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billyok

@billyok.bsky.social

4 Posts60 Follower21 Folgt
O'Neill of Chicago@brianoneill.bsky.social · 2w ago

Very happy with this review I have for Great Lakes Review, of "Great Lake: An Unnatural History of Lake Michigan."

A boulder, a huge chunk of rock broken down from mountains over millions of years, finds itself pushed south by a massive, continent-warping glacier. It is broken up under the unimaginable weight, dispersed into countless smaller rocks, one of which ends up on the beach of a vast lake carved and filled by the same glacial forces. One hot summer day in 1919 one of those rocks was picked up by the hands of a man and hurled at a young Black boy who drifted into a whites-only section of Lake Michigan. The boy drowns, sparking a blistering burst of racial violence, killing dozens. There is nothing teleological about history, much less geology. The rock wasn’t fated to be a dull tool of white supremacy. It just happened to litter a Chicago beach during a time of segregation, economic unrest, and simmering reactionary hatred toward the Great Migration. It was just there on a summer day. But why it was there — why that beach was rocky, why that beach existed at all, why Chicago and other Lake Michigan cities were formed the way they were — is part of the story of Theodore J. Karamanski’s Great Lake: An Unnatural History of Lake Michigan. Karamanski explores the interaction between people and the lake, and how we shape and distort this vast and uniquely American sea.
O'Neill of Chicago@brianoneill.bsky.social · 2w ago

Excited to have written about "Great Lake: An Unnatural History of Lake Michigan," by Theodore Karananski ( @uofmpress.bsky.social). A wonderful, insightful book in how we shape the lake. My review explores connections in time, and what we owe the sea. greatlakesreview.org/redefining-l...