Missouri Books

A different way to consider some of the Murillo's paintings. A must for any spanish art lover.The book is an attempt to say something new. A no-nonsense book.A book to learn, for people really interested in art, not for those who pretend to care about it.

Original version published by Paul Fessler in H-Net Book Review for H-GAGCS listserv

An academic's recommendation of a book as a "good read", however, can often be regarded as suspect by undergraduates and general readers. Perhaps our overexposure to dissertations and monographs have perverted our sense of what constitutes an enjoyable and easy to read book. To counteract such biases and perversions, I asked my wife to read Hauser's book. This book passed my wife's test. If only all books published by academic presses could boast such accessibility.

Originally published in Germany in 1950, My Farm on the Mississippi was clearly written for a non-academic audience. In this brief, very accessible book, Heinrich Hauser, an opponent of the Nazi regime and wartime German refugee, turns his three years from 1945-1948 on a Missouri farm near the German-American community of Wittenberg into an engaging adventure story. This book caught the eye of Curt Poulton, a historical geographer and translator at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, who translated this work into English. Poulton argues that Hauser, as a German living among a German immigrant community in the wake of World War II, offers invaluable commentary upon this 1940s "postimmigrant America" where immigrants' native language and customs were still alive.

In 1939, Hauser, a prolific writer of fiction and non-fiction, escaped from Germany with his Jewish wife and two children. After unsuccessfully trying his hand at farming in upstate New York and then at city life in Chicago, Hauser and his wife yearned for the romantic fresh air of the proverbial American heartland. With no prospects or firm destination, Hauser set off for St. Louis and points southward in an old 1928 Packard in search of his dream farm. South of St. Louis and just north of Cape Girardeau, Hauser and his wife began passing signs to "Stuttgart", "Dresden", "Altenberg", and "Wittenberg". In Cape Girardeau, Hauser spotted a "Dr. Schultz" and paid this German-speaking physician a visit to inquire about the region and the German-sounding places. Working through the German-American subculture, Hauser soon bought a farmstead south of the town of Wittenberg, Missouri on the Mississippi floodplain.

Hauser recounts how his wife Rita and son Huc struggled to make the farm a working proposition for the next three years. Most of the profits, however, were used to provide care packages and other aid to their German friends and relatives back home. During the rest of the time, his family survives horrific floods, raging forest fires, and a comic shipwreck. During the summers, his son Huc devised plans and adventures such as making a boat with an outboard motor in ways reminiscent of a Little Rascals episode. By 1948, however, low crop prices and homesickness convinced the reluctant Hausers to return to Germany and abandon their Missouri farm.

Nevertheless, Hauser offers a useful window into this German-American society on the banks of the Mississippi. As Hauser notes, it is this region's rural isolation that permitted its German culture and language to survive both World War I and World War II and beyond. Hauser knew he was among his own kind when he saw women working the fields---a practice Americans generally avoided. In the local bars, these German-Americans would add salt to modify the sweet American beers like Falstaff and Budweiser. When the war in Europe was over, Hauser's family celebrated with a crowd of itinerant German-American lumber workers playing "schottiches" and singing songs such as "Am Brunnen vor dem Tore" and sea tunes like "In Hamburg da bin ich gewesen". Also particularly interesting (and useful for immigration and ethnicity courses) are Hauser's recollected interactions between these German-Americans and the nearby African-Americans.

Just as Alexis de Toqueville's Democracy in America offers an outsider's critique of early nineteenth-century America, Hauser's observations present a valuable perspective of postwar America, its rural traditions and ethnic relationships. Hauser is an "outsider/insider" within the postwar German-American community. Though an outsider as a recent German refugee, he can speak the language (both linguistically and theologically). This allowed him to enter into the culture and bring a unique perspective to bear upon it.

Because this book was originally written for a German audience unfamiliar with many aspects of American society and culture, Hauser's narrative is particularly instructive to an American audience today. For many undergraduate students in particular, Hauser's emphasis on the basics of everyday American life proves more fascinating to American readers today than when it was originally published. Approaching the daily life of the post-World War II America from the cultural distance of a foreigner is in many ways similar to the approach of today's readers and students separated from that cultural landscape by the passage of fifty years. Thus, Hauser's cultural observations, which may have seemed less interesting to an American reader in the 1950s when the work was first published are met with a much different perspective.

Without Poulton's sparkling translation, however, these observations would have lost much of their power to English readers. Poulton's work arouses comparisons to other recent and notable translations such as W.C. Kuniczak's translation of Heinrich Sienkiewicz's monumental Trilogy beginning with the novel "With Fire and Sword" (popular Polish nationalist fiction written during the late 19th century-a useful assignment for courses dealing with 19th century European nationalism, by the way). Poulton remains faithful to Hauser's intent to provide his readers with an adventure story. So dependent upon narrative flow and colorful description, this value and attraction of this work would have been irreparably harmed by a poor translation.

Readers interested in this approach should also see the superb collection of immigrant letters in News from the Land of Freedom by Kamphoefner, Helbich, and Sommer (Cornell University Press, 1991).

I've enjoyed reading this book to my little boy, now 28 months old, most nights for nearly a year now. The text communicates the ideas about why church and religion are important in words he can understand, and the simple, colorful illustrations give us lots of opportunities to identify the birds, animals, and other objects. (When he's older, I'll be able to talk about the white doves and butterflies as ideas about Christianity.) -- Bill McClain

This book, written by Paul J. Nance, is one of the best reference books I have ever seen. I recently purchased the book and I find its contents and full color pictures very exciting. Whether you plan on traveling to the Middle East, or if you just want to learn about the culture, this is the book to read.

This book has several first rate accounts of Paul J. Nance's thirty two years in the Middle East. He worked for Aramco Oil Company in Saudi Arabia during this time and he acquired quite a bit of knowledge. Since his return to America he has started a collection of Middle Eastern artifacts and art. The book details many of the artifacts in his Museum, and is extremely helpful in learning about Middle Eastern culture.

This book can change the way you look at the Islamic religion. Before I looked at the book and visited the Museum of Mr. Nance I knew very little about the Arabian Penninsula.

Printed on high quality paper and interspersed with full color photography, The Natural World of Lewis and Clark is an amazing interpretation of Lewis and Clark's famous exploratory expedition to the New World from a modern point of view. The latest cutting edge advances such as DNA research, understanding of proteins, and new laboratory techniques are applied to the expedition's observations in plain terms. Readily accessible to readers of all backgrounds, The Natural World of Lewis and Clark includes in-depth discussion of flora and fauna species mentioned in the expedition's writings, as well as comments on the expedition's interactions with Native Americans. A bibliography and index round out this thoughtful and welcome fresh perspective on one of the greatest voyages of discovery in American history.

This is a moderately interesting read about the New Madrid Earthquakes from 1811-1812. Constant temblors for about 5-6 straight months. The Earthquake America Forgot is also a rather interesting read, aside from a bit of occasional biblical commentary.

If you're really into the New Madrid quakes of that period and some of the related geology, this might be work a perusal.

Just heard of this event July 07. Maybe I was asleep in class when this was mentioned, but as noted in the foreword by Dr. Stewart I'm not the only one who missed this, maybe the greatest recorded event of all time, or is even yet unaware. This book, 120 pages, compiles in one place extensive amounts of information about "the event". I hope it's not a hundred year event, but as we are approaching another hundred years, it might do well to be watchful. Otherwise, in my humble opinion as an unqualified scientist, the book is very informative and rich with references for further reading, or study if you are qualified or wish to be.

This book is a treasure trove! For those interested in earthquake phenomena, it gives a great and easy to read description of the different types of faulting, rifting, and earthquake scars the earth displays. A step by step set of maps and guides demonstrate exactly where to go to encounter the remnants of the New Madrid sequence; even 200 years later, the earth still tells the tale.

A fabulous and unique reference guide for anyone interested in earthquakes - snap it up right away!

New Territories, New Perspectives: The Religious Impact of the Louisiana Purchase is an anthology of scholarly essays by learned authors examining how the Louisiana Purchase - which doubled the fledgling America's territory - permanently transformed American culture in general and religion in particular. A predominantly Protestant culture spread westward, further intermixing with the meld that began when French and Spanish Catholic missionaries brought their faiths to native peoples. Individual writings include "Mixed-Race Ecstasy across a Single Line: The Deep South Roots of Pentecostal Tongue Speaking", "Voudou Purchase: The Louisiana Purchase in the Caribbean World", "Spirituality and Resistance among African-Creoles", and much more. "The interweaving of blood and culture between Africans and Native Americans in the plantation regions may not have been as extensive as the interweaving between Africans and Europeans, but it ran deep where it occurred, much deeper than is acknowledged in the average North American history." Thoughtfully researched and engagingly presented, New Territories, New Perspectives is highly recommended especially for college library collections.

ES un muy buen trabajo del Sr Pearson, constituye un especial y detallado aporte al conocimiento de este gran chilenísimo autor, para los lectores angloparlantes

The stories of K. A. Longstreet's NIGHT-BLOOMING CEREUS provide everything I want in a collection: a distinctive voice, on the one hand, and, on the other, a wide spectrum of experience. Her subjects include, among others, an obsessive admirer of the art of Van Gogh, who dyes his beard ginger in honor of his idol; a savvy Serbian war criminal and his American interviewer, himself guiltily conscious of having participated in a long-ago gang rape; a Jewish boy sheltered by a young Dutch woman during World War II; a dying old woman remembering her first meeting with her husband-to-be on a ferry through the Greek isles. Locales range from Paris to Minneapolis to Hiroshima to Switzerland, and the tone is variously lyric, comic, even farcical, and tragic. But NIGHT-BLOOMING CEREUS offers something more: it's one of those books that alters a reader's world. As Longstreet's theme is the power of imagination to save, to complicate, and sometimes to entrap the lives of people in circumstances dire or mundane, so her book embodies that same imaginative force. She makes us aware of the secret riches of our lives, the tragedies and raptures of those whom we brush unknowingly, the miracles waiting to be unfolded in the ignored, the forgotten, the bypassed. I'll never look at paintings the same way again, now that Longstreet has made me aware that a thin line can be seen crossing the brush strokes of WHEAT FIELD AT AUVERS, indicating the passing of a blade of grass across the canvas when it was still wet--proof that the painter was chewing a blade of grass as he applied those famous blobs. Similarly, you will never see the world in the same way after encountering these transforming fictions.