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Category: Review

  • ‘The Cherry Harvest’: A review

    Casual visitors to Door County might be surprised to learn that 70 years ago German prisoners of war (POW) were brought here under armed guard to pick cherries in the orchards.

  • Review

    Jane Smiley won both the attention of her readers and a Pulitzer Prize for her 1991 novel A Thousand Acres, a family narrative dealing with an Iowa farm in a plotline that mirrored the tale of Shakespeare’s King Lear.

  • ‘Early Warning’

    Jane Smiley won both the attention of her readers and a Pulitzer Prize for her 1991 novel A Thousand Acres, a family narrative dealing with an Iowa farm in a plotline that mirrored the tale of Shakespeare’s King Lear.

  • Soundings: Door County in Poetry

    “Whether you write poetry or not, live in Door County or not, know it through your grandparents or through a single visit,” Estella Lauter wrote in an introduction to Soundings, an anthology of Door County themed poetry, “we hope you will find stories, images, characters and ideas that draw you further into this remarkable place.

  • “Being Mortal”

    Atul Gawande’s best-selling book Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End targets not only those whose mortality looms before them, whether from a terminal illness or from the ravages of time, but their children and others who will be helping them make those decisions that affect the last years of their lives.

  • “Three Sea Tales”

    Written and illustrated by Roberta L. Raymond This is a wonderful book for children of all ages. The three stories reveal another world – the world under the sea where even fish work together.

  • “All Things Irish”

    If you’re lucky enough to be Irish, you’re lucky enough. – Irish Saying Michael Loynd’s novel All Things Irish is among the latest of books to be set in Door County and, like many writers who have been charmed by the peninsula, he publishes the cover-your-butt disclaimer: “This is a work of fiction,” maintaining that “any resemblance to actual events of locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  • “Windigo Island”

    By William Kent Krueger, 339 pages, Atria Books (Simon & Schuster), 2014. Few discoveries delight this reader more than learning at the close of a good novel that the author has published several books, each one in a sense serving as a chapter of a larger work.

  • A Review: “North of the Tension Line”

    By J. F. Riordan This is a novel that defines the meaning of “a good beach read.” Two women in search of a change in their lives; an unpredictable male business owner; a dare; Washington Island in the winter; a predictable ugly neighbor; prince charming rushing to the rescue; and, the frosting on the cake, a loveable dog and an irascible goat.

  • “Trespasser”

    By Paul Doiron Minotaur Books, 2011 “I found the wreck easily enough,” begins the first person narration of Paul Doiron’s novel Trespasser. “It was the only red sedan with a crushed hood on the Parker Point Road.

  • “Now and Then” and “Before & After”

    When June Nirschl and Judy Roy both retired to Door County, not only did they become neighbors but fellow poets as well, placing their verse in a number of publications.

  • “Things We Didn’t Say”

    Stepmothers have traditionally gotten a bad rap in fiction, and sometimes, as in the story of Cinderella, deservedly so.

  • A Review: “Didn’t See That Coming, The Reminiscences of Roger James Kuhns”

    A geologist, environmentalist, world traveler and raconteur, Roger Kuhns has published a pastiche of his reminiscences that grew out of notes he took while exploring the world for mining corporations.

  • “Next to Love”: A Review

    The World War II era has been romanticized as the time of the Greatest Generation, a period of patriotism, of soldiers selflessly serving their country, and of citizens pitching in for the war effort.

  • A Review: An August to Remember

    Will Morrissey is the protagonist of this coming of age story set in an unidentified northern Wisconsin resort area. He is 14, city born and naïve to the ways of the wooded rural, lake community he finds himself vacationing in with his family.

  • “Bark”

    Ah, Door County in summer! Orchards and wildflowers, stone fences and birch trees, lakeshores and sunsets – strangers smiling and waving to one another.

  • ‘The Memory of Old Jack

    In the spirit of Katherine Anne Porter’s classic short story “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall,” Wendell Berry’s novel The Memory of Old Jack occupies one day in the life of a central character.

  • Lyndon Johnson Fingered in Book on JFK Assassination

    According to a recent Gallup Poll, 61 percent of Americans do not believe the lone gunman theory that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in assassinating President John Fitzgerald Kennedy 50 years ago on Nov. 22, 1963.

  • A Review: ‘Death Comes to Pemberley’

    Fans of Jane Austen, and maybe even those who have been asked to read Pride and Prejudice in school and watched the movie, will enjoy PD James’ mystery sequel Death Comes to Pemberley.

  • “Close Is Fine” by Eliot Treichel

    Eliot Treichel might well have called his collection of short stories Men Behaving Badly. Close Is Fine, the title story in his slim volume, hints at the moral nature of the central characters, men who make bad choices, males who break both laws and vows of love – in short, who are not good citizens.