Patrick Hicks – författare

A witty, wise, and affectionate journey to every corner of the North Star State. After years of living abroad, writer and poet Patrick Hicks returns to Minnesota only to find that his home state feels like a foreign country.In the tradition of Bill Bryson and Paul Theroux, Greater Minnesota is an account of Hicks's discoveries. Half travelogue, half history, and fully delightful in its exploration of new places and people, this book follows Hicks as he ventures to the North Shore, the Iron Range, the Southwest, and even Up North in the dead of winter. As he travels the back roads of the state, he visits the Mayo Clinic, the SPAM Museum, ancient petroglyphs, the US Hockey Hall of Fame, the birthplace of Minnesota Public Radio, a world-class aviation museum hidden on the prairie, a lost forest, the humble start of the Mississippi River, and other stops along the way that are both surprising and intriguing.Through conversations with people on his travels, Greater Minnesota brings the reader along as he searches for what it means to be a Minnesotan.

A witty, wise, and affectionate journey to every corner of the North Star State. After years of living abroad, writer and poet Patrick Hicks returns to Minnesota only to find that his home state feels like a foreign country.In the tradition of Bill Bryson and Paul Theroux, Greater Minnesota is an account of Hicks's discoveries. Half travelogue, half history, and fully delightful in its exploration of new places and people, this book follows Hicks as he ventures to the North Shore, the Iron Range, the Southwest, and even Up North in the dead of winter. As he travels the back roads of the state, he visits the Mayo Clinic, the SPAM Museum, ancient petroglyphs, the US Hockey Hall of Fame, the birthplace of Minnesota Public Radio, a world-class aviation museum hidden on the prairie, a lost forest, the humble start of the Mississippi River, and other stops along the way that are both surprising and intriguing.Through conversations with people on his travels, Greater Minnesota brings the reader along as he searches for what it means to be a Minnesotan.

Set in Nazi Germany’s only all-female concentration camp, Across the Lake is a story of survival amid overwhelming brutality. With a keen eye towards historical accuracy, this is an unflinching portrayal of how prisoners supported each other while holding onto their humanity.This is also a story of the female guards—the Aufseherin—who were every bit as vicious as the SS in Buchenwald, Dachau, and Auschwitz. What did it mean to be a woman in a concentration camp like RavensbrÜck?Across the Lake is an unforgettable story about gender and violence in the Holocaust. As Svea Fischer struggles to survive yet another day, she has to forget her past and endure the brutal reality swirling around her. Meanwhile, a new guard, Anna Hartmann, enters RavensbrÜck and sees not horror, but opportunity. As the story unfolds, these two women find their futures inextricably tied together.Told with historical insight, Across the Lake explores a concentration camp that was totally unique in the Third Reich.

In the Shadow of Dora spans two very different decades from the Nazi concentration camp of Dora-Mittelbau to the coast of central Florida in the late 1960s; the book tells the story of the real life intersections between the horror of the Third Reich's V-2 rocket program and the wonderment of the Apollo missions. Eli Hessel, a brilliant young Jewish mathematician, finds himself deep beneath a mountain where he is forced to build Nazi rockets. When he is finally freed from this secret underground concentration camp, he immigrates to New York, studies astrophysics, and is recruited by NASA to help build the largest rocket ever to rise above a launch pad: the Saturn V. To his shock, though, he will be under the command of former Nazi scientists Wernher von Braun and Arthur Rudolph, both of who were at Dora. As America turns to the moon and cheers for rockets that lance the sky, Eli is swallowed up by the past and must cope with memories he thought were safely buried. This is a novel that asks questions about memory, morality, technology, and how the past influences the present. If we clamp down images of horror, will they always ignite and rise up on us?