Here is yet another list of great Midwest reads I've come across in recent months:
- A Woman Like Me by Bettye LaVette-Born in Muskegon, Michigan, LaVette's early promise as a soul star quickly dissolved after a series bad breaks left her struggling to find an audience...or to even get an album made. A recent video of a performance of the Who's "Reign o'r Me" at The Kennedy Center's awards show, which moved Roger Daltry and Pete Townsend to tears, went viral online setting the stage for the singer's amazing late-life career comeback. LaVette's story, told in her uniquely celebratory and slightly profane voice, is a great read for music fans and those who appreciate seeing a never-say-die spirit triumph.
- Forgotten Landmarks of Detroit by Dan Austin-Austin's tales of some of the city's great landmarks lost to time and neglect is a follow up
to his Lost Detroit book. The mostly long-gone structures in this book live on in vintage photos, veteran Detroiter's memories and the tales Austin shares with readers. Seeing photos of places like Detroit's Old City Hall, the City of Detroit III steamship and the Graystone Ballroom is a grim reminder of the treasures we've lost to time and a reminder to treasure the many magnificent architectural gems that still exist in the city.
- Revolution Detroit: Strategies for Urban Reinvention by John Gallagher-This is a follow up to Detroit journalist Gallagher's Reimagining Detroit. The book further explores Detroit as a shrinking city and possible strategies for moving ahead within that new reality for Detroit by sharing examples of the success of other troubled cities here and abroad. Among the ideas Gallagher champions are encouraging urban gardening on a commercial scale (after seeing some success with community urban gardens in building community, feeding people and fighting blight and crime) and viewing currently blighted and vacant land as an asset, rather than a liability.
- Me, the Mob and the Music: One Helluva Ride with Tommy James and the Shondells by Tommy James with Martin Fitzpatrick-Tommy James shares the tale of his roller coaster ride from the Midwest to fame with Roulette Records
(with 1960s hits like Mony Mony, I Think We're Alone Now and Crimson and
Clover) and witnessing the label's executives' fall from grace in a hailstorm of
arrests for multiple FBI charges of scams and tax evasion. The effect of the
record execs woes on James' career was complicated and catastrophic in many
ways, but this is the tale of an industry survivor who signed on with the label
as a naive teenager born in Ohio and living in west Michigan at the time, rose
to fame and lived to tell the story.
- Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson-Anderson's classic is a loosely connected collection of stories largely following the life of writer George Willard and other residents during the early 1900s in small-town Ohio. The book, first published in 1919, landed on more than a few banned book lists for its candor in depicting pre- and extra-marital sex. I found it slow-moving and depressing picture of too many people saddled with unfulfilled dreams and wasted
potential. Women especially seemed to lead sad, stunted or shattered lives
while living in unhappy marriages or spending their lives pining for someone
who dumped them long ago. Anderson based his tales on his memories of growing
up in Clyde, Ohio and on friends he knew as a young man while living in a cheap
Chicago boarding house and writing his first novels.
- Color Blind: The Forgotten Team that Broke Baseball's Color
Line by Tom Dunkel-This is the meticulously researched story of a semi-pro
baseball team fielded by a Bismarck, North Dakota car dealer named Neil Churchill
during the 1930s. Churchill wanted the best players for his team and recruited
a good number of stars from the Negro Leagues banned from playing for the strictly
segregated major leagues at that time. African American baseball stars like Satchel
Paige, Quincy Troupe, Ted "Double Duty" Radcliffe and Hilton Smith played for Bismarck, and Dunkel's account makes the reader wonder if Major League baseball might differ had these players if the majors allowed them to play. The Bismarck team folded near the end of the Great Depression and about a decade before Jackie Robinson's Major League debut as the league's first African American player in the modern era (although a few baseball players like Moses Fleetwood Walker played for Major League teams in the very late 1800s).
- Rocket Girl: The Story of Mary Sherman Morgan, America's First Female Rocket Scientist by George D. Morgan-Mary Sherman Morgan developed the chemical cocktail to propel the United States' first rocket, the Explorer I satellite, into space. Born into an impoverished North Dakota family, Mary struggled to be able to attend school as a young girl and immediately left home after her high school graduation at age 19 to attend college. Lack of money to continue school forced her to accept a job offer to work testing explosives for a chemical company near Sandusky, Ohio during World War II. Mary lost her job at the end of the war and she next landed a job as a chemical analyst for a California aviation company. Even as the only woman working on the engineering
floor, and one of few without a college degree, her reputation for brilliance as
an analyst led to a her appointment to work on a top secret and top-priority rocket
project in the wake of the Russian launch of Sputnik. Mary's son George found his
mother's story obscured by a shroud of security and her own reluctance to share
the story with her children or anyone else. He takes some literary license in
this work and shares the fact that conversations, names and some events in the
book are re-creations. I still think he succeeded in sharing the gist of his
mother's fascinating life story and saving the story of this space pioneer from
complete obscurity.
© Dominique King 2013 All rights reserved
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