Böcker utgivna av University of Minnesota Press

"Originally published as Restlosigkeit. Weltprojekte um 1900. Copyright 2006 Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag in der S. Fisher Verlag HmbH, Frankfurt am Main"--Title page verso.

Lake Minnetonka is renowned for its natural beauty as well as the prominent people it has attracted to its shores as a historic site of grand hotels, steamboats, and wealthy visitors from around the world, and as the home of the legendary Excelsior Amusement Park. But did you know that early European settlers to the region faced conditions so dire that they named an outlet of the lake “Purgatory Creek”? Or that a ginseng boom brought slaves to Wayzata to harvest the plant’s roots? Many know that Frank Lloyd Wright designed famous homes around the lake, but few are aware he was also arrested there for living with his mistress and sent to the Hennepin County jail for “white slavery.” By the Waters of Minnetonka uncovers remarkable and hidden facts about the lake and those who have lived on its shores, from the region’s original Dakota inhabitants to the present. Nineteenth-century plantation owners made Minnetonka into a summer vacation playground for the wealthy, and Prohibition-era battles led teetotalers to hoax Minneapolis newspapers about bloody clashes between preachers and saloon owners. Eric Dregni, who grew up in Minnetonka, sheds light on intriguing, if at times unsettling, aspects of the lake’s history, challenging myths and revisiting elements of the past that have been forgotten or glossed over. He also relates—and sometimes pokes fun at—the opulent, glamorous, and sometimes raucous moments that have made Lake Minnetonka an icon of splendid resort living in Minnesota.

Eric Dregni is assistant professor of English at Concordia University in St. Paul. He is the author of several books, including Minnesota Marvels (2001), Midwest Marvels (2006), In Cod We Trust: Living the Norwegian Dream (2008), and Never Trust a Thin Cook and Other Lessons from Italy’s Culinary Capital (2009), all published by the University of Minnesota Press. During the summer, he is dean of Lago del Bosco, the Italian Concordia Language Village in northern Minnesota. He lives in Minneapolis.

Grant Farred takes up the event as a philosophical problem from a novel perspective, examining infamous events in sport and arguing that theorizing the event through sport makes possible an entirely original way of thinking about it. He shows how what was inherent in the event is opened to new possibilities for understanding ontological being by thinking about sport philosophically.