Kenosha-based writer Michael Schumacher has been fishing the Great Lakes for good shipwreck stories. In recent years, he’s written on the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald and published two other accounts of catastrophic lake storms. With Torn in Two, Schumacher explores the 1966 sinking of the Daniel J. Morrell in Lake Huron. Only one sailor survived. For 60 years, the steam-driven ship had been a cog in a bulk-shipping industry that hauled iron ore from Minnesota across waters that promised danger when the fall winds blew. The Morrell had survived many gales, but as the author notes, its old hull was getting brittle with age. As usual, Schumacher finds the human element amidst ship and storms, giving a sense for life on the lakes in the last century.
