November Gardening Tip—from GARDENING IN IOWA AND SURROUNDING AREAS

"To discourage the use of your plants, including houseplants, as a cat litter box, cut a slit and a hole in the middle of a pie tin and place it around the base of the plant."—Kathleen Moench, Business Women's Garden Club, Des Moines

Gardening in Iowa and Surrounding Areas, by Veronica Lorson Fowler with the Federated Garden Clubs of Iowa

Photo from A YEAR OF IOWA NATURE, by Carl Kurtz

Monarch butterflies migrate in spring and spread across over one billion acres by the end of their migration cycle. See more photos like this one in Carl Kurtz's book, A Year of Iowa Nature: Discovering Where We Live.

Thottathil reading and signing in Cedar Rapids

Sapna E. Thottathil, author of India's Organic Farming Revolution: What It Means for Our Global Food System, will be reading from her book at the Cedar Rapids Barnes & Noble on Thursday. Be sure to stop by! For more information or to RSVP, visit our Facebook event.

Where: Cedar Rapids Barnes & Noble
When: Thursday, November 13, at 7:00 P.M.


Praise for India's Organic Farming Revolution

"A breath of fresh air in the organic/local food production discussion, this very engaging book provides a significant example of the structural conditions for the scaling up of organic agriculture."—Eric Holt-Giménez, executive director, Food First/Institute for Food and Development Policy

"This book will make an important contribution to the field of organic literature as well as to the field of such food and agriculture transitions. I am not aware of many efforts to provide the reader with such a comprehensive treatment of such transitions in the context of a specific community."—Frederick Kirschenmann, author, Cultivating an Ecological Conscience: Essays from a Farmer Philosopher

Excerpt from THE BOOK OF FAMOUS IOWANS, by Douglas Bauer

In The Book of Famous Iowans, Douglas Bauer explores the life of Will Vaughn, a man of late middle age living in Chicago with his second wife, remembering the month of June 1957 in his hometown,  the rural village of New Holland, Iowa. More precisely, Will remembers just a few days of that month and the quick sequence of astonishing events that have colored, ever since, the logic of his heart and the moods of his mind. He tells of his stunningly beautiful young mother, Leanne, who liked to recall the years of the Second World War, during which she sang with a dance band in a lounge in Cheyenne, Wyoming. He tells too of his father, Lewis, a soldier in the war who one night saw the "resplendently sequined" Leanne step onstage and began at that instant to plot his courtship of her.

--

I learned about my mother's search for work not from her or my father, but from my grandmother one evening as the two of us sat in her upstairs kitchen. I remember that the heat in her apartment that night was a stunning, sodden thing. I remember we had, my grandmother and I, tried and failed to eat our supper, so she'd made us ice cream floats to fill our stomachs.

Before she told me my mother's secret, she'd recalled my parents' arriving from Cheyenne and how, with a determined buoyancy, she and my mother had spent several days complimenting and deferring to one another while at the same time each was taking the other's measure. She said, "The first thing you noticed, of course, was her looks. I said to your father, 'How did you manage this? You're a handsome boy, honey, but the two of you together, it looks like the princess hasn't got around to kissing the frog!'"

But, she said, while my mother's beauty was something to admire, what there was to like was her intelligence; that she was smart enough to know she should be scared to death and strong enough to do all she could to hide her fear. Still, my grandmother said, when she looked back, she wished my mother had been able to say she was frightened; perhaps then she wouldn't have felt "she had to have her dukes up all the time."

Photo from A YEAR OF IOWA NATURE, by Carl Kurtz

In this photo, a whitetail doe and her fawn stand underneath a small tree. See more photos like this in Carl Kurtz's book, A Year of Iowa Nature: Discovering Where We Live.

Excerpt from THE BOOK OF FAMOUS IOWANS, by Douglas Bauer

In The Book of Famous Iowans, Douglas Bauer explores the life of Will Vaughn, a man of late middle age living in Chicago with his second wife, remembering the month of June 1957 in his hometown,  the rural village of New Holland, Iowa. More precisely, Will remembers just a few days of that month and the quick sequence of astonishing events that have colored, ever since, the logic of his heart and the moods of his mind. He tells of his stunningly beautiful young mother, Leanne, who liked to recall the years of the Second World War, during which she sang with a dance band in a lounge in Cheyenne, Wyoming. He tells too of his father, Lewis, a soldier in the war who one night saw the "resplendently sequined" Leanne step onstage and began at that instant to plot his courtship of her.

--

I have kept three photographs of my mother, Leanne McQueen Vaughn, and anybody who sees one of them invariably asks me who the beautiful young woman in the picture is. No one recognizes a trace of her in me, since I grew, against her certain prediction, to resemble my father. I have his fair coloring; his stocky build; his wide, square face.

It would be easy to think that the photos had been taken, not over a decade, but within a span of a few weeks. For her face in the first, when she was fifteen, appears remarkably the same as in the last, that of a woman whose sophisticated beauty has matured just moments before the picture was snapped. Her expression, too, is closely repeated and seems to me one of cool epiphany. It's conveyed by a watchful gleam in her eyes and in the way she holds her head, gracefully extending her neck so that she looks to be peering out over the heads of the crowd. I know well how it felt to be within its range (and it often felt powerfully confidential and secure). But thinking now of her actions, the choices she made, and how they permanently changed us all, I see her expression as suggesting that she has raised her eyes to look past the distractions of hope and innocence, in order to see what she needed to see.

Hot off the Press: THE VERY AIR, DEXTERITY, and THE BOOK OF FAMOUS IOWANS, all by Douglas Bauer

The University of Iowa Press is proud to announce the release of The Very Air, Dexterity and The Book of Famous Iowans, all by Douglas Bauer!

 

"From his supple prose to his common touch, one can detect in Douglas Bauer a substantial talent. The genius of Dexterity is that it is scrupulously organized and yet seamless in its narrative structure. In other words, Mr. Bauer is himself extremely dexterous."—New York Times Book Review

"The Book of Famous Iowans is a perfect novel—beautifully written and emotionally compelling in a way that made me wish it would never end even as I raced to the next page. I don't know when I have felt such love and compassion for a cast of characters. I already miss them, and will, I am sure, for a long time to come."—Jill McCorkle

"[The Very Air is] suspenseful, poignant, and irresistibly entertaining. Bauer makes some wonderful observations about life in America during the 1900s, and about humanity's eternal need for illusion, and his characterization is sharp and funny."—Publisher's Weekly