The Boundary Waters region of Minnesota and Ontario is a vast wilderness of quiet beauty, visited and loved by many, but home to only a rugged few. In 1928, Justine Kerfoot arrived, a Northwestern University graduate headed for medical school until her family lost both their Illinois homes in the stock market crash. Thrust into year-round life at her mother's fledgling summer resort, Justine was confronted with learning survival in the frigid north woods, a challenge she met with extraordinary verve and recounts with great candor and humor in this remarkable book. Kerfoot has paddled all the...

Temperatures that dive to forty degrees below zero are only part of life in northern Minnesota, according to award-winning writer Barton Sutter. Cold Comfort is his temperamental tribute to the city of Duluth, Minnesota, where bears wander the streets and canoe racks are standard equipment.

Letters from the Country, one of Bly's best-known and best-loved books, is a collection of essays as fresh today as when they were originally published in Minnesota Monthly. This contemporary classic welcomes readers to the small town of Madison, Minnesota (population 2,242), a rural community struggling to place itself in the new American landscape.

Minneapolis's skid row, known as the Gateway district, was a lively area consisting of dozens of bars, flophouses, pawnshops, burlesque houses, charity missions, and office buildings that had aged past their prime. Encompassing some twenty-five blocks centering on the intersection of Hennepin, Washington, and Nicollet Avenues, the neighborhood was demolished between 1959 and 1963 as part of the first federally funded urban renewal project in America. Gathered here for the first time, Edwin C. Hirschoff's stark and moving images of the Gateway district's final days -- its streets, buildings,...

Minnesota Rag takes the reader on an exhilarating tour of the seamy underside of a dark period in Minnesota's past, one rife with crooked public officials, vengeful gangsters, and yellow journalists. Featuring notorious characters such as Jay M. Near, racist and antilabor publisher of Minneapolis's Saturday Press, pioneering newsman Fred W. Friendly weaves the tale of a court case that molded our understanding of freedom of the press and set a precedent for the publication of the Pentagon Papers. "Friendly moves us from the ore-dusted brothels of Duluth, Minnesota, to the gothic top of the...

From his earliest childhood memories to the college classroom, from rural Minnesota farm fields and the defense of workers' rights to his 1990 election campaign promises of politics for the benefit of the people, The Conscience of a Liberal candidly discusses Wellstone's life experiences and the coming-of-age of his political views. What emerges is an intriguing inside look at Wellstone's crusade to assert an unabashedly liberal agenda.

From the moment he was elected, Wellstone has passionately articulated a path to economic and social justice for all citizens, justice not contingent on the...

Here Valerie Miner provides an account of her family's migration from Edinburgh's tenements across the world. Focusing on the life journeys of her grandmother, her mother and herself, Miner searches for truth about family members, unveiling family secrets and missing histories.

"My investigation of Minnesota murders over the years revealed no new motives for killing anyone. The old ones are perfectly satisfactory. . . . I hope you will find these murders interesting. I regret that I could not report the most ingenious and remarkable ones. They looked like accidents or natural deaths and were never discovered."--Walter N. Trenerry

Murder in Minnesota features some of the state's most infamous criminals--a collection of fascinating and disagreeable characters usually ignored by historians. They live again in these pages as the conniving, clever, mad, or...