Jerry Dennis

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Dennis's book is on Nicola's Books' all-time best-seller list, right up there with Harry Potter.

The Living Great Lakes tells a continuous narrative of one sailing trip through the Great Lakes. Of course, Dennis was able to hang lots of interesting information about the lakes off that line, but the story still carries it. In The Windward Shore: A Winter on the Great Lakes, just published by the U-M Press, Dennis has done something else entirely. Forced to slow down after a sports injury, he decides to follow his own thoughts very closely as he looks out through the windows of various houses on the big lakes. As part of "my continuing project to learn at least one place on earth reasonably well," he writes, he "trusted that it would appear gradually and accumulatively--not as a conventional portrait, but as a mosaic with depth, breadth, and range that included the sounds and scents and textures of the place and its inhabitants."