Review by Choice Review
A literary nostalgia trip across the eastern part of what is normally called the Midwest. Its passengers are essayists, literary critics, college professors, poets, novelists, short story writers, columnists, and freelance writers who in some way were influenced by the region and tied their experiences to the township. The township seems an odd identity since its purpose was for survey, land sales, and politics. Many of the stories are interesting. So much is individual impressions and, at times, near mystical observation that to be disagreeable seems gratuitous. Still, one point made early by the book's editor needs comment. Martone says, "No other feature so marks the Midwestern landscape as the signature of townships." Surely as he drives throughout the area he sees little evidence of townships save the regular roadways, but he must notice many bucolic features that continue to earmark the Midwest as one of the world's great bread or grain baskets. The other writers' presentations reflect this agricultural dominance. The book's photographic portraits by Raymond Bial suggest that Midwesterners living where they do are probably the best fed people in the world. General readers. R. S. La Forte; University of North Texas
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Editor Martone, a writer of fiction, compiled an earlier collection of essays whose title would have served as well for this one, A Sense of Place: Essays in Search of the Midwest (Univ. of Iowa, 1988). The essayists gathered in Townships are all midwesterners, past or present, and their contributions are set in, even if they're not all explicitly about, the Midwest. They're mostly first-person narrative evocations of childhood that are nostalgic in the best sense and should appeal viscerally to the reader who's from the Midwest. Together, they call attention to the thriving regional-essay culture that, although not a school, has nurtured the likes of Carol Bly, Amy Clampitt, Susan Dodd, Stuart Dybek, Susan Hauser, Verlyn Klinkenborg, Mary Swander, and Ray A. Young Bear. Although most contributors wax ethnological, few--Klinkenborg and Susan Neville are exceptions--share Martone's specific concern with the relation of the Midwest's geography and cartography to its inhabitants' lives. Too bad, as that theme is provocative and of increasing importance to the contemporary essay. (Reviewed Feb. 15, 1992)0877453543Roland Wulbert
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The Midwest, says Martone (editor of A Place of Sense ), has never had a distinctive regional identity. To redress that situation, he invited 24 of the area's best writers to focus on its townships, six-mile-by-six-mile squares arbitrarily defined by government surveyors. Unfortunately, everything about this volume seems arbitrary. The editor decided by fiat which states composed the region (Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Iowa), and no unifying bond is ever revealed. As Martone himself asks, ``what links the autoworker in Detroit with the actuary in Des Moines?'' What does Ray A. Young Bear, writing poignantly about his tribe's creation myth, have in common with Anthony Bukoski relating his passionate attachment to the Superior Bay wetlands? What does Carol Bly, learning about a blond-haired Jesus in Duluth, share with Deborah Galyan, whose black high school teacher taught her about Joseph Conrad and about life in Bloomington, Ind.? The reader may recall Gertrude Stein's remark about Oakland, ``There is no there there.'' Photos by Raymond Bial not seen by PW. ( Feb. ) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Essays on the Midwest, each grappling well with the idea of townships. A township is a six-mile square--36 sections of 640 acres each: The Midwest was surveyed in this fashion in the early 19th century. When roads were made, they followed the grid-lines: north- south, east-west; it gave a Jeffersonian order to the wilderness, and a character to midwesterners: practical, upright, clean. Maybe that's true, or partly true. You couldn't tell from some of these writers who, not long out of various writing programs, look across cornfields and see words. Others, like Carol Bly, pass lightly over the township concept to speak of the environmental problems facing Minnesota, Duluth particularly. Stuart Dybek, from a mixed neighborhood in Chicago, writes entertainingly about what shaped him as a writer, in the process illustrating how meaningless the township concept is for a large city. Ray A. Young Bear, a poet from the Mesquakie Reservation in central Iowa, writes lyrically of his grandfather's death and of the holiness of the land, to which subjects the metaphor of townships seems irrelevant or even at odds. On the other hand, Michael Wilkerson, writing from a far-left perspective, tells us exactly who owns townships: railroads and utility companies, with huge easements and endless payments unto them. Ellen Hunnicutt gives us a view of country becoming town, in an evocation of a childhood on the wrong side of the Bloomington, Indiana, tracks. Joseph Geha muses good-humoredly on the fortunes of a Lebanese-American (himself) in Iowa farm country. Paul Gruchow, James B. Hall, C.J. Hribal, and Howard Kohn are each skilled in evoking a rural Midwest that, if it has not exactly died, has changed dramatically. The three portray the disappearance of family farms, while Kohn relates, in wry detail, how a golf course came to exist in a rural township, and of one man's--his father's--resistance and eventual capitulation. Flawlessly intelligent essays, variously nostalgic, angry, and prophetic.
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Review by Choice Review
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
