Iowa Books

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 --

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?

I found this book to be not only entertaining, but informative. It is a tour of the midwest and its vegetable gardners. Within the authors' investigation of the various gardens he finds are slices of each gardner's life and their views on the world. Each personality is shown through the garden, from a man who live in a shack and swears to letting his vegetable vines ramble wildly, to an older man who drives from his home to his plot with percise neat rows. It is also a nice compilation of gardening tips that read like a conversation with an old-timer. While reading you can almost picture these people, sitting before you and pointing out the potato bugs on the leaf, or letting the soil fall through their fingers, harvesting tomatoes, ect . . . I recommend this book because it shows pretty much why we are drawn to plant our own crops and watch them grow.

The diaries published gave me some insight into how the pioneer women stabilized the home. Their lives were full of dreary mundane daily tasks that had to be done for survival. These women often looked at the migration to Iowa as a family opportunity to make a new life. Having grown up in Iowa, I can visualize Iowa as a new frontier and remember the culture I grew up with. The culture in Iowa of pitching in and helping the community grow has not changed.

very informative for dirt and flat to med. banked asphalt racers. i would have liked more info on high banked asphalt set-ups and the difference between med. and high applications. this book was very helpful as we built our car and got a baseline set-up. i highly recomend reading steve smith books to pepole that we race with, but most of them think they know everything or they want to set their car up like every other "joe" out at the track . it's amazing to me what things you can learn from these books and when you try to discuss issues with these guys they have no clue what your talking about. thank-you for the very informative books.