The Lake Effect: A Lake Michigan Mosaic

The Lake Effect presents Lake Michigan as a mosaic of multiplicity, examining the aesthetic, emotional, historic, economic, and social effects of this life-sustaining body of water. "I stood ankle deep in Lake Michigan for the first time when I was two years old,” Fred Carlisle writes. His fascination with the lake began then and has continued throughout his life. The Lake Effect is grounded in the author’s personal experiences but moves to wider considerations that include the aesthetic, emotional, historic, economic, and social effects of Lake Michigan. The book captures the lake’s mesmerizing beauty in summer and winter. It also examines the way Lake Michigan sustains the economies and societies of every place along its shores. It speaks of the ways human intervention and carelessness have polluted, damaged, and degraded the lake. The book also describes the lake’s power—in both water and ice forms—to drown swimmers, wreck ships, destroy beaches, and consume houses. The Lake Effect explores as well the functions and power of water broadly. Water can be magical and make us healthier, happier, and more peaceful. It can also be an adversary that damages and destroys. Water is equally a comfort and a threat: a mosaic of multiplicity and contradiction. ___________ Carlisle’s decision to write in full awareness of the ambiguities of water and of Lake Michigan makes this book particularly appealing to a wide range of readers, even those who have never had the pleasure of visiting Lake Michigan. —Nancy Grayson, Executive Editor, retired, The University of Georgia Press The Lake Michigan Fred Carlisle brings achingly alive in these pages is both an inward lake, a wholeness and a splinter of glimpses, formed and deepened and understood over a lifetime; and an outward one, with its own complex and sometimes troubling history, its own power and force and constantly changing sublimity. The beauty of the writing rises out of its deep, wryly curious attention, alive to an ordinary world that is shot through with glimpses of the profound and the sacred. Carlisle is someone we can trust, who we would want to spend a day with, standing on a dune, pondering a ferry schedule, peering at a photo of a child and his father on the way to Wrigley Field. In reading him, we are each reminded of our own inner landscapes and their power to shape and shatter and make us new. —Thomas Gardner author of Poverty Creek Journal and Sundays In Lake Effect, Carlisle insightfully engages in the paradox of our long and complex relationship with the Great Lakes. Using memory, science, research, history, and culture to plumb the depths of his love for the lakes, he renders a stunning series of deep reflections of the “lake effect” on humanity.... This book reads like an exquisite essay, but feels like a love letter to water. —Anne-Marie Oomen, author of three memoirs; a travel essay collection, An American Map; and As Long as I Know You, winner of the AWP Sue William Silverman Award for Creative Nonfiction Words and images cannot properly describe everything that Lake Michigan is. But through his prose, Carlisle captures the big lake’s spirit. And like Lake Michigan itself, The Lake Effect casts a spell. —William Rapai, author of Lake Invaders: Invasive Species and the Battle for the Future of the Great Lakes _______ Fred Carlisle lived in Michigan for twenty years, raising a young family and teaching at Michigan State University. He enjoyed a long academic career as a professor of English and then as a university provost at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia.
ASIN: 1958363189
VSKU: BVV.1958363189.G
Condition: Good
Author/Artist:Carlisle, Fred
Binding: Hardcover
Note: Any images shown are stock photographs and product may differ from what is shown.
Condition Notes: The item shows wear from consistent use, but it remains in good condition and works perfectly. All pages and cover are intact including the dust cover, if applicable . Spine may show signs of wear. Pages may include limited notes and highlighting. May NOT include discs, access code or other supplemental materials.