Imagining the Forest: Narratives of Michigan and the Upper Midwest by John Knott (review)

144 The Michigan Historical Review John Knott. Imagining the Forest: Narratives of Michigan and the Upper Midwest. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011. Pp. 314. Index. Notes. Cloth, $75.00; paper, $29.95. “We give our forests meaning with the metaphors we choose to represent them and the stories we learn to tell about them,” notes John Knott in the introduction to Imagining the Forest (p. 6). This phenomenon is not restricted to works of literature. Scientists and policymakers have deployed aesthetic arguments for forest preservation, and some, such as Aldo Leopold (particularly in his essay “Marshland Elegy”), associated beauty with ecological health. The time is surely ripe, then, for a volume that examines representations of the forests of the Upper Midwest within the larger context of America’s complicated and contradictory relationship with wild lands. John Knott has provided just such a volume, one that brilliantly achieves its task. Knott argues that two categories of metaphor have defined human relationships with upper-midwestern forests. The first is utilitarian, in which metaphors were deployed to understand forests as both commodities but also as playgrounds. Sometimes “play” in the forest could involve “the potential for significant environmental degradations and conflict with other recreational users (p. 190). Language articulating aesthetic and spiritual values comprises the second class of metaphors Knott examines. Both utilitarian and aesthetic images tap into deep strands of American culture. The switch from describing old-growth forests as “primeval” to “ancient,” for example, helped forest advocates re-enchant the natural world as well as connect with powerful sentiments of rural nostalgia. These categories of the utilitarian and aesthetic will not surprise scholars of ecological history, echoing as they do famous debates between John Muir and Gifford Pinchot, among many others. Knott adds to this history not through this thesis, but because of his wonderfully thick description of texts that provide a nuanced and historically dependent reading of forest literature. Literature, I should stress, is a broad category in this book. Knott’s impressive array of sources includes everything from Ojibwe visions (and how they were appropriated by other writers), to contemporary writers such as Jim Harrison and Philip Caputo, to technical documents. Nor does this book only examine environmental heroes. Indeed, Knott’s chapter on “The Culture of Logging” critiques how metaphors of use functioned for timbermen, associating timber companies with the Book Reviews 145 romantic labor of lumberjacks and placing the lumberjack’s labor into a narrative of national development. Fiction by William Davenport Hulbert and Stewart Edward White portrayed loggers as frontier heroes, battling company foremen and natural conditions to emerge in a contradictory cultural space, in which lumbermen were committed both to the progress of civilization and to the ineffable qualities of nature. Knott uses Harrison’s and Caputo’s appropriation of Ojibwe myth to argue that this literature is not merely inherently interesting but can also foster our own forest longings. “Older ways of imagining our relationship with the forest and its creatures can restore a sense of harmony with the natural world we inhabit,” he argues (p. 267). Knott’s insightful and entertaining book can help us do exactly that. Kevin C. Armitage Miami University of Ohio Bruce Allen Kopytek. Jacobson’s: I Miss It So! The Story of a Michigan Fashion Institution. Charleston, S.C.: The History Press, 2011. Pp. 202. Appendices. Photographs. Paper, $19.99. There was always something elusive about Michigan’s high-fashion retailer, Jacobson’s. It was a quiet, dignified specialty store that rarely made the news. The company had a strong, loyal customer base at its stores throughout Michigan, from communities such as Grosse Pointe, to Birmingham and its hometown in Jackson. And as many of the country’s high-end merchants, including Bonwit Teller, Sakowitz, and I. Magnin, fell to a changing retail environment based on value and convenience, Jacobson’s somehow remained. Jacobson’s: I Miss It So! is a long overdue tribute to this beloved Michigan institution, which was often called Jake’s by those who shopped there. Bruce Kopytek skillfully combines the art of storytelling with cold, hard business facts. Very few of Jake’s former customers know that the company had a...