Midwest Regional Roundup

Amid the Midwest

Pennant PuzzlementsThe title of The Million-to-One Team: Why the Chicago Cubs Haven't Won a Pennant Since 1945 by George Castle promises inside scoop about the team's record-setting ineptitude. According to Diamond Communications publisher Jill Langford, "Castle, himself a Cubs fan and jornalist who has covered the Cubs since 1980, has uncovered the strange story of Cubs owner P.K. Wrig ley, the gum magnate who never really liked baseball nor understood how a sports team differs from a gum manufacturing company." Castle aims brickbats at current ownership, too. Langford explained, "The book's official publication is September 10--the date in 1969 when the Cubs fell out of first place after 155 days at the top. The Mets beat them and took first place."

In This Article: Pennant Puzzlements Fishing for Complements Marine Maneuvers Chicago x Two Stately Wizardry Eating Hearty Stage Crafts

Fishing for ComplementsSounds fishy, but it's for real. Show g rs at UMBA are invited to drop their cards into the fishbowl at the University of Wisconsin Press booth for the chance to win a framed photo of a (gulp!) fish. The drawing focuses attention on Gone Fishing by Bob Rashid, a resident of Madison, Wis. Reported associate director Steve Salemson, "The book is essentially a photographic essay with text on the joys of fishing--why people love to fish. This is a photographic fugue on fishing in Wisconsin, a fine-art book of some 90 color photographs accompanied by captions describing the people and places encountered by the photographer while shooting."

The topic of fishing receives more scholarly treatment in Fishing the Great Lakes: An Environmental History, 1783-1933, by Margaret Beattie Bogue, professor emerita of history at UW-Madison. In Salemson's words, "The book is a comprehensive history of the fisheries from the perspective of the Great Lakes as a unified geographic entity, and it looks at the influence of the commercial fishing industry, the impact of the changing environment on the marine habitat, and the efforts of policy makers to conserve the resource for long-term use."

Marine ManeuversThe idea for Mail by the Pail (Wayne State Univ. Press, Sept.) unfolded while merchant marine deck officer Colin Bergel was aboard an ore freighter on the Great Lakes. "I was missing home," he explained. "I usually work 60 days on a boat, then I come home for 30 days." In his loneliness, he once found himself hoping that the mail boat would deliver word from his wife and three young children back home in Manistee, Mich., a port city on Lake Michigan. Eureka! Maybe he should write a book about The Westcott, the only vessel that delivers mail to Great Lakes freighters while they are moving! "I did everything wrong," confessed the first-time author. "I telephoned Wayne State University Press blind." A kindly operator connected him with the editorial department. Managing editor Kathy Wildfong recalled, "I told Colin we didn't publish children's books, but he was very persistent."

Chicago x TwoProving that the Second City is a first-rate visual feast, here are two takes on Windy City sights. From local publisher Ivan R. Dee, Urban Art Chicago: A Guide to Community Murals, Mosaics, and Sculptures by Olivia Gude and Jeff Huebner documents the vibrancy of the city's public art. Produced with the Chicago Public Art Group, the book contains 130 color illustrations, plus historical notes and addresses, for all the collected neighborhood artworks.

Local enticements, from Ivan R. Dee, Univ. of Wisc. and Willow Creek.

According to publicist June Sawyer, "It's street art in the best sense of the word. Often these works are on display on the walls of underpasses, community centers and public schools." Chicago's natural beauty is the focus of Windy City Wild: Chicago's Natural Wonders, with photography by Robert Shaw and Jason Lindsey, foreword by Bill Kurtis, published by Chicago Review Press. Said publicist Kathy Mirkin, "Most people think of Chicago as flat and dull. These beautiful pictures prove otherwise." Strictly speaking, the images are not entirely within city boundaries but were taken within a 55-mile radius of downtown Chicago.
Stately WizardryAmong the titillating tidbits that Michael Patrick Hearn reveals in The Annotated Wizard of Oz: Centennial Edition (Norton, Oct.) is that the landscape of Dorothy's Kansas is actually based on North Dakota, where L. Frank Baum lived before writing his beloved tale in Chicago. Along with extensive commentary and interpretation, The Annotated Wizard of Oz contains a facsimile of the rare 1900 first edition with the original drawings by W.W. Denslow using different colors for each region of Oz. Bob Weil, Norton trade executive editor, told PW, "Mike Hearn published his first Oz annotation in 1973 when he was 21. It appeared on the front page of the New York Times Book Review. Mike's new annotation will bring the facsimile edition to a whole new generation. It's chock-full of information with vast surprises."

Eating HeartyHenry Sinkus, owner-chef of The Pine Baron's Restaurant in Manitowish Waters, Wisc., describes the small lakeside community as "one of those places where everybody knows everybody else." For several years he was well aware that a patron at the eatery was Tom Petrie, publisher of Willow Creek Press in nearby Minocqua. Even so, Sinkus recalled, "When Tom said, 'You know, you should write a cookbook,' the offer was out of the blue." The offhand remark led to the publication of The Northwoods Table, a regional cookbook featuring recipes with ingredients indigenous to the northern tier of the U.S. and southern Canada. "By definition, Northwoods meals are comfort food: hot, hearty and filling. The climate demands it," Sinkus explained. "Would can ists who paddled 21 miles through Minnesota's Boundary Waters slice celery sticks for their evening meal?"

Stage CraftsThis fall, Sourcebooks, which is headquartered in the Chicago suburb of Naperville, Ill., is publishing two titles celebrating two renowned Chicago institutions. The first, Steppenwolf at 25 (Sept.) by Sam Shepard, Kurt Vonnegut, Don DeLillo et al., with extensive photography by Chicago-based photographer Victor Skrebneski, commemorates the 25th anniversary of the Chicago acting ensemble whose membership includes John Mal ko vich, Gary Sinise and Laurie Metcalf. The other, The Second City (Oct.) by Sheldon Patinkin, is a combination book/two-CD set showcasing the comedic output of this improvisational group whose alumni, living and dead, include John Belushi, Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, Chris Farley, Mike Myers and John Candy. Said Source books founder-publisher Dominique Raccah, "There are hundreds of thousands of people who attend theater annually across North America, so these are big national stories with a much broader base than Chicago."

The First Fiction Scene Tales of two towns (Berkley, Bridge Works.) A bunch of nice middle-class women in a small Minnesota town buy Microsoft stock early on and end up with a cheery chunk of change in Ladies with Options (Berkley Signature paper, Feb.) by Cynthia Hartwick. "It's not based on the Beardstown Ladies," says Berkley senior editor Judy Palais. "It's not about getting rich. It's about what money makes possible. There are funny parts, bittersweet parts and triumphant parts." Palais calls it literary commercial fiction firmly rooted in a Midwestern sensibility. "A lyrical page-turner" is how Judy Clain, Little, Brown senior editor, describes These Granite Islands (Mar.) by Sarah Stonich. "It takes place near and around St. Paul, Minnesota," she explains, as a woman on her deathbed recalls the summer of 1936, when her husband and sons are away for the summer on a remote island and she meets a woman who changes her take on life. "It's rather like Susan Minot's Evening," adds Clain, "as a kind of mystery unfolds." St. Paul is also Stonich's home. Sharon Rolens, who lived in Kane, Ill., for 50 years and is now a professional musician in Denver, conjures up an Illinois hamlet called Old Kane in Worthy's Town (Bridge Works, Oct.). "It's about a young guy who's growing up with his grandparents and responds to what g s on in town," says editorial director Barbara Phillips. "There's a murder. There's suspense. Old Kane turns out to be somewhere between John Steinbeck's Cannery Row and Thornton Wilder's Our Town." Barnes & Noble has made Worthy's Town part of its Discover Great New Writers program for the fall. Hometown for Heather Neff is Ypsilanti, Mich., where she is an associate professor of English at Eastern Michigan University. Neff's canvas stretches far more broadly, however, in Blackgammon (Ballantine One World, Oct.), which involves two African-American women, one living out her dreams as an artist in Paris and the other married to a brilliant British scholar in London. A woman leaves Minneapolis for Iowa at the suggestion of an old friend, finds her murdered corpse, marries the friend's boyfriend and then senses that she herself is in mortal danger. That's the suspenseful edge in Discovering the Body (Morrow, Sept.) by Mary Howard, who lives in Ames, Iowa. "Stone Field, True Arrow (Holt/Metropolitan, Sept.) is Kyoko Mori's first adult novel," says Metropolitan editor Riva Hocherman. "One of her earlier books for younger readers was Shizuko's Daughter. In all of Kyoko's writing, place is a significant part of the atmosphere. In Stone Field, True Arrow, the American Midwest is very much a state of mind." Here, a woman who grew up in Japan and was subsequently raised by her mother in Minneapolis deals with the thorny issues of being torn between two cultures. Set largely in Milwaukee, "It's a quiet book with great depth, one that looks powerfully at transitions," says Hocherman. Mori lives in Cambridge, Mass., and teaches at Harvard. --Robert Dahlin Top