea. He chronicles the dramatic course of the hurricane itself, as seen through the eyes of a diverse cast of real-life characters, including eighteen-year-old Emma Mille, her French father, a steamboat captain, a pastor, and a slave. Island in a Storm is the story of their bravery and cowardice, luck and misfortune, life and death.

At the heart of this narrative lies another, equally compelling, story. Sallenger, an oceanographer, traces the insidious link between the environmental deaths across the Mississippi delta and the human deaths that occurred when the storm swept ashore. The result is a fascinating portrait of a coast in perpetual motion and a rising sea that made the Isle Derniere particularly vulnerable to a great hurricane.

Ultimately, Island in a Storm is a cautionary environmental tale. Global warming is spreading the unique hazards of river deltas to coasts around the world, and the signs of what happened to Isle Derniere may soon be appearing on other islands. The account of this nineteenth-century disaster and its aftermath offers a vital historical lesson as we continue to develop precarious coastal locations whose vulnerability will only grow as sea levels rise across the globe.

Views on the Mississippi: The photographs of Henry Peter Bosse by Mark Neuzil

As mapmaker and photographer for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Henry Peter Bosse (1844-1903) took more than three hundred photographs of the Upper Mississippi River from 1883 to 1893, a time of unprecedented environmental and social change. Now recognized as the leading photographer of his time of the Mississippi, his work was almost unknown until five separate volumes of his photographs were discovered during the past few years. Since then, Bosse’s work has been exhibited at the Smithsonian and other national museums and sold by leading auction houses to private collectors around the world.

Views on the Mississippi brings together for the first time almost one hundred of Bosse’s most stunning images. These photographs-tracing the river from Minneapolis to St. Louis-capture the Mississippi as it was being transformed from an untamed natural wonder to a modern commercial highway. Presenting the wagon and railroad bridges, the towns and villages along the banks, and the steamboats that served them, Bosse’s images depict the river at the fulcrum between the nostalgic era recorded by Mark Twain and the coming century of industrial development and environmental change, including the alterations wrought by the navigation projects of the Army Corps.
Bosse used the cyanotype process, which produced large-format photographs in crisp, vivid blue tones. This volume offers high quality reproduction with new captions providing the location and significance of each image, as well as historical context. Also included here is a detailed reproduction of Bosse’s rare landmark map of the river, first published in 1887-88, giving the reader with a fascinating guide to the historic Upper Mississippi.
Views on the Mississippi is certain to delight and surprise those interested in nineteenth-century America, life on the Mississippi River, the environment, and fine photography everywhere.

CONCLUSION:

Thanks for joining us! We’ll be back next week with a look at the next county and the next book prompt!