Iowa Books

Good content for the Middle West. My book club will read for January 08.

In the mid-'40s, Barbara Scot's father abandoned his wife and two children and ran off with another woman, leaving behind a mortgaged farm and a pile of debts. He committed suicide in 1950, but his wife Katherine continued to live in the small Iowa town and to attend the Presbyterian Church that was witness to her shame. Years later, Scot returns to the town, to her grandfather's house, and to the farm that her mother defended, to try to understand the truth. What compelled her mother to remain? What compelled her father to flee? What combination of church and land loyalty and family heritage created this singularly American tragedy?

As she answers these poignant questions, Scot also movingly discovers a real father: her uncle Jim, who kept her safe and taught her to love nature and the world. Scot's story reminds us that the truth is never simple, and that we are all woven into an intricate web that stretches back into time and deep into community and culture. If you're looking for a book to help you understand a father's abandonment, a mother's determination, and the power of place, this story offers some important insights.

by Susan Wittig Albert
for Story Circle Book Reviews
www.storycirclebookreviews.org
reviewing books by, for, and about women

This book is not my usual genre, but thought I'd stretch a bit. A few chapters in, I felt that I should not be reading Barbara's private diary. Several chapters later I was wondering WHY I was reading Barbara's private diary. Several more chapters in, I was wondering why Barbara felt we all should be reading her private diary. I am confident that Barbara got more out of writing this book than I got out of reading it.

While I was aware that this was a memoir, my assumption was that something interesting must have happened to the author, or her immediate family, or her friends, or her neighbors, or her not so immediate family, or ANYONE! But that was not the case. While Barbara does a very good job of recalling various parts of her childhood, the reader is not really provided any reason to care about any of the characters. Unless you grew up in the Midwest, or were divorced once or twice, or had a parent die young or commit or attempt suicide, there was no real "hook," no connection to the author or her life. We don't really learn anything or take anything away from this book, nor do we learn that the author learned anything but a few missing facts about her past. We don't get any inkling of how that information and/or revelations will benefit her or the reader.

Despite her inclusion of geographic maps and genealogical family trees I had no idea who was related to whom, nor which generation was involved with which other generation. I'm sure it all made sense to her extended families, but to the moderately engaged reader it was very disjointed.

Though this volume was self-absorbed and narrow, Barbara's other volumes may be worth a read assuming that she has an actual story to tell in them.

i thoroughly enjoyed this book. i am not an expert critic, but i found myself wanting to go"home" again after reading her book. very nostalgic and bittersweet.

the book came some what handy, but I would have like more information than it gave. for example what drugs were used to treat the animals, or the difinative host and intermidiate host.

Miss Reith is referring to the 6th edition not the 5th. The 5th edition is still the premier reference for any parasitology student. Unfortunately the 6th edition and later editions were edited, diluted and reformatted to become a nice fecal collector used to house train a pet. Useless is a kinder description. Find, buy any edition before the 6th!

I was surprised at Dr.? Reith's review of this book. Contrary to what Reith affirms, the book IS divided into host sections, al least for the parasites diagnosed by fecal examination; actually, there are 28 pages and 55 photographs devoted to dogs and cats, 16 pages and 32 photographs devoted to ruminants, etc. Parasites of the urinary tract, genital tracts, or skin are in a separate chapter, as are blood parasites and arthropods. This does not bother me terribly. I wish Reith had mentioned the "very common parasites" that are not included; I have not missed any yet of the common ones in a veterinary practice. I have a fairly extensive collection of parasitology diagnosis books and, for the variety and/or quality of the photos, this is still the best. I only wish that some of the photos were in color but I am not sure I could afford it. I still recommend it very strongly to my students of Veterinary Parasitology and to veterinary practitioners.

The features that made the 5th edition so helpful as a reference, like separating the book into sections according to the type of host (ie: dog, sheep, horse, rodent), and showing photos of the parasites that commonly are found in or on that host, have been removed. Additionally, some very common parasites are not even included in this 6th edition! Rather than a good reference book, it has now been reduced to somewhat of a primer on parasitology, one that introduces you to 'types' of parasites, rather than one that actually enables you to recognize characteristics of one parasite that distinguish it from another, similar parasite so that you can specifically identify it. This book is no longer useful, as the previous edition was, for reference work. I do not recommend it.

"APOLLYON is the story of one man's struggle with himself, his parents, and particularly with his traumatic experiences in Vietnam. The lives and psyches of all Vietnam veterans are distilled in his own experiences there..." Norman Sage, Editor

I just recently sorted all the books I've recieved from friends, publishers and agents. At the bottom of the pile was, Apollyon. I had some free time so I started to read it. Here is my review. It is obvious Mr. Stein needs to work on his character development. He also needs to work on his writing style. Both are very weak. But most important, he needs to do more research. It's apparent he's not that knowledgeable on the subjects he writes about. This book is dated 1985, I don't know if Mr. Stein is still writing or not. But if he is, I hope he has improved since Apollyon.

My family and I have read this first novel over and over, and we love it. While it is apparently total fiction, it smacks of something that could happen. Actually, just a year or three ago, when that man crashed his small airplane next to the White House, we all thought APOLLYON: A Novel was coming true.

This collection of poetry, essays, and short stories by registered nurses has moved, inspired, and encouraged nurses here in the US and Canada and overseas. Many nurses, after reading this collection, have contacted me to say how these poems and stories reflect what they think and feel as they themselves are working with patients: the joys and moments of transcendance as well as the fears and frustrations. Nurses from all walks of healhcare--among them ICU nurses, homecare nurses, Hospice Nurses, OB/GYN nurses, Nursing Home nurses, office nurses--find words here that mirror what they feel during those amazing moments, the ones between the heartbeats, when they are standing by a patient's side. Death and dying are part of a nurse's day, just as surely as birth, healing, and grace are. These works speak of all aspects of caregiving, from the nurse's unique vantage point. Now in it's fourth printing, Between the Heartbeats is being translated into Japanese and a second, all-new volume is currently being assembled, a companion piece to the original volume offered here. As Frances Biley said in her review of Heartbeats in Nursing Times (3/20/96) "This book is essential. I dare you to read 'NICU' by Dana Schuster and not be moved. Beg, steal or borrow this book; if that fails, buy it."

As a nurse, when I purchased this book, I thought I would find some beautiful poetry about the profession of nursing and the art of caring. Instead, I found what I think may be the problem with nurses. As I read this book, I am struck with what appears to be repressed hostility and depression by these writers. Some of the poetry is morbid. And we wonder why there are nursing shortages?

Superb text for teaching creative approaches to caregiving through literature to nurses and other caregivers. I had the honor of using the book as a text book this past semester at Penn State University, Harrisburg, PA. The course explored the literature of nurses as well as traditional literature. The goal of this exploration was to redefine caring, to create new ways to teach preventive health care and nurturance, and to sensitively encourage caregivers to own their responsibility to intellectualize and write from their unique vantage point as observers of pain. Numerous and various clinical scenarios were available through the creative writing in BETWEEN THE HEARTBEATS and provided an opportunity to look at clinical situations with a refreshing perspective. My co-editor, Cortney Davis, and I have conducted many workshops but this was my first opportunity to use the book as a text for a three credit course. As might be guessed, I was personnally pleased that the book served so well as a text. Best wishes to any of you who may want to try it in your classroom.

Judy Schaefer, RNC, MA

In the Base-Superstructure debate that has been raging for a while, and still is, within modern Marxism, GA Cohen's Defense of Karl Marx's Theory of History is one of the more powerful blows struck and deserves to be read.

Cohen is a supporter of "the primary of productive forces" (the word primacy here being used to avoid the label of being a determinist or vulgar marxist) and argues to uphold the base-superstructure metaphor which Marx set forth in the 1859 preface to the Contribution to Political Economy. In a nutshell, the metaphor basically said that the base of all society is the economic structure, where everything else (legal and political institutions, for example) rise as a superstructure on this base. The implication is that the most influential thing in society is indeed our economic system. The further implication here, and surely what Marx was trying to say, is that capitalism is the defining aspect of everything and essentially the primarily determining entity in society.

GA Cohen upholds this metaphor by first scouring the 1859 preface, then other Marx works and finally arguing for the legitimacy of the "primary of productive forces" himself. His arguments are concise and powerful. If you are a serious student of Marxism, the read is basically mandatory and helps break the illusion that there is really one theory of Marxism and thats it. Cohen's interpertation of Marx tends to be the one that most people identify Marx with themselves and also tends to paint Marxism as cold and determinist (despite his attempts to keep away from the dreaded title).

However, if you are going to read this, be sure to read Althusser, Williams and Lukacs. These are the other three major points on the debate and reading them will give you a rounded perspective on the entire thing. I tend not to agree with Cohen (though that doesn't show in my rating) and think that if you read a lot of Marx, you can see he himself differing from Cohen. The famous 11th statement in his Thesis of Feurbach sums it all up:

"The philosophers have only interperted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it."

Cohen's views on the economic base's primacy doesn't leave much room for this statement to be anything other than a hollow statement.

Cohen's classic book is a defense of the Second International thesis that the productive forces (roughly technology and labor power) are the "motive forces" of history. In the first version of the book this idea, widely disputed among Marxists, was intended to show that socialism was the necessary culmination of a history of increasing development of the productive forces. This is a difficult thesis to maintain today, and indeed in more recent work, some of which is embodied in the second edition of the book, Cohen retracts it, suggesting only that the development of the productive forces makes socialism possible. (Subsequently he seems to have backpedaled even on this.) The implications of the weakening of historical materialism (along with a sharp critique of Cohen's original view, one that he now largely accepts) were offered by Wright, Levine, and Sober in their Reconstructing Marxism, an essential companion piece to Cohen's book. They essentially involve taking apart the optimistic claims that Marxism offers an integrated scientifically based program of social change that inspires optimism about progress towards socialism. Cohen's main thesis, as an interpretation of Marx and as a _defense_ of Marx, seems much less plausible than, for example, the alternative "class struggle" interpretations of historical materialism urged, for example, by Robert Brenner or (formerly) Richard Miller in his Analyzing Marx.

Nonetheless, Cohen's book remains a model of clarity, depth, and ruthlessly honest exposition that shows up the places where it runs into problems. It contains must that is salvageable, not least an interpretation of what it is for the economic to be "primary" in terms of a theory of functional explanation, on which the ideological superstructure and the state are explained in part in terms of their functionality for the economic base, and revolutionary social change due to "fettering" of the productive forces understood in terms of dysfunctionality. People who like their Marx fuzzy and obscure enough to avoid intelligible criticism (Althusserians, for example) have never liked this book, but if Marxism _as a theory_ has a future in the wake of collapse of the Marxism _as a movement_, Cohen here set the standard for what that theory should look like in procedure and rigor if not necessarily in its substanative claims. Serious study of Marx's theory of history starts here.

This book has some virtues, in terms of clarity of exposition, but as a reading of Marx it leaves a lot to be desired. Like Jon Elster's attempts of making (non)sense of Marx that followed it, this text reads into Marx a set of assumptions taken for granted within neoclassical economics but entirely foreign to Marx's work. If you want to see how Marx and Marxism measure up to the unquestionable and seemingly unthinkable criteria of bourgeois thought, read this. But if you want to understand Marx, read Althusser. 'For Marx' is a good place to start, but be sure to read the essays collected in 'The Humanist Controversy' and 'Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists' too, not to mention 'Reading Capital' and 'Machiavelli and Us' ... Cohen may be easier to read, but only because Cohen doesn't challenge any of the ideology of capitalism that is as invisible to most people as water is to the fish that swim in it.

I have had to read this book for the English class and I must say that it is not bad. For me it was not easy to understand and so I was tired to read it. But I think that it was a good choice to read this book in class because you can learn much about the Revolution in Russia but also a lot about tyranny.

For all people who want to inform themselves about socialism and communism in very abstract way. Personally I prefer to treat an issue in a realistic way, and I think the oppinions and feelings of the situations that Orwell describes would better be understood if he had used human characters.

FINE

I expected a more "animal rights" version of why we should all be vegetarians. In fact, this is a very balanced explanation of how we *used to* take better care of our farm animals == they were practically under the same roof as us; there was an unwritten contract between us and the animals, that if we took care of them, they would "take care of us." but now that "animal husbandry" has become "animal science" -- and animals are no longer under our roof, this "contract" is no longer a fair contract: there is benefit for only the human and not the animal.

Bernard Rollin gives both the meat eater and the vegetarian a lot to think about with this book. I highly recommend it for all.

After hearing the author of Furious Cooking speak,my feelings on this book are very strong. The poems are very wild, follow no form or idea, and use obscene text and language for shock value. Some poems were good, but most were just dissapointing.

I am astonished by the fearless talent this book has between its pages. The poems jump off the pages and grab my heart. I would recommend Ms. Seaton's books to anybody looking for the best poetry of this century.

I was feeling depressed about the state of American poetry, then started reading this book. Seaton's blend of humor, intensity, music, word-play and compelling narrative is a wake-up call to the hushed and mournful monotone-makers on the one hand, and to affectedly disengaged language-poetry offspring on the other.

I lived in the same general area as Swander describes although I know nothing about living among the Amish. I appreciated her comments about having to relearn eating again.

My copy of this book is titled "Out Of This World: A Woman's Life Among The Amish", NOT "Out Of This World: A Journey Of Healing". I was disappointed. I was expecting a cultural anthropology of an "English" woman's experiences living in a primarily Amish neighborhood. True, there was some of that in the book. But it was mostly a rambling, self-absorbed personal memoir. The author was writing about her trials in coming to terms with her Environmental Illness. By the end of the book, I was thoroughly bored with her hypnotherapy sessions, her dreams about eating, the many frog legs she actually ate (including details on their capture and slaughter) and exactly how she chewed her yucca. In addition to not being the type of book I was expecting, it appeared to be written in more or less a "stream of consciousness" style, with no logical organization or chronology. In other words, I didn't particularly enjoy the book and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

Feeling in need of healing myself, I read "Out of This World," with delight. It's an Iowan's book, or a Midwesterner's, and it helps to live near an Amish community. Swander can depict the Amish people as individuals, because she interacts with them and respects their simplicity and spirituality. I especially enjoyed the description of her Christmas celebration and of her animals' lives. To me, she writes like E. B. White crossed with Annie Dillard--the domestic life interwoven with the natural, seamlessly.

Use this book as it was intended (as a textbook in an editing course), and you will become a grammar guru.

This is one of the two best grammar guides I know. (The other, of course, is Strunk and White's Elements of Style.)

Don Ranly is one of the few remaining grammar gurus. He knows what he's talking about; listen to him.

Although this book probably works best as a text in an editing class, I see no reason why it couldn't serve just about anybody who needs to improve his or her grammar.

Outside of the grammar instruction, this book offers advice on writing, story choice, captions, etc. But my favorite part is still the grammar. What can I say? I'm a geek.

Don't get me wrong, I don't expect this to be published, but thought someone should proofread the title on this one... perhaps this book doesn't accomplish what the author set out to do. :-)

This was the first book that I read by Ed Gorman and I ejoyed it very much. I thought it to be a very fast read and did not lack for excitement. The "profiler" Robert Payne is a compassionate character, but still dedicated to seeking the truth. The female characters are interesting and treated with great respect by Payne. I was not able to predict the many plot twists and the ending was great!

I usually write reviews on only very good or very bad books. This one is clearly the latter. Gorman is a pretty bad writer, with a plot with a Bates Motel-like ending that is dopey beyond belief. In addition, the two female leads (one is the narrator's sometimes lover) are two of the most obnoxious characters I have read in some time---totally unsympathetic!! Worse than all of that, frankly, is the fact that this author just loves "potty talk", in bed, out of bed, wherever!! Every bodily orifice is discussed in detail. The heroine(?) vomits on what seems every few pages. After making love she asks whether she farted all night while she slept, saying she had a flatulence problem. She also said she smelled at the beginning of her menstrual cycle. The narrator described every pee he took, etc., etc. These are not people I would invite over for dinner. What an offputting book Gorman has written!!

Over thirty ago, voodoo practitioner Paul Renard permanently shook up the town of Brenner, Iowa when he burned down sterling Psychiatric Hospital, killing over twenty people. The killings were as gross as anyone can remember. To the fear of everyone, the lunatic escaped, leaving behind voodoo symbols. Though seen once over the subsequent years, Renard was never caught.

Just when the townsfolk started to feel safe, a new string of voodoo killings occur. TV Psychic Tandy West asks her former lover ex-FBI profiler Robert Payne to help find the murderer. Instead of a simple and clear case, Robert finds a town without pity filled with individuals who want their personal pasts burned away like Renard did to humans three decades ago.

The fourth Payne tale is an intriguing thriller that stars an entertaining lead protagonist who readers will enjoy observing in action. The story line places elements of the psychological thriller inside a modern day gothic tale. When the plot veers towards a gothic, it seems to sputter, but when talented Ed Gorman stays within the psychological path, the exciting tale is faster than a SST. Overall, the return of Payne, especially glimpses into his personal side, turns this into a fine novel that fans of the series will enjoy.

Harriet Klausner