A novel by writer Jeff Vande Zande. "Jeff Vande Zande's Into the Desperate Country captures the primitive pulse of a life on the edge. Against the backdrop of Northern Michigan, a taut drama plays itself out, pulling the reader along on its tight rope. Once the logical world of our daily routines falls away, what are we left with? Vande Zande offers no easy answers in this impressive debut novel." --Jim Daniels Excerpt from a review: The title of Jeff Vande Zande's debut novel, Into the Desperate Country, aptly refers to Thoreau's statement in Walden; that "the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." The desperation of life on the assembly-line drives the hero, Stanley, to his own Walden, a cabin by a river near Gaylord, Michigan. Necessity presses him close to nature, where he lives in a kind of a blessed limbo waiting for the world to close in on him. Unlike Thoreau, he is about to lose his cabin to a bank foreclosure, so his haven is in peril. He is caught between looking for answers to his dilemma outside himself and looking inside himself for the strength he needs to find solutions.