Somehow, we missed a very kind notice of Up the Rouge! Paddling Detroit’s Hidden River in Detroit’s Metro Times newspaper. The review of our book was the lead section of a roundup story by Michael Jackman in the November 25, 2009 issue of Metro Times.
Here’s what Jackman wrote about Up the Rouge!:
“For a city that’s shrinking, Detroit sure gets a lot of play on the bookshelves. From appealing photographic books to auto histories to poetry anthologies, there’s plenty of paper to stuff a stocking with this year.
“Take Up the Rouge! (Wayne State, $34.95), for instance. Former Freep journo and active Detroit blogger Joel Thurtell tells of his 2005 canoe journey up the Rouge River. What at first appears to be a stunt quickly develops into an investigation of how the river’s environmental quality is ignored. As he makes his way up the trash-strewn, polluted waterway, scrambling over logjams and avoiding bacterial infections, Thurtell (and photographer Patricia Beck) force us to bear witness to how, unlike our other recreational rivers, we’ve been content to turn this one into a sewer. The resulting story is unusual, insightful and surprisingly engaging.”
If there are any of Thurtell’s blog readers who haven’t already read “Up the Rouge!” or listened to the audio version, do yourselves a favor and either buy the book/audiotape, or get it at your local library.
The Bible says “a prophet is not without honor except in his own country.” If this book had been written about any other body of water in any other state, we would be seeing Beck and Thurtell on The Today Show, Good Morning, America and Sixty Minutes. (Hey, Oprah, get with it!) But somehow, though Thurtell’s findings are an important microcosm of our continent’s rivers, because the location is in the Detroit area, it is pretty much ignored by the rest of the country: To paraphrase another Biblical quote: Can anything good come out of Detroit? (Hey, Thurtell, maybe if you’d put some sex in it . . . )
If you want your children to have clean, untoxic water to drink, wake up and smell the sewage: Thurtell and Beck have done Detroiters a big favor; the least we can do is acknowledge it by investing a few hours in reading or listening to “Up the Rouge!” And then doing something to help the rest of us clean up what’s rotten in the Rouge.