Book reviews

Fall 2004

By Gayla Marty

From M, fall 2004

A Measure of Endurance: The Unlikely Triumph of Steven Sharp

By William Mishler

Steven Sharp was 17 when he lost both his arms in a hay baler while working on an Oregon farm. But due to a notice in an old magazine, remembered by a friend, Sharp became the center of a case against a billion-dollar multinational company. This thorough and compassionate account of Sharp and the Minneapolis attorney who represented him was completed by Mishler, a poet and associate professor of Scandinavian languages and studies, not long before his own death in 2002.

Knopf, 2003; ISBN 0-375-41133-X; $24.00 hc

Grass Angel

By Julie Schumacher

Eleven-year-old Frances thought she had summer planned until her mother took her little brother and left for a spiritual retreat half-way across the country. A very different season unfolds as Frances moves into a house near the cemetery with Aunt Blue, gets into trouble, learns to make angels in the grass, and slowly discovers a lot about the most important things in life. This is the first novel for young readers by Schumacher, author of The Body is Water and a member of the creative writing faculty.

Delacorte Press/Random House, 2004; ISBN 0-385-73073-X; $15.95 hc

Life and Death in a Small Southern Town: Memories of Shubuta, Mississippi

By Gayle Graham Yates

Part history, part sociology, part memoir, Yates's story of her home town is both poignant and poetic. Shubuta's people, places, documents, and memory weave together with interviews to reveal an American small town both beautiful and ugly, segregated during Yates' youth, and now led by a black mayor, bank officer, librarian, aldermen, and police. Yates is a professor emerita of American studies.

Louisiana State University Press, 2004; ISBN 0-8071-2937-2; $24.95 pb

MORE INFO: Contact University of Minnesota Bookstores, located in Coffman Memorial Union and the St. Paul Student Center, at 612-625-6000 or generalbooks@umn.edu. Look for faculty authors at www.bookstore.umn.edu/genref/faculty.html.