Charles R. Eisendrath
ABOUT THE FOUNDER:
MAKER OF ORGANIC MAPLE SYRUP
After an early career as a Time Magazine correspondent in Washington, London, Paris, and Buenos Aires, Charles R. Eisendrath joined the faculty of the University of Michigan but continued journalism as a freelancer. His work has appeared on NPR, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, International Herald-Tribune, and The Atlantic.
At Michigan, Eisendrath founded Wallace House. It includes the Knight-Wallace Journalism Fellowships, one of the nation’s leading mid-career professional programs, and The Livingston Awards, widely known as “the Pulitzer Prize for the Young.”
Director of the Wallace House programs from 1986 to 2016, he raised a $60 million endowment to sustain the Fellowships permanently and remained the founding director of the Prizes.
In the culinary world, Eisendrath is known for founding Grillworks, Inc. to manufacture and market his patented device that helped re-introduce Americans to cooking over wood.
Eisendrath has spent the second half of a varied career in academia, very much a part of the University of Michigan but also true to a journalist’s calling as an outside observer, maintaining a critical attitude. In the business school, where he frequently guest lectured, he was surprised and disappointed by programs geared to “profit maximization” at all costs. It seemed to him a formula for compromised quality in everything except financial performance. His message to MBAs starting their careers was precisely what he applies to making maple syrup—a goal of maximized satisfaction in work and the product itself. Profit at some level necessary but not the goal. Riches sought but not necessarily financial riches.
Eisendrath summed up much of this In “Downstream from Here: a Big Life in a Small Place,” a memoir published in 2019. He meant by that title that throughout a life of travel, he felt himself shaped by the land, water, creatures, and characters encountered on a family farm he visited every year of a long, busy life. It begins with a chapter about how his new effort to make superior maple syrup there began with accidentally burning the old sugar shack to the ground. Lessons learned are to be tasted in every Lake Charlevoix Maple syrup bottle.
He and his wife Julia, a quilter, live in Ann Arbor and East Jordan, MI. Their youngest son, Mark, is an artist.
World Scoop, Sept. 11, 1973
People Magazine covers Grillworks.
MORE ABOUT
CHARLES R. EISENDRATH
Wikipedia
In the News
Traverse Magazine, November 2022
Columbia Journalism Review, October 2015
Michigan Alumnus Magazine, Spring 2012
Selected Journalism
New Livingston Awards Winners to the Fast Track, HuffPost, 8/11/2014
The Other Mike Wallace, The Atlantic, 4/19/2012
In Praise of Rupert Murdoch, The Atlantic, 9/11/2012
Guns for Hunting People are Different, The Atlantic, 5/24/2012
Government Secrecy and the Press 1, C-Span, 1/8/2007
Government Secrecy and the Press 2, C-Span, 1/8/2007
Back to Nature, NPR, 12/4/2001
After a Plane Crash, Celebrating Life, The New York Times, 3/18/2001
Race, Press and Public Policy, C-Span, 1/8/2001
Radio
“All Things Considered,” NPR/Michigan Radio
“Politics and Prejudices,” with Jack Lessenberry
“Points North,” NPR/Interlochen Public Radio
“Michigan’s Big Show” with Michael Patrick Shiels, Spreaker
“Monocle” with Fernando Augusto Pacheco
Press
National Writers Series, Author Next Door
Michigan in Books, Tom Powers
Northern Express, Al Parker
Record-Eagle, Dan Nielsen
DOWNSTREAM FROM HERE: A BIG LIFE IN A SMALL PLACE
Why not learn how to learn by doing and take careful note of where each lesson comes from? Why not go backwards and forwards at the same time, intro-prospecting what’s gone into our gene pools by letting it come out as the future unfolds?
Actually, each of us is a family album that few of us take the time to reference. The trick is learning how to read the pages while making new ones at the same time. The turning part happens by itself — you just need to pay attention.
In this series of essays spanning four decades, Charles R. Eisendrath explores the things that grow lives of their own when left undisturbed at a “second” home — things like an “ancestor room,” a storm-struck forest, a player piano and a childhood fear of wild dogs. These are examinations of the loves of a place inhabited only temporarily, but with permanent assoiations that shape perceptions of all else, everywhere.
In 1973, after covering the assassination of Chilean President Salvador Allende for Time Magazine, Eisendrath decided to not let a career stand in the way of growing roots and building a life. He moved with his wife and two young sons to Michigan, a part of the world imagined and carved into 160-acre homesteads by Thomas Jefferson in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. At Overlook Farm, the Eisendraths would be his heirs.
These essays range from Anatolia to Argentina, from FDR’s secret wartime fishing trip to a plane crash in Costa Rica. The margin notes of academic articles lead to a grill admired by James Beard and a Saudi prince. Tenure at the University of Michigan inspires a cherry orchard and bulldozers invite ghosts. Serious, hilarious, inquisitive, spontaneous, Eisendrath introduces us to the people and places, the life, death and afterlife that goes on nonstop, all around us, “Just Downstream from Here,” meaning where we are right now.
“Charles Eisendrath has long been considered a reporter’s reporter but with Downstream From Here he takes us on a lyrical and altogether enchanting journey through a rich life of family, nature, farms, fish and fun. He reminds us to ignore deadlines and breathe deeply.”
TOM BROKAW, former anchor and managing editor of NBC Nightly News
“Written with the eye of a journalist, the prose of a novelist and the wit of a humorist, Downstream from Here takes you on a long walk down the path that leads to a life truly lived. Prepare to be inspired.”
JEFF DANIELS, actor, playwright and musician
“Downstream is the kind of book that demonstrates how you can actually be an intrepid foreign correspondent, devoted family man, fishing enthusiast, AND creator of the Grillery, the world’s best BBQ, in my book! The perfect … read, the balm to soothe the madness of our times, I give Downstream five stars.”
CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, Chief International Anchor for CNN and host of ‘Amanpour & Company’ on PBS
“An amazing, beautifully written and unusual memoir. In this vivid book, Charles Eisendrath mesmerizes us with glorious stories, which as with Thomas Jefferson’s from Monticello, are really love poems—to Eisendrath’s Michigan Overlook Farm, to nearby shimmering and stormy lakes, to its varied trees and wildlife, to his devotion to family, and to a love for journalism exceeded only by his love for the wondrous outdoors.”
KEN AULETTA, author and columnist, The New Yorker
“Downstream from Here is neither a pilgrim’s nor a rogue’s progress, but a sybarite’s unabashed plea for sufferance. Eisendrath is a likeably voluble, well-informed Virgil through the rounds of his own life’s considerable exploits. And it all works here. His memoir seeks not so much regulation redemption and transcendence as corroboration that human life is, in fact, worth living—especially, it must be admitted, his.”
RICHARD FORD, novelist and short story writer
“Too often we are told we have to choose between living wide or living deep, between travelling across the surface of the earth, or coming to truly know and love one place. But Charles Eisendrath has done both in his rich life. This is the memoir of a foreign correspondent and a journalism mentor and yet a man who is spiritually rooted at his beloved Overlook Farm. The essays that he has written about this life are a joy!”
ELLEN GOODMAN, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and syndicated columnist
“Downstream from Here is a trip home, to the home you dream of and which may not exist for you, but—lucky for us—it does for Charles Eisendrath, a reporter, orchardist, teacher, inventor, a father and son and husband whose love of the outdoors is matched by his astonishing attention to its joys and depths. This book comes along with you long after a passage is finished. It speaks to you in a voice beautiful and poignant, a poem about longing, achievements, disappointments and, ultimately, joy.”
DOUG STANTON, author and co-founder, National Writers Series
“Charles Eisendrath could be fearing for his life while interviewing a Chilean dictator after a bloody coup. Or he may be chatting with a Michigan fisherman at sunrise. He comes to both conversations with the same humility and infectious curiosity. And that’s the beauty of this book. As he reflects on his journey, he tells us it’s okay to crave both adventure and quiet moments with people we love. In the end, what really is fulfillment? You’ll leave this book in a better place to find it.”
DAVID GREENE, co-host, ‘Morning Edition,’ NPR
“Whether he’s covering a coup, surviving a plane crash, learning how to tap a Michigan maple or pitching his patented wood-burning barbecue cooker, former Time correspondent Charles Eisendrath’s Downstream from Here offers a great read. From his rural Michigan “spirit home,” as he calls it, Eisendrath offers us an eclectic collection of essays that highlight the value of place in our emotional lives. With wit and wisdom, he revisits the past and helps us to feel better about the future.”
CLARENCE PAGE, author, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and syndicated columnist
“Charles Eisendrath writes that ‘Journalists spend their lives looking out the window.’ In this marvelous memoir, he lets us look back in that same window to a family farm in northern Michigan, and how it relates to a fascinating international life. Downstream from Here is a paean to place and to family with a cover by one son, drawings by the other, and a counter-intuitive explanation for why one of the country’s most engaging reporters invented a disruptive cooking device called the Grillworks.
ARI WEINZWEIG, author, co-founding partner, Zingerman’s businesses