Lake Superior Profiles combines biography, history, folklore, religion, and humor in fifteen diverse chapters. In Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Ontario, Gagnon visits the rivers, bays, small towns, larger cities, and nature preserves that surround Lake Superior to meet the people who make their homes there. Among those he meets are several fisherman, a botanist studying arctic wildflowers on Isle Royale, a former lighthouse keeper on a remote reef on the lake, a voyageur reenactor from Duluth, a woman who harvests wild rice each August in the Bad River Sloughs, and a monk living on the Keweenaw Peninsula. He also writes about three of the lake’s major fish species, a rock formation steeped in lore called the Sleeping Giant, and the current fragile ecology of the Big Lake.
