The Great Black Swamp: Toxic Algae, Toxic Relationships, and the Most Interesting Place Nobody’s Ever Heard of

Novelist Wensink (Broken Piano for President) presents a charming, idiosyncratic love letter to his native Ohio. He hails from the state’s rural northwest, a land “so empty... that even other Ohioans” consider it “something like narcolepsy in geographic form.” In August 2014, the environmental monotony was broken by the appearance of a “strange lime-colored goo” on Lake Erie—“an algae bloom so large... it was visible from space” and “so toxic it could have killed the entire city” of Toledo. Investigating the algae bloom sends Wensink delving into the history of Toledo—a city “born with its back to the wall” that briefly became the “illegal gambling capital of America”—and its surrounding region, which in the mid-19th century was “one million acres of dark, deadly, impenetrable swamp” halfway between Chicago and New York. Settlers hoping to tame the prime location real estate were struck down by malaria and cholera; even burial was thwarted (“the water table would simply push the deceased up through the mud”). This all changed when James B. Hill—“the Great Black Swamp’s hero, villain, and Falstaff”—invented a ditch-digging engine in the 1890s that eradicated the wetlands “in a matter of years” and ushered in industrial agriculture and the mass use of fertilizer—the eventual culprit behind the algae bloom. With humor and pathos, Wensink weaves his own life into this twisty environmental history, from his farmer ancestors to the dissolution of his marriage. Funny, fascinating, and sneakily profound, this delights. (Nov.)