Hello everyone! Every once in a while I get to meet and new author and review his/her new book. Thanks to the wonder of my Face book page I met Author Jim Landwehr who is, this very week, releasing his new book: Dirty Shirt: A Boundary Waters Memoir. I was pretty excited to read this because I'm an outdoorsy person who loves, loves, loves being outside in the woods. Okay, those of you who know me know I can't stand the idea of dirt under my fingernails and while I enjoy a weekend of camping every couple of decades, no, I'm not outdoorsy at all. But THAT'S what's so great about Jim Landwehr's book! You don't have to GO TO the Boundary Waters to feel like you're IN the Boundary Waters. This memoir, which follows brothers and their friends up to the wild beauty that is The Boundary Waters, is full of gentle humor, family history, and plenty of outdoors instruction. There is an underlying hint of nostalgia that borders on melancholy, but without bringing down the room. The key to the book is the brothers' father, a figure known only in stories and memory, and in his love of the outdoors. The brothers take their wild pilgrimage and learn about themselves and about their father. Then, they turn around two decades later and teach the same love of the wild, the same need for preparation, and the same connection with family history to their own children.
Check out the trailer: I love reading about real people in places I've never been. Somehow putting a real person, someone I might run into at the grocery store, draws me into the book even more. I will probably never paddle a boat anywhere near the Boundary Waters. But I'm okay with that because I've read Jim Landwehr's memoir and I feel like I was out there with him and his brothers. This book is a must read for different groups and for different reasons: The adventurers, those looking for someplace outside to explore will enjoy the detailed description. Those of you who enjoy memoirs are going to love Landwehr's down home voice and obvious fondness for the stories he's telling. And those of you looking for a new book by a new author who truly has something to say and is able to say it very well. A really great summer read, and it'll available HERE and NOW!
Check in tomorrow when I have my Ten Questions interview with Jim Landwehr and we find out very important things about him, his new book, and where HE thinks the best coffee on the planet can be located. (I may have to debate that one!
Good morning! No, that isn't a misprint. peter bradley means to spell his name in lower case letters. In fact, inspired by e.e. cummings, he spells pretty much everything in lower case letters. Today's author is part of that new breed of author...the kind who gets a following and then publishes a book. While he might rail against the e-reader format, peter bradley is part of the digital movement. But his online publishing politics aside, peter bradley is a poet, and he's a voice people should maybe hearing. He has two collections of poetry available right now "a collection of writing from under my sheets (wish they were yours)" and "GRAVITY". His poetry touches on topics the twenty-somethings of today, indeed the twenty-somethings forever, talk about: Sex, breakups, long distance relationships, and alcohol. He uses raw language...so beware...this is not a Dr. Seuss book by any stretch. Written in that rare space of time between the junior year of high school and his twentieth birthday, peter bradley reveals heartbreak, angst, and a longing for either a return to childhood or a fast forward into middle age, because 'right now' is too much to look at.
Publishing the two books quickly, there isn't a lot of time between them, and yet there's a definite shift, a darkening, between the first and second collections. Questions about love, betrayal, and the emergence into a self reliant adulthood are raised in short, clipped verses and long, wandering soliloquies. Like many of his generation, peter bradley does his best to wander away from the traditional rules of poetry, but in doing so writes haunting, approachable words that many could identify with and few would struggle to understand. Where was this guy when I was being forced to dissect great poetry for one blah English class or another? bradley speaks with the voice of his generation, which is to say, while he's looking for help, he's not asking anyone for it and he wouldn't thank you if you offered. He lives in a world the generations before created and he's trying to make the best of it. It's hard for me to give this a star rating for a couple reasons. 1) I don't read enough poetry to compare these books to anything else. 2) Rating poetry on a hard 1-5 scale sort of defeats the whole idea of poetry, right? BUT, if you love poetry, or if you are looking for a fresh new voice, this is a great place to start. His books are available for Kindle and in print by clicking here.
Every once in a while I get to meet and new author and review his/her new book. Thanks to the wonder of my Face book page I met Author Jim Landwehr who is, this very week, releasing his new book: Dirty Shirt: A Boundary Waters Memoir. 
This book is a must read for different groups and for different reasons: The adventurers, those looking for someplace outside to explore will enjoy the detailed description. Those of you who enjoy memoirs are going to love Landwehr's down home voice and obvious fondness for the stories he's telling. And those of you looking for a new book by a new author who truly has something to say and is able to say it very well.
