Northport World News

  

What does Labor Day mean for you? This year, for me, it means that school will start soon and the mentoring program at Northport will start up again, so I should be reunited with the student I mentored last spring. I look forward to that. Otherwise, it’s time for me to think about fall hours, maybe taking Mondays as well as Sundays as days off. As for the Monday holiday itself, I’ll probably be open, at least for a few hours. Maybe Tuesday will be my holiday. 

Traverse City author Robert Downes has won a book-of-the-year award from the Historical Society of Michigan for his nonfiction book, Raw Deal: The Indians of the Midwest and the Theft of Native Lands. Long ago (but recent enough that I remember it: 1991) Bob Downes and George Foster started the Northern Express, a local weekly covering the local Grand Traverse region scene. When they sold the paper, his partner went back to accounting, and Bob turned to travel and writing. Latest of his books, Raw Deal begins with indigenous prehistory and follows Native Americans east of the Mississippi up to the present day. I’ll have to restock soon, because I had only one copy left when Bob stopped in on Friday. Graciously, however, he signed that copy.

Another nonfiction book that’s been getting raves from my customers is The Turtle and the Mitten: An Epic History of Michigan, by Aaron Helman. Aaron’s book is more general Michigan history and addresses various periods, one topic at a time, beginning with Detroit and then going back to Pontiac and Tecumseh, forward to the Toledo Strip (read the book to find out what this is, if you didn’t grow up in Michigan), and so forth. An accessible and entertaining introduction to our state’s history, The Turtle and the Mitten is finding a wide audience.

That’s Up North literary news. Farther afield, Geraldine Brooks has won the 2025 Library of Congress Prize for American fiction, and I could not be more pleased. I think there’s only one of her books that I haven’t read.

At home, I had another visitor and a chance to catch up on family news. The next evening, Wednesday, it rained, so mowing grass was out of the question, and I set aside my halfway sort of backup plan to spend the evening on bookkeeping. A rainy evening invited relaxation. Providing Sunny Juliet with a fresh, juicy bone, then, I settled down on the porch with a novel instead, feeling beyond cozy…. 

My “Shelf Awareness” newsletter had recently shown a chalkboard outside a bookstore somewhere with one arrow pointing in—to BOOKS—and the other pointing out—to CRUEL WORLD. Fiction, however, does not have to be (and isn’t even primarily) “escape” literature. The book by Nevil Shute that I dove into the other evening, Pied Piper, set in the early days of World War II, certainly was not. ThThnovel's protagonist, an elderly English widower (he is 70!!!) whose pilot son has been killed, recounts what began as a getaway fishing vacation in the Jura region of not-yet-occupied France. As the war comes closer and closer, he was persuaded to take charge of a young brother and sister whose parents, determined to remain at the father’s League of Nations job in Switzerland, want their children home in England, safe from the war, and he agrees to see the young ones home. For one reason and another as he crosses France with the original two children, his entourage of dependents grows (hence the novel's title), and the dangers and risks of travel mount precipitously when the Germans invade France, their planes bombing the roads and their soldiers occupying towns and villages. The old man (as the author calls him) with the growing band of children in tow is an Englishman—the enemy! Will he be able to save the children? Military occupation, abductions and disappearances, accusations of disloyalty, civilians as enemies—it all felt much closer to home than I would have thought possible a year ago.

The journals I’ve been keeping for about nine years bear Roman numerals and titles. My current volume is XIV, and its title is “So Far.” I use those two little words often these days. I wrote to a friend that “so far” my health and strength are holding out, “so far” I’m managing this and keeping up with that. In my eighth decade, though, I know the day will come when “so far” turns into “no longer.” It’s inevitable. I have friends who no longer hike or no longer drive--well, the list goes on, but I'll stop there.

 

I only hope and pray that "so far" becoming "no longer" will not be the case for our country and that we do not reach a stage when women are “no longer” allowed to vote, when Americans can “no longer” travel across state and national borders, when speech dissenting from government propaganda and a dominant party line is “no longer” free, etc., but curbs on freedom are already underway, with others under serious discussion by influential members of the Republican Party and supporters of the president.

(What makes the setting aside of Constitutional protections and provisions even more maddening is that the people going along with it have the nerve to call themselves “conservative”!)

How many of you have ever read any books by Studs Terkel? He interviewed Americans on his Chicago radio program from 1952 to 1997, and many of the stories he elicited from interviewees found their way into books. The first I ever read was Working, and immediately I became a Terkel fan. One of the latest books in his long list (not quite his last) was Hope Dies Last: Keeping the Faith in Difficult Times, first published in 2003. 

 

For Studs Terkel, hope never died, and the same was true for most of the people he interviewed, though various of them defined hope differently and found it in different ways and places. More than one person in the book found hope in the struggle itself. At least one found it in taking action. Not in seeing light but in lighting the way themselves or even going forward in the dark.

 

I intended to make a gift of Hope Dies Last to a friend, but he assures me he will return it after reading, so I have now decided that it will be a book I’ll loan out to anyone who expresses an interest. Let me know if you are interested. I’ll start a list. 

 

Keep the faith, 

my friends. 

Keep hope alive.

You can do it! Extend yourself!