Iowa Books

Ruth Kohrt was a school teacher in Northwest Iowa. This book chronicles her first year of teaching, when she made $90 and spent $100. It describes her duties, where she lived, how she rode to school on a horse, what children did in a one-room school, and who tried to seduce her. It's also interesting for its idiom, Dutchified English, the language of Northwest Iowa. An interesting book for anyone wondering about rural education in the early Twentieth Century or what a one-room school was like for students and teachers.

This book is very useful in the treatment plan of patients. It explains the various methods to use.

I am a born-in-Brooklyn lifelong New Yorker and local history buff. I found this book engrossing and highly informative in areas (agriculture, farming and land use) most local histories ignore.

It is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand how the outer boroughs of New York developed.

The photos are a hoot - showing long-urban areas as utterly unrecognizable farmland.

The book's only shortcoming is the author's boilerplate Marxist analysis of how land and capital are used in a modern economy.

With that one caveat, I heartily recommend this weighty tome for anyone seriously interested in New York outer-borough history.

If you enjoy reading about pioneer days, and char-acters that are so well described that you feel you know them, then you will love this engrossing story. I found myself thinking about this book when I wasn't reading it, a sure sign that the book was enjoyable. It is entriguing from the beginning where a lonely cowboy is looking for a place to call his own, and then when he finds a girl staying in his homestead, uninvited!! The story that unfolds is huge, with the characters growing older with the story. I hated to finish the book that was so full of the true flavor of pioneer days, hardships, big family life, incest, and lots of laughs along the way. I loved it!!

Paul Errington grew up tramping prairie pothole marshes,
then became one of Aldo Leopold's early students, at a time
when traditions of nature observation and waterfowl hunting
were contributing to the growth of ecological science.

This book is a set of connected thoughtful chapters on
the seasons and years of pothole marshes - "Of Marshes
and Winter", "Of Marshes and Spring", etc., concluding with
"Of Marshes and Time" and "Of Marshes and Man".

Marsh environments change greatly from year to year;
vivid paragraphs of here-and-now description alternate
with meditations on past years and the ebb and flow of
life. Muskrats, hawks, mink, ducks and geese, shore birds,
owls, foxes, fish: Errington watched and tracked and
recorded their lives, and their deaths.

Errington's clean spare style is a pleasure, and Hochbaum's
pen-and-ink illustrations beautifully complement the text;
I particularly love one with a few flocks sharing a dawn sky
with the morning star.

Highly recommended to anyone who has read and enjoyed
Aldo Leopold, Sigurd Olson, David Rains Wallace, or
Barry Lopez, and to waterfowl hunters, bird watchers --

Cynthia Rylant does an excellent job of filling in the gaps for us in the little written about time of late 1875 through 1877. Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote very little about those years when she would have been about 8 - 10 years old. They were years of some strife and hardship on the Ingalls household, and this is probably an important time and book to add to your Little House Collection, a time that probably shaped and had quite an influence on her life.
This story looks like it would be read before "By The Shores of Silver Lake"

Due to hardships and events beyond their control Ma and Pa Ingalls had to pack up their wagon and their family several times during those years, and we learn of other people that touched their lives in some way. Selling the farm and deep in debt, moving to the city and working their fingers to the bone before they could settle down once again. Some of the stories, you will no doubt know from the Little House TV series, and although this book takes nothing away from that wonderful show, you will learn that they happened just a little differently and in different places. The birth and too short life of baby Charles Frederick, the coming of baby Grace, working at the hotel, and meeting another branch of the Ingalls family.

Laura's love of traveling West to the wide open country and her love of books and reading become apparent at her young age. And through all the strife, the family never lacks in love and spirit.Her wonderful with relationship with her family, but especially Pa, shines through here. You are taken from smiles to tears and in the end, just like the TV program, you are left with a big grin and maybe even a new outlook on life,

The book is recommended for 3rd through 7th grade, and I agree this would be a great read for that age group.It will certainly leave young readers hungry for more. But I have to say, that all ages will love these stories and for those especially that love the Little House series, "Old Town In The Green Groves" although not written by Wilder herself, will give you the same great feeling and will fill in some of those "lost years" for you.

It's a fairly fast read, not too long, and you will probably wish there was more.

Recommended for all to take another journey of love with Laura, Mary, Carrie, Ma, Pa and Jack the Dog!...Enjoy the read...Laurie

Continued quality of the Photo Archive series this time for Oliver tractors. Oliver collectors have been waiting for this one. Great black + white photos showing complete line of Oliver tractors. A must for oliver fans.

This is another in the series of murder mysteries published by the public radio station KUNI. The story is serially written by several authors, where each one writes a chapter. There is a fundamental story line that must be followed and the chapters are then edited into a book form. With nineteen different authors, there are times when there are some glitches in the continuity, but overall the plot flows fairly smoothly.
The basic plot is that a frustrated musician believes he is destined to be a great conductor. Lacking the ability to achieve this goal on the basis of his talent, he begins killing the conductors of symphony orchestras in Iowa. The FBI agent assigned to the case is on his way down, having too close and frequent a relationship with alcohol. Even the calling in of other law enforcement resources has no affect; the killer never has a difficult time in executing his next target. That was the weakest point of the plot; the murders take place despite the presence of large numbers of police officers. They are just too easy.
The ending is, as is the murderer, one for the psycho file. There is a dramatic conclusion where the murderer finally gets his wish, but by that time he is so demented that the pinnacle of his career is a small down concert where the consequences of his conducting are guffaws from the audience.
I found this book to be tolerable; the weaknesses are due to the multiple authors and the fact that many of them do not write mysteries. It was interesting to read the material of those who are musicians by trade. This was especially true for the chapter by Christian Tiemeyer, the former conductor of the Cedar Rapids Symphony Orchestra, where I have season tickets.

James Van Allen passed away in August 2006, leaving an awesome legacy of achivement. This slender, well-written volume describes the progress in atmospheric and space physics with a focus on Van Allen's crowning achivement: his detection of the high-energy radiation belts around the Earth. The Van Allen belts were found by particle detectors prepared by Van Allen and his associates at the University of Iowa and carried aloft on the early Explorer satellites of 1958.
Van Allen continued his work in physics and space science up until his death at age 91. He assisted greatly in the researching of the book I co-authored, The First Space Race, which told the story of the earliest satellites. Origins of Magentospheric Physics tells an accessible, compelling story of scientific discovery.

Just a brilliant look at four black artists who escaped the racism of the U.S. to live and work in Paris. Very interesting?