The living Great Lakes : searching for the heart of the inland seas

I'm so glad Ann Arbor/Ypsi reads chose this book, and even though I didn't make it to any of the events, I did see this book displayed in the downtown branch in April 2010. I picked it up, and it turned out to be the last book I read before embarking upon a 3-month stay in a foreign county. As someone who has lived almost all of my life in the shadow of Lake Michigan (well, okay, maybe just most of it by this point), it was wonderful to get a firm sense of home before leaving for such a long time.

It certainly didn't hurt that the book was so clearly a labor of love, either. I felt that Jerry Dennis did a very good job blending history, sailing know-how, and environmentalism into a compelling narrative. I do believe that I was naturally inclined to look upon the book more favorably given my personal situation at the time of reading it, but it was a bit like chicken soup, and there's nothing wrong with enjoying a bit of that sometime, is there? Recommended for lovers of the Great Lakes.

This book tells the story of a crew sailing the Malabar from Grand Traverse Bay (on Lake Michigan) to a harbor in Maine -- through 4 of the 5 Great Lakes, part of the Erie Canal, the Hudson River, and on into the Atlantic.

My husband enjoyed the languid pace of the writing. I don't really have an opinion (positive or negative) on the pacing, but I got really annoyed at how the book jumps back and forth. The author will be writing about their journey, then he'll jump into some treatise on historical French explorers, or some explanation of invasive species or environmental damage, and eventually come back to the journey - all within one chapter. And a few times, the journey narrative didn't even seem strictly chronological. I found myself skipping those sections to finish up the journey storyline, then backtracking to read the tangents. I might have enjoyed the book more if he would have alternated chapters - narrative, historical/ecological - rather than interspersing snippets. Don't get me wrong, I found the history and science sections quite interesting (especially as I know very little about the history of this area, since I didn't grow up here), but the jumping around almost made me crazy at times.