Iowa Books

This book was very useful for planning our wedding reception in my home state - Michigan. With my mother's assistance from Kentucky, my husband and I were able to coordinate our reception AND guest accomodations from our home in California. I found the book helpful, insightful, very well organized, and succinct. Flowery writing is great if you want a novel. If you are looking for a true reference book, this one is a good place to start.

If you are looking for a book to inspire your next midwestern trip, keep looking. Bob Puhala's writing is hardly the sort to bring out the intrepid (or insipid) traveler in anyone. Reading the reviews of inns I was familiar with was disappointing. He does not manage to bring these places to life or capture their essence. He does provide a good basic description of each inn and fairly good directions to each, along with the information you would need to make a reservation. Because most of his picks are rather on the beaten path, if you're going to visit Uncle Lem and Aunt Nan in Backwater Creek, you probably won't find a likely place to stay using this resource.

I was suprised that many Inns were neither Inns or in the counrty. Jumer's Castle Lodge is hardly an Inn (having 210 rooms and being part of a chain) and the Blanche House, minutes from downtown Detroit, Michigan (and a short walk away from some unsavory neighborhoods), would only be in the country if one traveled back in time about 150 years.

This book might be more useful for business travelers looking for something different, but for the traveler looking for inspiration and a nice country vacation (as I was) - it dosen't fit the bill.

Although containing good general information, this book is not very detailed. For the most part, I needed more specific information for prairie restorations. However, I did enjoy the discussion on the history of tallgrass prairie restoration in Iowa. Additionally, the species-specific information with additional comments on the native prairie wildflowers and grasses is quite useful and much appreciated. It is the first species list I have found that provides information regarding what wildlife would be attracted to each plant.

Restoring the Tallgrass Prairie is a great "first" book for a person interested in praire management/restoration. The book is split into two parts. The first part is a guide to restoration. The second part is a field guide for the identification of prairie grasses, plants etc. I recommend this book because of its content and superior value for this type of book.

Hi Andy,
We bought and enjoyed your Civil War book. We sent it on to a son and he liked it too. You were not bashful about the facts, as some are, and folks will respect your judgment on the matter.
Hal Hotle, Bentonsport, Iowa (received in U.S. mail; Hal doesn't have computer)

Perhaps I was expecting too much, but the interesting title suggested that a welcome update to the field of the impact of the Civil War on the developing states -- and vice versa -- had arrived. I was sadly disappointed. The book adds little, is full of inaccuracies, and -- aside from a couple of pages of bibliography -- has no references or citations. If you're looking for a quick read, it's okay. If you're looking for serious scholarship, you, too, will be disappointed.

Here is one example of where I felt that the movie(s), that were based on this book, were better than the book itself. I loved the Pat Boone remake but wished that it contained more of the fair goings on. I had hoped that the book would contain more on that, but sadly it did not. The family does not even get to the fair until almost halfway into the book. I found the author's writting style tedious, and I also did not appreciate the "low" morals displayed by the (post) teens, as depicted in this book. It was obviously written from the male point of view.

I read this book for my 8th grade english and reading class. I never really heard of the book, but of course like ever one else in the United States have seen then the musical State Fair. The book was a lot like the book. The reading goes really fast. If you want a book that you can read in a day or two this is the book you should pick.

WEISS: "Years now without coffee, without alcohol, without tobacco", you wrote. Was it because of your health?

CIORAN: Yes, health. I had to choose. I was drinking coffee all the time. I'd drink 7 cups of coffee in the morning. It was one or the other. But tobacco was the most difficult. I was a big smoker. It took me 5 years to quit smoking. And I was absolutely desperate each time I tried. I'd cry. I'd say "I'm the vilest of men". It was an extraordinary struggle. In the middle of the night I'd throw the cigarettes out the window. First thing in the morning I'd go buy some more. It was a comedy that lasted 5 years. When I stopped smoking, I felt like I'd lost my soul. I made the decision. It was a question of honor. "Even if I don't write another line, I'm going to stop." Tobacco was absolutely tied up with my life. I couldn't make a phone call without a cigarette. I couldn't answer a letter. I couldn't look at a landscape without it.

WEISS: You felt better afterward, I hope.

CIORAN: Yes. When I'm depressed, I tell myself: "You did succeed in conquering tobacco". It was a struggle to the death. And that's always made me think of a story Dostoyevsky speaks about. In Siberia there was an anarchist at the time who was sentenced to 18 years in prison. And one day they cut off his tobacco. Right away he gave a declaration that he was renouncing all his ideas and everything at the feet of the tsar. When I read that in my youth, I hadn't understood it. And I remember where I smoked my last cigarette, about 14 years ago. It was near Barcelona. It was 7 in the morning. It was cold, the end of September. And there was a foolish German who dove into the water and started swimming. I said: "If this German can do that at his age, I'm going to show that I can too". So I went in like that and I had the flu that night.

The Eugene Ionescu interview was semi-interesting. And the other interviewees didn't interest me at all.

Weiss undertook these interviews of famous writers between the years of 1980 and 1987 to gather information for newspaper profiles of writers. Later, he began to publish the full interviews in literary journals. The writers are loosely connected in that they all spent a great deal of their adult lives in the city of Paris. Also, they were all taking risks in their writing by either breaking from or reformulating their literary traditions. There is, however, a deeper similarity between the pieces. In the introduction, Weiss reveals that he began to see a common theme in these interviews, that the discussions kept returning to "certain cultural preoccupations" that he had not always planned to talk about. Eventually, Weiss collected nine of these interviews together and published them under the title Writing at Risk. Weiss begins each chapter with a brief profile of the subject and a few comments on the subject's impact on the literary world and his personality. For example, Carlos Fuentes "is above all a man of conscience" and Eugene Ionesco is "one of the leading dramatists in the `theater of the absurd'." In these one to two page profiles, the interviewer outlines the writer's literary works, his political influence if any, his occasion to live in Paris, and the circumstances of the interview. Also, Weiss is careful to note the month and year of each interview knowing that the information garnered from the conversations is only understandable within it's political and historical context.

The conversations are recorded in a tradition interview style with the interviewer's questions written after his initials and a colon and the subject's responses after his initials and a colon. This, however, is as close to tradition as Weiss gets and his innovation works well. For the most

One reviewer said you either love this book or you hate it. I was one that hated it. The good news is that is a short book and I finished it in an hour. At least I didn't waste days reading it. I found it depressing and disappointing - not romantic at all.

This book is SO over the top I found myself anticipating the next breathless passage with actual excitement. It also provides another exception to the cliche that "the book is always superior to the movie"---the Eastwood movie is actually a nice little bittersweet romance----if you want a love story see the movie---if you want a laugh read the book!

I love this book. Great love story. The book arrived in perfect condition and very quickly. Thank you

After reading a gut-wrenching novel, I decided to read something that I thought would be light and quick, so I settled down with the Bridges of Madison County. I don't normally read romances, but I had heard a good review, and I thought it would be worth the time. It turned out that it was, although not the light reading I had anticipated. A very emotionally draining book, this is a story that will stick with me for a time. It is written as though it were a nonfiction book, even with a beginning on how the story came about and was researched, and ending with an interview with a musician who know Robert Kincaid, one of the main characters. But don't be fooled, this is a piece of fiction, and there was no Robert Kincaid. This is a deeply moving love story of two strangers who fall in love, but spend only four days together before making the decision to part forever. Separate, but not forgotten, their lives were from that time on woven together.

I read this in one sitting yesterday afternoon, and immediately regretted it. What's so romantic about betraying your spouse? Maybe this is just my conservative upbringing, but both Francesca and Robert disgusted me beyond belief. I especially hated her daughter's reaction to the affair. There is no justification for cheating, least of all fickle emotions. It seems Waller is trying to insult the reader's intelligence.

[..]The romance itself was unconvincing, rushed, and unrealistic. I certainly hope this "novel" doesn't find its way onto any required reading lists, because it's such garbage.

Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America
This book describes the author's family move from the sophistication of life in San Francisco to Iowa in 1993. The author's acceptance of a position as professor of journalism at the University of Iowa necessitated not only a change of location, but also of world view and life style, as witnessed by his shock in reading a newspaper review of the better sea food retaurants in the Cedar Rapids area and finding Red Lobster and Long John Silver listed.

I purchased the book because like so many, I was horrified at the multi-million dollar raid performed by ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) at the Postville Agriprocessor's meat packing plant in May 2008. The raid netted some 400 workers, principally of Guatemalan and Mexican descent, working at the plant that day. I wanted to know the history of the town and the plant that brought these people to this small Iowa town, to a factory operated by Hasidic (ultra-orthodox) Jews. At the time of the raid, the plant provided nearly 60% of the kosher beef, lamb and poultry in the US.

In an often humorous, but always serious and evenhanded way, Bloom tells the tale of the dying town that was ressurected by the opening of the kosher operations at the abandoned meat packing plant there. The creation of more than 400 jobs, even though the jobs did not attract workers from Iowa, was still an economic miracle for Postville, but as Bloom explains, the blessing was also a curse, as it meant the the Hasidic Jews had accomlished that which the town and state had not. It also meant that the Jews were the wealthy people in town who effectively called the shots on much of town life. Finally, there were the cultural and religious differences that had never quite been over come.

Bloom's tells this story of culture clash from several perspectives, and the people, real people (although some are re-named from their actual names) are living, breathing people, not stereotypes. One one level, Bloomn's book is a history of ecomic and culture clash in a small, rural town. On another level, possibly not intended, the book is a tale of globalization, and the shifting role of the US in a global economy. The tensions and clashes in the book seem to parallel or foretell the rise of globalism and and its clashes with rising nationalism and nativism.

The book is a valuable and comfortable read on its own. As we learn more and more of the social and economic paralysis now besetting Postville (not to mention the cost to tax payers for the raid itself), I believe Bloom's book will be a valuable tool in defining a basline and illuminaitng the very intangible sociological elements of the town's existence.

This book should be read as a book that does not reflect the people it is written about but instead reflects the politics and outlook of the academic who wrote it and his secular world view. For him he is the anthropologist discovering this world of Hasidim and Iowans and as a good secular person he must judge who is 'right' and who is 'wrong'. SO he decides that the nasty Hasidim are evil because they do not intermarry, they do not mix and they, gasp, do not celebrate Christmass. One wonders why it is they, the minority of 150, who are expected to assimilate and confrom to the majority? Is it because they are the 'other' or the foreigners. It is interesting, in the secular academic world no one forces foreigners to assimilate. Instead Cinco de Mayo is celebrated. So why isnt the diversity of the Hasidim celebrated. When the locals insult people by calling them 'Jew lover' the author laughs at this as if this racist insult is a joke, which means the book itself may border on anti-semitism. The author insinuates that the Hasidim keep apart for 'racial' reasons, which is patently untrue. They also keep apart for religious reasons, sort of like the Amish.

The insinuation here is that the Hasidim are not American because they don't confrom and don't fit in and arn't friendly enough. But perhaps the author missed what being American is all about. America is about being who you are and at the same time being a patriot. Most Hasidim are the most patriotic people. They may not celebrate Christmass, but they wave the American flag. That is what being American about. Becoming an Iowan doesn't make someone American, just as Iowans are not forced to become like New Yorkers if they move to New York. If they moved to Crown Heights, the land of the Hasids, no one would expect them to become Hasidim.

Seth J. Frantzman

Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America looks at how tensions gradually erupt between locals and hasidic Jews who opened a kosher slaughterhouse in a rural farming community. This book was written by a secular Jew from the west coast who had moved to Iowa to take a job as a university professor.

While the author certainly has issues of his own (he actually cites the scoutmaster mentioning Jesus Christ at his sons Boy Scouts meeting as an example of anti-semitism he has experienced in Iowa!) I don't think the most rabid Jew hater could have done a better job of making the Hasidic Lubavitchers look bad. After being taken under the wing of Lubavitchers who wanted to convert him, as a secular Jew, to their Hasidic sect, Bloom in the end exposes the Lubavitchers worst traits. From their petty haggling over prices in local stores over the smallest of items, to their racist attitudes towards "goyim" and "schwartzs", while simultaneously accusing anybody who disagrees with them of being anti-semitic, to their refusal to pay debts and honor contracts in business dealings and other bullying business practices, their importation of illegal immigrant riff raff to this once homogenous crime free town to cheapen their labor costs, even their cruel way of slaughtering animals to make the meat kosher are brought to light. All of these factors, along with the Hasidic Jews refusal to participate in the community other than by using it to make themselves rich, gradually over a period of time caused major tensions between multi-generational locals and the Lubavitchers. On the other hand he does show some of their admirable traits also, like being family oriented and their obsessivly strict adherence to preserving their own culture and customs.

Overall this a very good book that I would recomend to anybody interested in Jewish culture, or anybody that wants to delve into reasons why Jews, who seem to never be able to see the reasons themselves, are often disliked, throughout the world and history, by people of many races and cultures. You can also learn a lot about the tensions and infighting that goes on between secular Jews like Bloom and the Orthodox Jews too.

What is cultural identity? Matzoh ball soup or holy scripture? John Deere caps or yarmulkes? Postville is a wonderful book because it isn't written as a traditional news report that pretends to be objective and removed from the subject at hand.

Stephen Bloom's book is worth reading because he makes clear that every observer brings predjudices and what Postville reveals is the author's discovery and coming to grips with his own set of beliefs. Are deeply religious people more moral than others? Are American values of freedom really available to everyone?

As an author of a memoir myself (Typo: The Last American Typesetter or How I Made and Lost 4 Million Dollars) that deals with culture clash in Iowa--I couldn't get a flat fixed on my rental car because "Men should know how to change a tire."--I can report that Bloom has nailed the difficulty outsiders have in small towns.

I have also seen first hand how people portrayed in a book will find the worst thing the book says about them and lock onto it. You can see that in the reviews of Postville here on Amazon. Jews think Bloom is an anti-semite. Iowans think he is a snarky city boy.

But Bloom does his best to show all sides of everyone in the story, which makes his narrative more, not less, believable.

Like the book The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust that talks about the poor reception for some European Jews by their bretheren in Israel, this book is honest.

Read it, and learn what Bloom has laid out so clearly: all of us are ready to blame someone else for our problems.

Firstly, I enjoyed and was fascinated by Postville. Second, I'm a non-Orthodox, yet identifying Jew who hails from the Midwest and who attended University of Missouri-Columbia, quite similar to Iowa City. So yes, Bloom's descriptions were accurate and yes, the stereotypes are lived up to (feed commercials on TV, little in the way of ethnic culture). I also have had contact with ultra-Orthodox Jews; specifically, I have Lubavitch relatives. So I'm qualified to "judge", as it were, all sides involved, or at least no less qualified than Bloom.

Secondly, I too "came down on the side of" the Iowans. In fact, because of Bloom's descriptions of the Lubavitchers -- so antithetical to the behavior that I've come to expect from them -- I began to suspect that perhaps they were not actually Lubavitchers, but posing as Lubavitchers, or some sort of spinoff sect a la those Mormons you read about from whom the church hurries to disassociate itself. In any case, the Postville Lubavitchers certainly didn't resemble any Lubavitchers I've met.

Mostly, a seemingly trivial detail bugged me the entire way through; I say "seemingly", because it actually encapsulates (as does Bloom's stay in Iowa) what I call the American Jewish dilemma, i.e., must we be chained to an urban existence in order to remain Jewish? I'm referring to several instances wherein Bloom went out of his way to tell us that he ate treif food. Not just treif, as in "We stopped in at McDonald's for burgers on our way home", but specifically pork. The minute I read this, my respect for him dropped several notches. What was he thinking by deliberately spelling out to the reader his non-observance of kashrut? That this would endear him to gentile readers? This matter angered me far more than his unsavory descriptions of the Lubavitchers; while he can't control their behavior, he can control his own, or at least not "diss" Jewish observance from the rooftops.

The reviewer who pointed out that the locals' anger at the Lubavitchers' deserting their businesses for Wal-Mart may have been displaced anger at Wal-Mart was on target. After all, we all know what Wal-Mart is doing to small-town America's economy.

I also liked how Bookaholic put it regarding the Lubavitchers' behavior feeding into stereotypes. Indeed. However, the leap that some reviewers make to such behavior explaining anti-Semitism and pogroms -- whoa! That's forbidden territory. Don't even attempt to go there. That's where my intercultural tolerance ends, people. I had assumed that folks who read books are more incisive than that. Or do you, too, believe that an Easter newspaper headline reading "He Is Risen" is actually jounalism?

Jihad! covers the beginning of the Mujahedin fight against the Soviets in the early 1980s, as seen by a former British special forces soldier, directed to infiltrate, assess and train the forces opposing the USSR. Great topic? You bet it is!

Carew, though a source of phenomenal information that not many people can even dream of, is not a particularly good writer. His book reads more like a military situational report (and then this happened, and then this happened, and then....) than anything else, bringing the dryness and boredom to this fascinating time in history. The book starts off good, but seems to be full of fillers, as Carew seems to struggle with descriptions - fillers that far too often involve crass, out-of-place language.

There is no doubt that Carew was a great soldier. Maybe he should have hired someone to write his account for him. I would not recommend this book, unless one needs information on weaponry or tactics used in 1980. If one looks at it that way, the book is a good source of knowledge.

Not a book for serious researchers and those with military backgrounds. If you just like a good yarn, then go for it.

Tom Carew, real name Philip Sessarego, is a SAS groupie. I remember him from the years I lived in Hereford late 70s and early 80s. Hereford was home to the SAS and the SAS guys were pretty low-key. Then there were soldiers attached to to SAS, who could be anything from cooks to motor mechanics. A number of these guys tried their best to look SAS, wearing beepers and drinking in the pubs (i.e. The David Garrick) where SAS guys were supposed to hang out. Then, there was Sessarago, who was a category to himself. He left the Army in 1975, having failed acceptance into the SAS. He spent the years after that in a fantasy world, trying to look the part in his Land Rover, and supposedly, dabbling in some occasional private mercenary work overseas. I'm sure that Phil is a legend both in his own mind, and probably in his house.

In response to various stories in the British press last fall, the Ministry of Defense eventually confirmed that, despite statements made in this book and in interviews, Mr. Carew had never been in the SAS Regiment. Presumably the rest of the experiences in the book are just as accurate.

Tom Carew, in recent press, has been reportedly uncovered as having made false claims about his service in Afghanistan. Regardless of what you believe or don't believe, the story is interesting in and of itself. While a lot of the data could have been gleaned from the countless books and reports written during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the book certainly has its moments. I rated the book 3 stars, not because of the claims made against Carew, but because the book as advertised when I bought it (early 2001 in the UK), purported to discuss Carew's operational experience in the Balkans. If you read the book hoping to see this aspect of his special operations career, you would have been sadly dissapointed. If Carew has lied about his special operations experience, the story makes for an interesting account nonetheless.

I read this book in the spring of 2001 and at the time I was somewhat interested in a war that I did not know a lot about. Given the events post 9/11 it would be interesting to reread the book. The book was ok, it offered some interesting facts of the British Special Forces operations, but it did not provide a good overall view of the conflict, country or people of Afghanistan. There are a number of books now coming out about this conflict and part of the world that would probably offer a better overview. If you are interested in British Special Forces then this would be a good book for you.

I always wondered about Laura's life during those lost years. The book is very sad, but I'm glad it was written. My 9-year-old daughter and I both read it and enjoyed it.

I have read all the Little House books, and even though this was not by Mrs Wilder, it is an excellent read. I just wish it had been longer, forget the purists, put it on your bookshelf with the other ones and encourage your children to read all of these books they are wonderful for children and adults.

This is an excellent book. I truly enjoyed reading it. It goes along with Laura Ingalls Wilder's other little house books. I truly enjoy all of Laura Ingalls Wilder's books.

I too am a true Little House fan. I agree with the others who wrote about Laura's hair. I noticed off of the bat that she had bangs. You would think the author/illustrator would of remembered that it was a big deal for Laura to cut her bangs. I was dissappointed when Grace and Freddie just popped up in the book. Rylant could of gone into more details about how the girls felt about Ma having another baby. For the girls to come home and there was a baby there seemed a little far fetched. I did noticed that there is a new edition of the book with Laura's hair in long braids. I guess enough people complained.

I liked this book ok, but like other reviewers, I missed the detail of Laura's original books. I kept expecting to get to the part where Mary loses her sight. If I recall correctly, at the beginning of Silver Lake, she tells us that Mary had gone blind after suffering from scarlet fever.
I also thought it was odd that the girls never noticed that Ma was pregnant! I didn't notice the bangs in the illustrations till I read the reviews here, but they are absolutely right!
I can understand why Laura left out these years in her books. With little Freddie dying, Mary losing her sight, and moving to places she was not enthused about, she likely did not care to share these stories.

It must be said at the outset that there are no great poems in this collection. Some are not even good, as poetry goes. But who would judge the poetic attempts of children in a hospital? The same sort of sympathy must apply to poems composed in solitary confinement. The publisher could have printed the bars of a cage over each one, for each bears the imprint of prolonged and tormenting isolation. None can be read as a purely artistic composition, without an awareness of the author's biography and suffering. Linguist Flagg Miller, in an analytical preface, relates these works to traditions in Arabic poetry, which is enlightening, but concludes that aside from rhyming couplets they have little in common with formal conventions. Likewise, they do not fall into the category of political or jihadist verse. Rather, they strike a popular and universal chord as cries from the heart, arranged in separate lines. They might simply be called poetical statements.

The analogy with children is not too far wrong, for all of these poets by necessity have been reduced to the most basic wants and desires. Some were poets before their arrest, others not. The translations in English tend to even them out, so that, with one or two exceptions, it appears that all of the poems were written by the same man, a generic man, maybe an Everyman of the Muslim world. This man wants to see his loved ones, to see God's--or Allah's--justice restored, to see--as poet Ariel Dorfman notes in his Afterword--the ocean, which he can smell in his tiger cage and hear roaring out of sight every day. (Think of it: it would drive you mad.) Above all, the "detainee" in "Gitmo," like every other long-term prisoner, wants to step out and breathe the free air, to stop being shackled and confined, to stop being tormented.

One of the poems, "First Poem of My Life," by Mohammed El Gharani, arrested at age 14, tortured by both Pakastani and American soldiers, and confined at Guantanamo since 2002, was obtained and translated by pro-bono lawyer and editor Marc Falkoff, who supplies three notes on the original. These notes are sufficient to indicate untold richness in the Arabic, especially word associations which cannot be converted into English. Possibly the other poems as well were written on a higher level than would appear at first sight. As Falkoff explains in his Preface, the Pentagon feared that releasing original texts would endanger national security, presumably because the Arabic could contain hidden messages. This ruling pertained to couplets written in toothpaste or etched with a pebble on a styrofoam cup. Only government linguists with high-level security clearance were permitted to see and translate the hundreds of poems composed at Guantanamo, and of these only a tiny fraction were declassified and released to the prisoners' insistent lawyers. Other poems were reconstructed from memory by the lucky few who were released.

The result is a book consisting of 22 poems written by 17 prisoners. For the most part, one author is represented by one poem. The "First Poem," mentioned above, tells a story: "They surrounded the mosque, weapons drawn,/ As if they were in a field of war./ They said to us, 'Come out peacefully,/ And don't utter a single word.'/ Into a transport truck they lifted us,/ And in shackles of injustice they bound us." Adnan Latif's "Hunger Strike Poem," featured in the Fall 2007 issue of Amnesty International, protests: "They are artists of torture,/ They are artists of pain and fatigue,/ They are artists of insults and humiliation." Jumah Al Dossari's "Death Poem" advises his tormentors to "Take my blood./ Take my death shroud and/ The remanants of my body./ Take photographs of my corpse at the grave, lonely." He wants these sent to "the judges and people of conscience," who must "bear the burden, before their children and before history,/ Of this wasted, sinless soul."

We, the readers, are the judges and people of conscience, who must wonder how the US military authorities, holding a man in absolute confinement and isolation for five years, have been unable to determine whether he is innocent or guilty of anything and should or should not be brought to trial. What they have determined, as Falkoff reports in his preface, is that they are able to accuse fewer than half of the total 775 detainees of committing any hostile act against the United States, a mere eight percent of being members of Al Qaida and a mere five percent of being on the battlefield in Afghanistan. That means that probably eighty percent or more were wrongly arrested or sold out by others for a bounty. The whole thing is a violation of international law, American democracy and human decency. This book is only one of those that will reveal the US national disgrace in the years to come.

The University of Iowa Press is to be highly commended for making this collection available to the world, but I have a small quibble. In a volume of 75 pages there is no reason to print texts in 9 and 10-point type. Miniscule may look chic, but these poems are not dainty and should be printed in standard 11-point or even 12-point type. Let the words released from prison be seen!

very beautiful...Most honest and captivating poems I have ever read. very good that someone published such raw work..

...as if that's really possible with this book, but oh well.

Having read extensive amounts of Arabic and Persian poetry, I feel comfortable dismissing this without riling my political beliefs and I encourage other potential buyers to ask themselves what they are looking for in this book. Do you want to change the policies at Gitmo, or shut it down? You have a vote and a right to assembly (and maybe some extra cash to toss towards your preferred party); use them.

This is terrible poetry, and it's terrible that the contents are being passed off as remotely poetic. Regardless of your position on the detainees in Guantanamo--some of whom no doubt do belong there, some of whom no doubt do not--and their treatment, it is poetry that is being detained unfairly here, and the whole field of poetics that is suffering torturous abuse.

And I hate to throw a wet blanket on the fiery who's-innocent-who's-guilty debate going on here, but the simple truth is, we, the readers, don't know (it appears our government doesn't really, either, but, again, vote and assembly, see above). I would never presume an inmate guilty without trial, but I see no reason to presume his verse honest. Especially given the low-quality of the contents, it does not take a leap of the imagination to see why any inmate would quickly scratch on the side of a cup and toss it to a lawyer to try and improve his position. There are abysmal conditions in our continental prisons, too--containing our own citizens. Toss everyone a styrofoam cup and a toothpick, tell them that you want to collect verses for a book to try and free them, and every murderer, rapist, and cocaine dealer will come up with something just as impassioned as the framed or racially targeted prisoners who truly don't deserve their sentence. Is that really to be called poetry?

This is not poetry. It's a political agenda chopped up into lines. Another reviewer has remarked that an opposite-extreme equivalent to this would be a series of Pentagon poems, and I think that'd be a great idea--so that we can decry that as a waste of time as well and everyone can feel equally irate while those of us who extract joy in honest verse can all feel doubly cheated.

As it is, this book hurts its cause more than advancing it. If they wanted to use these writings effectively, they should have embedded them within an essay or an expose, not offered them as standalone poems--they lack the strength to stand alone. Context alone has never been a strong enough pair of legs to carry any art form far along time's path--and for those that want a lasting stamp of American indecency to warn and instruct future generations, this will not be it.

By failing on any poetic terms, Poems From Guantanamo muddles its already murky message and threatens to push an already unjustly disinterested America into the realms of disdain where we pick up the remote and change the channel.


**As an aside, I take particular offense at the editor's incessant jabs at the Pentagon and Defense Department for withholding or censoring poems for security reasons--an excuse Mr. Falkoff balks at with incredulity. This shows an ignorance of military and poetic history that is not too surprising given the shallow credentials (if not well-intentioned aims) of the editorial staff. Poetry has a long-storied tradition of containing military codes and instruction, dating back (at least, as far as I know) to the Greeks and seeing extensive use as recently as the secret services during and after WWII.

The current state of poetry can be deduced from the fact that one of the most talked-about collections in recent times was borne of a marriage between terrorists and lawyers. "Poems from Guantanamo" is a slight book containing 22 "poems" authored by detainees at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. The majority of the pages, however, comprise the accompanying introductory materials, biographies, and an afterward, which were written by others in an attempt to supply an aura of gravitas to the whole affair and to indicate the reason these poems were published at all, and the specific agenda of those responsible for it.

The Acknowledgements page is telling. This collection of poetry, we are told, would not exist were it not for the efforts of "hundreds of volunteer lawyers." The bulk of the page is a recitation of the names of many of those counselors. As an afterthought, a short list of translators is provided at the end.

The Introduction by Marc Falkoff, a lawyer representing a number of the detainees, portrays them in devout religious terms, never once uttering the word "terrorist." But these people didn't find their way to Gitmo because they spent all their time in mosques praying for the welfare of people of all faiths. He outrageously compares the Gitmo detainees with the prisoners in Nazi concentration camps and the Soviet Gulag. Most of the verses composed at Gitmo have not been released by the Pentagon, apparently for fear that they might contain secret messages. Falkoff admits the translators are not experts and that the translations "cannot do justice to the subtlety and cadence of the originals," he writes, but when we look at the wretched poems themselves, Falkoff's suggestion that they possess a superior quality in the original becomes ludicrous. It's an absurdity only an advocate for terrorists would think to spout. He paints the Pentagon as an evil entity censoring many of the poems which still remain classified, but even so, "Representative voices of the detainees may now be heard."

But before we see the literary output of the terrorists, we are confronted with another introductory piece, a Preface by Flagg Miller, who is described as a "linguist and cultural anthropologist." Miller constructs a history of Muslims who responded to oppression with poetry, and places the detainees in that long tradition, but the Gitmo detainees are not oppressed without cause; they are terrorists and deserve incarceration. Many who were released subsequently resumed their terrorist activities. This alone guarantees a risk that any future detainees who are released would do the same. Few countries will accept any of the detainees: who wants terrorists in their midst? And since there is no legal smoking gun for some of them, affording them legal due process risks acquittals and setting free the likes of Khalid Sheikh Muhammad (no poetry of his in this volume--perhaps the Pentagon has it).

One is left to wonder what poetry the victims of 9/11 would have written, if they had had the time, as they jumped from the Twin Towers, or as they smashed into the Pentagon. The Gitmo poets surely approved of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Perhaps they wrote a few lauding the 9/11 terrorists. Only the Pentagon censors know for sure.

As for the poems, they all have a banal sameness about them, leading me to conclude that we can speak of a Gitmo School of Poetry. The distinguishing features of which are: a profession of innocence, their captors are the criminals, anger at infidels, belief in Islam, Allah will one day destroy their oppressors, threats of revenge, no mention of 9/11 or Al Qaeda, absence of remorse or any sort of mea culpa, and a total lack of any poetic talent whatsoever. There is nothing unique here and little in the way of personalities. Any sad person or any inmate at any prison could have written some of the poems. The entire collection can rightly be dismissed as worthless. This book wasn't published because someone thought the poetry possesses any intrinsic value. Perhaps we will see a future college course on the Gitmo School of Poetry coming soon to the University of Iowa English Literature studies department, as well as many other like-minded colleges? It's doubtful we will see the University of Iowa Press publish a volume called "Poems from the Pentagon."

Reading through the poems, one feels like a beggar rummaging through a garbage can looking for a diamond but finding nothing but rotten tomatoes. The entire enterprise--from the words carved in cups or written on paper, to the translation, to the editing, to the publication--is a complete fraud. This book was published to serve as a political tool as part of an ongoing effort by anti-war activists to shut down the Gitmo prison. Falkoff and the others believe the detainees are innocent of any crime--or that there isn't enough evidence to convict them in a US court of law. So this book portrays them as the opposite of what they are: innocent poets who were somehow in the wrong place at the wrong time. Sympathy for terrorists and terrorist-wannabes is the order of the day. They're poets! Political prisoners! Let's turn reality on its head and see who gets dizzy.

It would be a nice touch if one of the Gitmo Poets wins the Nobel Prize for Literature based on the "strength" of his poems in this volume. The Nobel committee is in the habit of handing out its awards based on politics, and this book fits their bill. Falkoff and his cohorts have apparently won the propaganda battle, as the US government and military seek to close Gitmo due to its unsavory reputation, as detailed in the world news media. We're a long way from poetry but so is this book.

Poems from Guantanamo should be required reading in high schools. Students need to read the effects of this administrations policy on human lives. When the history books are written, this country will have to apologize for creating a concentration camp with dehumanizing and life-crushing strategies. The poems are simple, clear, heartrending. No self-pity, no lashing out. They have historical merit for their culture and ours.