The poems of Jeff Weddle's new collection, A Puncher's Chance, are alive with all the mystery, beauty, love, loss, and heartbreak we are surrounded by every day in this world of ours. Weddle shows off his range in this book with an array of poems from the lushly lyrical to the cut-the-crap, straight-talking conversational. In here, there are dream-like visions, laments of rejection, celebrations of redemption, and rallying incitements to his fellow artists to keep up the good fight of creation and imagination. How else can we survive in this world gone at least half-mad? One of the poems in this collection claims, "It is time for us to be good to one another." Indeed, it is. The strong voice in Jeff Weddle's poems is one of honest devotion to his craft and committed resistance to corruption and lies. It's just what we need right now. Scott Silsbe, author of Muskrat Friday Dinner
French explorers called the Ecorse River the river of bark, or Ecorces, because the Huron Indians who lived in the villages surrounding it wrapped their dead in the bark of the birch trees that grew along its banks. White pioneers settled on French ribbon farms along the Detroit River, and a small village called Grandport sprang up where the Ecorse River met the Detroit River. By 1836, Grandport, now known as Ecorse, had grown into a fishing and farming center, and, by the 1900s Ecorse had gained fame as a haven for bootleggers during Prohibition, an important shipbuilding center, and the home of several championship rowing teams.
This entertaining and informative encyclopedia examines American regional foods, using cuisine as an engaging lens through which readers can deepen their study of American geography in addition to their understanding of America's collective cultures. Many of the foods we eat every day are unique to the regions of the United States in which we live. New Englanders enjoy coffee milk and whoopie pies, while Mid-Westerners indulge in deep dish pizza and Cincinnati chili. Some dishes popular in one region may even be unheard of in another region. This fascinating encyclopedia examines over 100 foods that are unique to the United States as well as dishes found only in specific American regions and individual states. Written by an established food scholar, We Eat What? A Cultural Encyclopedia of Bizarre and Strange Foods in the United States covers unusual regional foods and dishes such as hoppin' Johns, hush puppies, shoofly pie, and turducken. Readers will get the inside scoop on each food's origins and history, details on how each food is prepared and eaten, and insights into why and how each food is celebrated in American culture. In addition, readers can follow the recipes in the book's recipe appendix to test out some of the dishes for themselves. Appropriate for lay readers as well as high school students and undergraduates, this work is engagingly written and can be used to learn more about United States geography.
History, travelogue, and memoir combine in this illuminating journey in the footsteps of the great explorer La Salle. This is the extraordinary account of a personal and historical quest in which Philip Marchand retraces the seventeenth-century explorations of La Salle while he searches in the present day for vestiges of France’s lost North American legacy. After he explored the Great Lakes and the entire Mississippi, La Salle was murdered by his own men when he led them on a disastrous mission to Texas. The vast land beyond Quebec that he claimed for France could have become — but for a few twists of history — an alternative North America: a French-speaking, Catholic empire in which native peoples would have played a prominent role. Marchand probes the intriguingly flawed character of La Salle and recounts the astonishing history of the Jesuit missionaries, coureurs de bois, fur traders, and soldiers who followed on his heels, and of the Indian nations with whom they came into contact. He also reports on the survivals of this diaspora from late-night bars, battle reenactments, parish churches, and wayside restaurants from Montreal to Venice, Louisiana. And throughout he draws on memories of his own Catholic childhood in Massachusetts to interpret the lingering attitudes, fears, hopes, and iconography of a people who, more deeply than most, feel the burdens and the ironies of history.
Business Plans Handbooks are collections of actual business plans compiled by entrepreneurs seeking funding for small businesses throughout North America. For those looking for examples of how to approach, structure and compose their own business plans, this Handbook presents sample plans taken from businesses in the Distribution industry -- only the company names and addresses have been changed. Typical business plans include type of business; statement of purpose; executive summary; business/industry description; market; product and production; management/personnel; and, financial specifics.