Books like Packinghouse Daughter — picked by fans

I love the very idea of a whole book devoted to poetic writing about the weather.

Weather in the Midwest tends to be particularly dramatic, and to have a particularly marked influence on daily life. Susan Allen Toth is a wonderful writer; with humor and insight, she leads the reader on a thought-provoking exploration of how weather affects our lives, our memories, and even our character. 

This book takes on class, gender, and addiction, plus a host of other contemporary issues facing rural America and the nation—and Smarsh still manages to craft a compelling, human memoir.

This book might be the antidote to all the easy, anodyne, partisan conclusions the talking heads offer about rural America. As someone who grew up in rural America but now lives in a small city on the West Coast, I felt challenged reading this memoir.

Smarsh is the best kind of rabble-rouser; she’s telling it straight no matter who is listening. 

Ian Frazier’s exploration of his own family’s history takes the reader on a fascinating deep (and broad) dive into American history.

What begins as a chance discovery of letters written between his parents as a young couple leads him inexorably back into the far-reaching branches of his family tree, and a unique perspective on American life from the eighteenth century to the twentieth.

David McCullough called this book a ”remarkable history of an unremarkable family.” The author’s keen curiosity, masterful storytelling, and elegant prose kept me spellbound. I read this book when it first came out, and it was one of those books that for a while I couldn’t stop telling everyone to read.

I’ve never forgotten it, and now I think I’m about to read it again.

In this collection of essays, Bill Holm honors the history, the heritage, the people, and the land surrounding his hometown of Mineota, Minnesota. After extensive travels and life in other places, he ends up back in a town that he never wanted to return to; but having landed there, he finds his way to an appreciation of that place and its people.

In this book he pays tribute to the depth and richness that can be found—given the right attitude—anywhere on earth, including in a small town on the prairie.  

I grew up down the road from the small-town cemetery where my family was buried.

In contrast, Rachael Hanel's father was a small-town cemetery caretaker. As a child, she helped him collect the silk flowers so he could mow around gravestones. Rachael studied other people's grief and thought she was comfortable with it. Then her father suddenly died of cancer, and her perfect family disintegrated.

Hanel's Midwestern distrust of emotions is very familiar to me. Rereading this book—before and after my own father's death—completely altered the way it affected me. Be prepared if your own grief is still fresh.

This book is one of many Mary Higgins Clark books I read in my early teens, but this particular one has stayed with me. It is a domestic noir, somewhat a tale of how never to rush into a marriage with someone you hardly know. Added to this is the peril of involving small children.

I really liked this book–it terrified me beyond belief, but I think this is why it has stayed with me. That first look perhaps at the psychopath hiding in plain sight, appearing to all the world like a safe, kind person, but inside, totally damaged and deadly. Superb.

One of the biggest worries as the Civil War wrapped up was that Confederate troops might disappear into the Appalachian Mountains, where they could conduct guerrilla raids with relative impunity. As a result, the war could have been extended for years, maybe even decades, as the insurgents crept out of their strongholds to conduct hit and run raids. Fortunately, that didn’t happen. Confederate leaders like Robert E. Lee and Pete Longstreet reminded Southerners they lost the war. It was time to get on with their lives.

Most southern veterans accepted the situation. However, a few, like Jesse and Frank James and the Younger brothers, couldn’t accept defeat. So they holed up in the backwoods of Missouri and fought a new kind of war using tactics they’d learned under William Quantrill and Bloody Bill Anderson.

Sound familiar? It’s the same situation that has allowed terrorist groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda… show more.

Gary Clayton Anderson is one of the foremost authorities on the complex and complicated history of the U.S. – Dakota War. In his latest book, Massacre in Minnesota, Anderson relies on his knowledge of the conflict and his skill as a historian to create an objective, thorough look at Minnesota’s watershed historical event. Anderson, who’s been writing about the U.S. – Dakota War and its participants since the 1980s, guides readers through the events with expert explanations and a multitude of perspectives. He also shows growth and maturity by revising his language and viewpoint to fit the understanding of contemporary scholarship. Massacre in Minnesota is an easy-to-follow, comprehensive look at a tragedy we’re still trying so hard to understand.    

In Rez Life, David Treuer, an Ojibwe from the Leech Lake Reservation, shows us the real-life consequences of historical events and policy. Through scholarship and anecdote, Treuer teaches readers what it really means to be Native American in a country that has tried, time and again, to erase them. Rez Life is not the history book rendition of past wrongs and tragic events. Instead, it is an articulate, expressive look at the people who live with the legacy of those past wrongs and tragic events. It shows readers the Native Americans they won’t see in history books—the ones that exist today, fighting to overcome the trauma thrust upon them.

Jim Northrup, Fond du lac Ojibwe author, was my writing mentor from the time I met him in 1991 until he passed away in 2015. He would always ask, “What are you writing today?” That was his way of encouraging me to keep writing. His crime novel, Dirty Copper is the story of Luke Warmwater, who returns to the Reservation after serving in Vietnam. Luke becomes a deputy sheriff on the Rez and sees firsthand the war raging below the appearance of peace.

I would listen to Jim talk about his writing and the progress he was making on his story as he wrote it. Listening to him encouraged me to keep going with my writing. Jim’s way of storytelling through the written word is something I have tried to emulate.