Northland by Porter Fox

NORTHLAND by Porter Fox is subtitled “A 4,000 Mile Journey Along America's Forgotten Border” and given all of the recent news about the United States’ Southern border, I was interested in reading more about the Northern one.  In the advance digital copy I have, Fox refers to both Canadian and American cities within 100 miles of that Northern border. A few (particularly those in Ohio) might surprise you; however, Fox also includes Chicago on his list of cities “in the Northland” and that at least feels incorrect – the nearest Canadian city is Windsor which is about 300 miles away – see this map. Sadly, that reference made me wonder about the other historical, political and scientific “facts” and interpretation in this text especially when I noticed that Fox only devotes a few pages of the book to notes (perhaps he includes more in the final print version?). 

Fox does divide the book into five sections (Dawnland, Sweet-Water Seas, Boundary Waters, Seven Fires, and Medicine Life) to wind his way across the continent from East to West. Along the way, he introduces (but does not really develop stories for) local residents like Milton Chute who harvests sea urchins in Maine or Captain Ross, a helmsman on The Great Lakes. Kirkus gave NORTHLAND a starred review, but I would honestly recommend other titles first. For me, the fictional works of Howard Frank Mosher provide a much keener insight into life along the border. And Dan Egan’s award-winning The Death and Life of The Great Lakes is a recent, outstanding piece of scholarship.  For those interested, Egan will be speaking locally at the Bookstall on Wednesday evening, July 18 at 6:30 pm.

Us Against You by Fredrik Backman

Earlier this month, Simon & Schuster’s Atria imprint released US AGAINST YOU by Fredrik Backman; it is the sequel to Beartown, a book which has generated some lengthy discussions at our high school. The stories in both novels take place at a small town where hockey championships are truly a focus and “kids get raised with the philosophy ‘the stats never lie.’ Either you’re the best, or you’re everyone else.” As the new novel opens, reverberations from a sexual assault by one of the key players are still being felt and there is talk of disbanding the team. “The idiots won’t say it was Kevin who killed Beartown Ice Hockey, they’ll say ‘the scandal’ killed the club. … their real problem isn’t that Kevin raped someone, but that Maya got raped. … Women are always the problem in the men’s world.”

The story is classic Backman (he also wrote A Man Called Ove and others), with much empathy for those with less power and with anger against the bureaucracy: “it is divided in the way that all worlds are divided between people: between those who are listened to, and those you aren’t” OR “sports are only sports until someone who doesn’t give a damn about sports has something to gain from them, then sports suddenly become economics.” Once again, Backman gives readers much to discuss in US AGAINST YOU which received a starred review from Library Journal.