May 3, 2010

Book 21: The Living Great Lakes

The Living Great Lakes: Searching for the Heart of the Inland Seas
Jerry Dennis

As I will shortly be leaving for Ireland, I decided to read about a subject very close to home: HOMES, or the Great Lakes. Though told with a somewhat uneasy combination of science, memoir, and history, The Living Great Lakes presents a loving homage to some of the planet's most astonishing (and perhaps under-appreciated) natural features. I remember once asking my mom why, if Lake Michigan was indeed a lake, I couldn't see Wisconsin from Grand Haven; she replied that the lake is almost as wide as Indiana. It's impossible to think of these lakes in any traditional framework, a fact that Dennis makes clear time and again throughout the book, particularly when he elicits the opinions of long-time oceangoing sailors who hadn't been on the Great Lakes before- the hardened salts are uniformly amazed at the power of these inland bodies. Dennis recounts these and other facts with a gushing sense of pride that borders between sincerity and self-aggrandizement; he is guilty of the latter particularly when mentioning time and again his lifelong credentials from living near the lake. It is, however, clear that the book is a labor of love, and his feelings for the lakes and the environment drive the book and serve to connect its sometimes straining threads of narrative.

The heart of the book is the oft-interrupted story of a journey from Traverse City to Maine, through the bottom four lakes, the Erie canal, and the Atlantic Ocean aboard a sailing ship. This story itself is fascinating, though non-sailors would benefit from a small glossary of jargon that is alternately defined condescendingly within the text or left ambiguous for non-sailors. Unfortunately, this narrative becomes increasingly tired as the text wears on, penetrated more often and for longer periods by side narratives that often appear out of nowhere and bear no discernible relation to the narrative framing it. Each chapter is at its head divided into constituent parts (a la Democracy in America), but within the text itself these divisions are ambiguous and often confusing, as they leap back and forth in time without a discernible anchor. Aside from a few uninteresting asides (particularly the repetitive environmental studies, which certainly have their place but are presented in a disjointed manner that makes Dennis come across as annoying), background information and even unrelated stories from Dennis's own experiences intersect well with the main sailing story and do provide a comprehensive, multi-layered view of the Great Lakes region.

The strength of The Living Great Lakes is its scope, as Dennis as narrator/memoirist eventually becomes tiresome. His forays into the geological, economic, political, and environmental history of the Great Lakes may not always be well integrated, but combine well to make the book an excellent introduction/love song to the area. Passion shines through every word of this book, for both better and worse, and the book is enjoyable for its thoughtfulness and for the very earnestness that sometimes sinks the prose under its own weight. Particularly informative are early chapters on Lakes Michigan and Superior, those with which Dennis is most familiar and whose identities are most strongly connected with Michigan. Historical asides on explorers such as La Salle and tributes to the many victims of intricately described weather patterns (such as the famous Edmund Fitzgerald) find a home amidst personal narrative, scientific exploration, and political pronouncement. The voyage of The Living Great Lakes can get a bit bumpy with a lack of clear transitions and some repetitive content, but it is nonetheless a moving testament to these powerful bodies of water that so thoroughly define the land and people they touch.

Grade: B+

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