Like Lake Superior itself, the communities of people surrounding the "Big Lake" are vast and full of variety, spanning state and international boundaries. In Lake Superior Profiles: People on the Big Lake, author John Gagnon gives readers a sense of the memorable characters who inhabit the area without attempting to take an exhaustive inventory. Instead, Gagnon met people casually and interviewed them-from a tugboat captain to an iron ore boat captain, Native Americans, and fishery biologists. Different though their stories are, all share a steadfast character, an attachment to the moody...

Though many Union soldiers wrote about their experiences in the American Civil War, few had the vantage point of William Horton Kimball, a member of the First Michigan Engineers and Mechanics. As a military engineer, Kimball spent most of his time behind the major lines of conflict and often worked among civilians who sympathized with the enemy. In "Among the Enemy: A Michigan Soldier's Civil War Journal, " author Mark Hoffman presents Kimball's journal as a unique window into wartime experience.

Kimball was a prolific writer, and his journal is full of detailed accounts of expeditions...

In the decades following World War II, professional city planners in Detroit made a concerted effort to halt the city's physical and economic decline. Their successes included an award-winning master plan, a number of laudable redevelopment projects, and exemplary planning leadership in the city and the nation. Yet despite their efforts, Detroit was rapidly transforming into a notorious symbol of urban decay. In Redevelopment and Race: Planning a Finer City in Postwar Detroit, June Manning Thomas takes a look at what went wrong, demonstrating how and why government programs were...