Thursday, July 23rd -6pm book talk and signing with...

              Jeff Alexander is an award winning author and a former environmental journalist. He covered Great Lakes issues for the past 20 years for several Michigan newspapers, most recently for The Muskegon Chronicle. He currently works for the National Wildlife Federation’s Great Lakes office.

              Alexander’s newspaper articles won numerous journalism awards, helped spur pollution cleanups worth more than $30 million, prompted a ban on expanded oil drilling beneath Lake Michigan and forced the U.S. Coast Guard to cancel plans to conduct live-fire weapons training on the Great Lakes.

              His first book, "The Muskegon: The Majesty and Tragedy of Michigan's Rarest River,” was published in 2006 by the Michigan State University Press. “The Muskegon” was named a 2007 Michigan Notable Book by the Library of Michigan Foundation and earned a State History Award from the Michigan Historical Society. 

              His new book, “Pandora’s Locks: The Opening of the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Seaway,” was published this year by Michigan State University. It explores how allowing ocean freighters into the Great Lakes 50 years ago unleashed one of the world’s worst environmental disasters.

              Alexander is a native of Los Angeles. He resides with his family in Grand Haven, Michigan.

A 50-year retrospective of the St. Lawrence Seaway: The St. Lawrence Seaway was considered one of the world's greatest engineering achievements when it opened in 1959. The $1 billion project — a series of locks, canals, and dams that tamed the ferocious St. Lawrence River opened the Great Lakes to the global shipping industry.

Linking ports on lakes Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, and Ontario to shipping hubs on the world's seven seas increased global trade in the Great Lakes region. But it came at an extraordinarily high price. Foreign species that immigrated into the lakes unleashed a biological shift that reconfigured the world's largest freshwater ecosystems.

Pandora's Locks is the story of politicians and engineers who, driven by hubris and handicapped by ignorance, demanded that the Seaway be built at any cost. It is the tragic tale of government agencies that could have prevented ocean freighters from laying waste to the Great Lakes ecosystems, but failed to act until it was too late. Blending science with compelling personal accounts, this book is the first comprehensive account of how inviting transoceanic freighters into North America's freshwater seas transformed these wondrous lakes.

Thursday, July 30th 6pm book talk and signing.

Some stories don’t need to get their hair coifed or their teeth whitened before going out in public.

Sailing Grace, honored as “Best New Non-Fiction Book” by Indie Awards, a finalist for USA Book News’ “Best Books” award, and as a “Michigan Notable Book”, is one of those stories.  She introduces herself this way:

        After eight visits to surgery in eight months, “heart transplant” is working its way into conversations with John’s doctors.

John and Barbara are talking about going sailing instead.

This true story, narrated with present-tense immediacy, begins with John flat on his back in a local health club, gasping for air.  It ends thirty-one months and four thousand miles later when he, Barbara, and their two youngest children maneuver their sailboat, Grace, into Schull Harbor, Ireland.  A gritty account of their family’s struggle to do better than simply survive, it is also a commentary on how love heals,  dreams energize, and trauma can be a wake-up call.  From hospital ward to the stormy Atlantic, this hard-edge story will resonate with anyone who has struggled with profound adversity - be it divorce, disease, depression, financial crisis, or the “heavy weather” that unexpectedly blows through every life.

An international edition of Sailing Grace will be published by Adlard Coles (London) in the summer of 2009. It will be entitled Outrageous Grace, and will be sold everywhere in the world, with the exception of the United States.