In this sequel to Letters From Leelanau (not reviewed), Stocking
sets out from her farmhouse on Michigan's Leelanau Peninsula to
explore her home state - " as good a microcosm" as any, she
asserts, for an examination of contemporary American culture. Her
series of deliberately haphazard journeys produces a thoughtful
collection of essays and sketches about the lasting diversity of
the daily round in the small towns and back roads of the country's
rugged northern edge. Drawn particularly to the islands of the
Great Lakes, Stocking is in search of an "island of 'unchange' in a
sea of change" where life is simpler and people know and trust
their neighbors. She finds it on Bois Blanc, an insular community
that admits the best modernity has to offer - computers in its
one-room schoolhouse, an "astonishingly sophisticated" bookstore -
and staves off the worst. On Drummond Island she follows the public
battle between a crusading journalist and Tom Monaghan, the
Domino's Pizza magnate, over a rustic community's future. On Sugar
Island she hopes to show her daughter Gaia, whose father is an
Ottawa Indian, "people who look like her just living their lives."
For Stocking, island life is a welcome anachronism, and she records
its rhythms lovingly: the daily arrivals and departures at ferry
landings; the seasonal wax and wane of the population; and the
distinctions that separate natives from outsiders and the islands
themselves from the mainland. A constant is the author's own
introspection, an earnest self-examination that only seldom wears
thin as she interweaves personal history with more far-reaching
questions about society, fate, democracy, morality, and the nature
of God and the universe. Stocking's sharp descriptions of the
natural world help ground these abstractions, and her enthusiasm
for travel and for the lives of strangers enlivens a richly
detailed narrative. (Kirkus Reviews)
One writer's quest to locate herself within the wet, wild, and
diversely human cultural heritage that has shaped her
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