Description

The Lake Effect by Fred Carlisle

“I stood ankle deep in Lake Michigan for the first time when I was two years old,” Fred Carlisle writes. His fascination with the lake began then and has continued throughout his life.

The Lake Effect is grounded in the author’s personal experiences but moves to wider considerations that include the aesthetic, emotional, historic, economic, and social effects of Lake Michigan.

The book captures the lake’s mesmerizing beauty in summer and winter. It also examines the way Lake Michigan sustains the economies and societies of every place along its shores. It speaks of the ways human intervention and carelessness have polluted, damaged, and degraded the lake. The book also describes the lake’s power-in both water and ice forms-to drown swimmers, wreck ships, destroy beaches, and consume houses.

The Lake Effect explores as well the functions and power of water broadly. Water can be magical and make us healthier, happier, and more peaceful. It can also be an adversary that damages and destroys. Water is equally a comfort and a threat: a mosaic of multiplicity and contradiction.

Fred Carlisle lived in Michigan for twenty years, raising a young family and teaching at Michigan State University. He enjoyed a long academic career as a professor of English and then as a university provost at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia.His fascination with Lake Michigan began when he was just two. An old photograph shows two-year-old Freddie on a Lake Michigan beach, ankle deep in the water. Carlisle grew up in Ohio, and has also lived in Florida and rural Virginia. He now lives with his wife, Beth, on her family farm in the Virginia mountains.Carlisle has written literary criticism-studies of Walt Whitman and Loren Eiseley-and three memoirs. His most recent book is Hollow and Home: A Story of Self and Place.