University of Iowa Books

I cannot help but notice that most of the glowing reviews for this collection of "poetry" used the word "complicated". Hmmmm. Is this a case of "The Emporer's New Clothes"? Are reviewers afraid to admit that the only person who can possibly understand most of these stream of consiousness, nonsensical ramblings is the author herself? I regret spending $13.00 on the notion this writer clearly bought into, which is that poetry has to be completely enigmatic and inaccessible.

Small Boat by Lesle Lewis is a beautiful little book in both presentation and content. David Brewster's "Under and Beyond" cover painting is the perfect visual statement of the mystical richness inside. On the back cover, James Tate writes of the poet: "Hers is a rich, complicated voice, beautiful, mysterious, and heartbreaking." Amen. This says it all. This is poetry that puts you on the alert, makes you think, re-slants the world and opens your mind. Wherever I read in this book, I feel the poet has used some magic wand to capture those seemingly blank, indifferent moments we all feel ... that I feel! ... all those everyday bits and pieces and tangles of life, the unending running thoughts, the way our eyes land on something for a nano-second, the lostness that comes over us. Instead of letting them dissipate into nothingness the way the rest of us do, she locks on to them so they become relevant, wake us up, make us see the story underlying them. We see what we missed in the most mundane things -- the saga, the romance, the nightmare.

I bought this based on the Iowa Prize, but am swiftly and certainly returning the book before it gets a coffee stain or someting and I must keep it. It seems as though this author was told once by a well-meaning mentor to "mix it up" pertaining to word placement. She does so to the point that her mixed-up language is nothing but a disjointed distraction. But alas, she also must have had another well-meaning mentor who told her to "make surprising statements," since this seems to account for the rest of what is contained in the poems. Example: this is the ENTIRETY of one poem... "The rain does not cool and is a sticky one to the present and the place. / Is it a weakness, yours for narcotics? / The trees levitate and become mountains. / You stand in the water inside a melancholy boulder. / Now you're a flying sandwich." No, I could not make that up if I tried. The "sentences" (it would be a travesty to call them "poetic lines") read more like the writing of a 16 year old who believes poetry is stream-of-consciousness babble. This collection (what I could manage to read of it) does nothing but baffle. Save your money, and if you want to read a REAL poet, I consider Leslie Adrienne Miller a worthy investment.

Small Boat is a collection of poetry by Lesle Lewis which is unique in that some of the free-verse poems read almost like short vignettes of prose. Depicting a journey among waves of New England, both external and internal, these involving verses speak to the reader of challenge, new experiences, and the wonder of a new voyage. Blue Comma: House rolls into car./A friend is so depressed he has to leave his girlfriend./I remind him not to forget his umbrella and by this time the house has been towed away./Can I say how tired dead I am?/It's a busy mind these days and hardly a heart, a nighttime of chairs./Night is a time we know of from daytime experience./We'd like working together./No, we wouldn't.

Stephen Pyne is a difficult writer, but the depth and meticulous nature of his intelligence pulls you back to him even though you tell yourself to lighten up and read a good mystery. Three cheers to university presses (U of Iowa and U of Washington) for putting and keeping this book in print. The Ice touches on everything about Antarctica: the history, the landscape, the literature, the geology, the biology. The book is all-encompassing--as is The Ice that is its focus and deep passion. It's worth the effort, and your vocabulary will never be the same afterwards. You can read a mystery later.

Like the previous reviewer, I too quailed at the start of this book. Immediately I was plunged to half page paragraphs and dense terms, swimming between excessive description and dense science. But, I'm a geologist. I've been to Antarctica. I knew I could do it...

I suspect that this book will remain unsurpassed for being an all encompassing tome on Antarctica for decades, possibly even centuries ... maybe even until we emerege from this interglacial period and the Western Ice sheet melts, thus giving up the secrets to climate control and Antarctica. I can't imagine much has been left out at all - Pyne is unbelievably, incredibly thorough. Every facet of the ice, and every facet he could think to associate with ice has been methodically slotted into this book. And if he ran out of talking about anything to do with the ice, he'd talk about Antarctica.

But this book is very, very, very, VERY heavy going. I set myself a goal of 25 pages/night - but it still took 2 months to read... Sometimes, I just had to take a break. And as I ploughed ever onwards, I constantly wondered, 'how would someone be able to read this if they hadn't actually been to Antactica???' And other times, I even qualified that with a "would anyone really understand this if they weren't a geologist or in a similar field?' I mean, Pyne can be descriptive, but at other times, adjectives seem to be insufficient, so he swoops into heavy scientific jargon.

I also missed having some diagrams. A few 'colour' photos even... (Ok, colour is a bit misleading - its all white, blue and grey down there...). Antarctica is so stark and sparse, that sometimes, it is just better to look at a photograph of the deep glacier blue of ice (well, actually, WHY ice is blue was something Pyne overlooked in this book, now I think of it! Rainbows and bubbles people...), or a vast plain of continental ice, or the weird solar and weather patterns that can pervade above the ice...

If you can't make it down to Antarctica, but want to become an authority on it, then you can go no further than this book. If wading through the heaviest and densest book written in a long time is something you will need to build up to, the maybe start with something like, Antarctica: The Blue Continent, and see if you want to progress from there - at least then you will have some pictures in mind of what to expect when Pyne melts into deep prose...

The planning to buy this book was detailed and meticulous. Consultations had to be held with interested parties (my sons) and the wait for it to arrive was lengthy - at least ten days.
It was with a sense of mounting excitement that we eagerly surveyed the flat white cover of the package, I could sense our goal. I knew it wasn't going to be easy traversing 428 pages of a book titled "The Ice" but I had completed intensive practical training for this expedition. I was a veteran of Huntsford's "Schackleton", Huxley's "Scott of the Antarctic", Fuchs & Hillary's "The Crossing of Antarctica", the list was long but rewarding. Here was my biggest challenge to date.
The warnings were stark right from the start, the prologue uses half a page to list 72 ways to name ice. I stumbled and nearly gave up. Willpower, only willpower kept me going. I was becoming word blind. Reaching my first goal, the middle, I could only contemplate with horror the trials still awaiting me. "Great God, this is an awful book", I thought as I turned the next page. I wondered if I had the stamina to make it, others before me must have faltered. My son looked at me, "I'm just going out, I may be some time". I could only admire his courage, at having come so far. I ploughed on, yet another reference to Admiral Byrd appeared on the horizon. Until now I had been unaware of his supreme importance as an American and Antarctic explorer. Similarly I had been foolishly unaware of the fact that "...there is nothing in the Heroic age to compare with Ellsworth's all-or-nothing transcontinental flight, even Schackleton turned back..." The fact that Ellsworth achieved precisely nothing is of no importance, he was an American.
Things were looking bleak, stamina was draining fast. A crevasse nearly finished me as I learned that TMW Turner (English) had painted sunsets. I began to lose hope, I was hallucinating, could he really mean JMW Turner who painted ships too, and trains ? It was my darkest hour, all hope was gone. I closed the book.
This is a book for the fanatical written by someone who equates flowery, overblown prose with literature, it is so bad it is almost a parody. If you want to read about the modern Antarctic, read Sara Wheeler's polar classic "Terra Incognita". The best place for Pyne's tome is on an iceberg, drifting slowly out of sight towards the equator.

Karen Coats's book is the finest instantiation of Lacanian theory available to theorists of children's and adolescent literature. Accessible to students and yet still offering challenging insights for more advanced scholars, Coats's work is elegantly written and ground-breaking. I recommend this book to all scholars in the field.

I had mixed feelings about this book. Its worth getting. It is beautifully written, clear, concise, and conveys a ton of difficult material on Lacan in a very lucid manner. Its probably one of the best academic writings I've encountered on Lacanian theory--to some extent (that is, the most basic and elemental aspects of Lacan).

However, I was not happy with the way the writer brought her impeccably controlled and "authoritative" theoretical apparatus to bear on children's literature. Not once did she address the problem that children would never be able to process their literature in Zizekian or Lacanian language. She never discusses the immense gap between the theoretical technology she commands and the audience for the books she writes about, to the point where it got absolutely ludicrous to read about the perverse psychic structure of Curious George. She simply has to address the problem that children don't have a clue what "the Other" is. They do not have these terms at their disposal. Therefore, it seems to me, one must find and seek out the structural translations that might lead us to really understand how how the "Other" or the "phallus" translates to someone without this verbiage. It seems to me that children's lit demands a purely structural Lacanian approach so that we may find the things that truly are at work and transmitting to children. I don't think she gets at this level at all, except, maybe, when she is talking about early picture books. Then she actually discusses the differences between words and things, images and story. That is concrete. But when she gets to the older literature, she loses her grip.

This is not to say that one can't use Lacan to talk about children's lit, but her readings are way too didactic. She spends way too much time expounding and explaining her theory, and hardly any time at all reading the texts. A la Zizek, they simply become "transparent" demonstrations of her theory.

So I would recommend this if what you're interested in is an "authoritative" rendition of Lacanian theory; it really is very clear and very interesting. But I would not recommend it if you're interested in children's literature or a truly Lacanian reading of children's lit.

This book was too hard to understand. It's as though the author used her thesaurus every chance she got. I think it could have been a really good book if was written in a way that is easy to understand.

The 5th edition has seen a complete revision of the illustrations, which all were replaced by a better grade of line-drawings. This makes for a much more likable book.

As a guide to the trees of N-America (exclusive of Mexico and tropical Florida) it seems obvious to compare it with Sargent's "Manual of the Trees of North America (exclusive of Mexico)", now available as a Dover-reprint. The present book appears an abbreviated and updated version of the earlier one, with distribution maps the most noticeable addition. However I find the earlier one definitely more attractive, if only because the line-drawings are so much clearer in the old book. In Preston's book the reproduction of the drawings is very black, and hence unclear.

When comparing this with the magnificent "Trees_of_Canada" by John Laird Farrar (aka "Trees_of_Northern_United_States_and_Canada") the book by Preston looks shabby indeed. The most kindly thing to be said would seem to be that this is vastly overpriced. Surely the USA can do (a lot) better than this for its trees?

This 400 page book is a no-nonsense identification manual for north American trees exclusive of Mexico and tropical Florida (except for 35 species of hawthorn and 16 usually shrubby willows). It is adequately illustrated by drawings and distribution maps. Most of the species are described (habit, leaves, fruit, twigs, bark, general), some of the more uncommon ones are only mentioned in the keys. Although the book claims to use language as simple as possible I can imagine that it is the botanists who come to terms with it most easily.

A real drawback can be found in one of the introductory keys (species with toothed leaves) where the identification relies heavily on fruit characters. This is no doubt scientifically accurate, but not very practical in the field. A less rigorous, user friendly approach would be preferable.

I recommend the book to people with botanical training who will be happy to find the species arranged according to families and not according to the position of leaves. I liked the book because of its mostly very useful keys and because it presents all the north American trees in one easy-to-carry volume

I find it hard to say less than positive things as I know all the work that goes into writing a work like this. But I didn't like this book at all. It felt like a bit of an ego trip to me and I didn't come away from it enriched or excited about an art form in which I participate in both as a composer and a performer. Arcana, Forces in Motion and Experimental Music do a much better job than this. Sorry.

History, styles, and cultural and spiritual implications of the out jazz scene (primarily New York) are well documented in this 200 page text. If you are "going out" with your music, this is a valuable reference for recorded music and scholarly texts. Author is multiinstrumentalist and has a background in anthropology

Iowa's Historic Architects is a collective biography of architects who worked in the Hawkeye State prior to 1950. Professor Emeritus Wesley I. Shank (Iowa State University) has been writing on Iowa's architectural history for over 25 years. Iowa's Historic Architects has concise biographical entries on 234 architects, each with a short list of building attributions and references.

The book is not presented as a history of architecture in Iowa. I found it essential to have the 1993 Buildings of Iowa (David Gebhard and Gerald Mansheim, in the Society of Architectural Historians "Buildings of the United States" series) at hand while reading Shank's book. Gebhard and Mansheim provide the necessary architectural survey, maps, photographs, and thematic arguments. With this supporting information, the men profiled in Iowa's Historic Architects can be placed in context. A comprehensive reference dictionary of regional architects and their work, in tandem with such a good survey overview, should be an invaluable research tool.

The biographies of Iowa architects are organized on the basic information that defined each man as an architect: where they got their training, where they worked, with whom they were associated, and a selection of their projects. Many of the entries read like obituary notices, with benedictions and lists of the surviving family members at the architect's death. Few of the entries have detrimental information. A reader might infer that Iowa architects were immune to incompetence, bad business, legal battles, character flaws, and passion. The entries include too much genealogy; the dates of birth of an architect's children, for example, generally have no value in evaluating the architect's career.

Some 50 architects whose offices were not in Iowa, but who designed buildings in Iowa, are included in Iowa's Historic Architects. These sketches are properly concise. Professor Shank includes references for each architect (but not specific citations for each building attribution). The book has a useful introductory essay on the history of architectural practice in Iowa, with good details about the implementation of professional ethics and standards of practice. Appendices show where the Iowa architects acquired architectural education and the Iowa cities where they had offices. The bibliography includes National Register reports, the files of the Iowa State Historic Preservation Office, and the 1955 AIA directory of living architects.

Regional dictionaries of architects (or any reference book) may be judged by three standards. The information must be accurate; the information must be inclusive, within the book's geographical and chronological limits; and the information must be accessible. I cannot dispute the accuracy of the information included, but Iowa's Historic Architects fails to fulfill the second and third standards. The book has three fatal flaws:

1. The book is not indexed. This severely restricts access to the information. To learn, for example, who might have designed the wonderful Methodist Church in Menlo, or the Art Deco municipal swimming pool in Decorah, you must read every page of Iowa's Historic Architects with no surety that you'll find anything. Even with the Gebhard & Mansheim volume at hand, the absence of an index is unforgivable. Reference books must be indexed!

2. The book has only a small selection of buildings designed by or attributed to each architect. Architect William Thomas Proudfoot designed hundreds of Iowa buildings, but his entry - the longest in the book - lists only fifty projects. For other architects, Shank includes no more than a dozen Iowa building attributions. How can we assess the achievement of an architect, except by examination of his work? Less glamorous projects, such as apartment buildings, livery stables, commercial remodelings, warehouses, and Sunday School additions, are as valuable as any courthouse, school, or cathedral to characterize an architect's competence. Similarly, scholars pursuing individual properties, typologies, regional histories, or other building patterns will find Iowa's Historic Architects to be frustratingly incomplete.

3. The book fails to list many Iowa architects. The Clark W. Bryan Directory of Architects and Classified Directory of First Hands in the Building Trades (1890) (Springfield, Massachusetts: Clark W. Bryan & Co., 1890) lists 52 architects who had offices in Iowa. Twenty-five of these men, at least, are not found in Iowa's Historic Architects. Another primary source, Hendricks' Commercial Register of the United States For Buyers and Sellers (1918) (New York: S. E. Hendricks Co., Inc., 1918) names 118 Iowa architects. Fifty-nine of these men are not included in Iowa's Historic Architects. In each of these two windows, fifty percent of the Iowa architects are neglected! This does not reflect a conscious "editing-out" of minor architects, for Shank includes Frank Fiedler, C. B. Lakin, J. E. Howe, Henry Throne, and several other obscure Iowa architects about whom almost nothing has been recorded. It appears, rather, that the primary research was inadequate. This is not an inclusive dictionary.

A biographical dictionary of Iowa architects should strive to include every Iowa citizen who was identified, however fleetingly, as an architect, and every out-of-state architect who designed anything in Iowa. It should include every Iowa building and project, built or not, that can be attributed to these architects, with all project references cited. It should be indexed by project sponsor, by locality, and by building type. Iowa's Historic Architects fails on all of these counts.

Scholars requiring information on Iowa's built environment will consult Iowa's Historic Architects. They will be disappointed. This is not the authoritative reference book that it should be.

Shank's clear prose is a gold mine of information on a hard-to-nail topic: biographical data on architects in the state of Iowa. A brief summary of the development of the education and licensing of architects is also quite useful. The individual biographical sketches are engaging in and of themselves. A very useful book.

I was just fooling around with Google and ran across this reference from 1986. It just goes to prove Amazon does indeed have an index to almost everything!

I was born and raised in Estherville, Iowa, later attended Iowa State University at Ames, and relocated to Florida fifteen years ago. I've always been fond of regional writing and was delighted when my mother gave me a copy of Esther's Town as it featured my home town. Perhaps I, like many, develop more of a sense of sentimentality and nostaligia the older I get; however, I think most readers would enjoy the tales of the strong and brave pioneers of this northwestern Iowa town. The author worked for the local newspaper and knew all the "characters" so the authenticity of the book can't be questioned.

The text offers an overview of the American media market, with general facts and figures. Broadcasting, film and print industries are detailed in separate chapters. The book is concise and clear, but at a cost: it does not provide a consistent set of economic models for an in-depth analysis of the structure of the market, or its current trends. The level of the economics is somewhat basic. Good for students, not so much for more advanced readers.

This book contains a series of essays on Paracas art on the following subjects:

-Paracas an ancient cultural tradition on the south coast Peru.
-Paracas: Discovery & Controversy
-A technical & Iconographic analysis of Carhua Painted textiles
-Stucture, Image & Abstraction: Paracas Necropolis headbands as system templates
-Paracas necropolis bundle 89: A description
-Physical & Chemical Analysis of Paracas Fibers
-Ecology & Society in embroidered images from the Paracas Necroplis

-Social & Political leadership in the Lower Ica Valley: Ocucaje Phases 8 & 9
-The Paracas problem: Archaelogical perspectives.

As you can see from the above contents list this book is aimed at specialists - and the language is dense in academic and thick with reference terms. The illustrations are meagre and all in Black and white.

While there is a lot of information in this book, as a person doing research in areas relating to some of these subjects I have found this book hard going. I'm sure to find some useful things but only after much digging and decoding of jargon.

So, if you are after a book with beautiful pictures of Paracas textiles - avoid this like the plague. If you are after archaeological research by people who have worked in the field and have finally been able to publish what they have found then this book is probably for you. I'd classify this as a reference work, not a general use book, especially for people new to the area this book would be difficult to use.