Originally published in 1929, I Thought of Daisy is the first of three novels by Edmund Wilson. Written while he was still balancing his ambitions as a novelist against a successful career in literary criticism, I Thought of Daisy marries Wilson's two vocations to create an unusual and revealing work of fiction.

Iowa is the only state completely within the tallgrass prairie formation. Thanks to rich soil, adequate rainfall, and warm summer temperatures, hundreds of species combine to produce a diverse and colorful and ever-changing landscape. Using text and maps by Paul Christiansen and newly created drawings by Mark Müller, this first comprehensive guide to the prairie plants native to Iowa provides all the information necessary for identifying and distinguishing even the most similar species.

Species are described from the ground up: stem, leaf, bud, flower, fruit, and habitat. The time of flowering and fruiting is given for the central part of Iowa. Where several species are closely related, a common member of the group is fully described, and the other species are compared with the first. Each species is paired with a distribution map. The superbly detailed illustrations, all of which were drawn specifically for this handbook, capture the general shape of each plant as well as its characteristic features. A guide to family identification, information about extant and restored prairies in Iowa, and a glossary are also included.

Farmers who settled Iowa in the 1800s viewed the great green sea of grasses and wildflowers as a challenge to be replaced with cropfields and pastures. Today we realize that the prairie is an addictive, restorative, aesthetically satisfying place for study and recreation. An Illustrated Guide to Iowa Prairie Plants is designed to enable those who want to go beyond the most common plants to identify all native species and to learn more about their distribution, structure, and natural history.

The Anthropology of Iceland presents the first perspectives on Icelandic anthropology from both Icelandic and foreign anthropologists. The thirteen essays in this volume are divided into four themes: ideology and action; kinship and gender; culture, class, and ethnicity; and the Commonwealth period of circa 930 to 1220, which saw the flowering of sagas. Insider and outsider viewpoints on such topics as the Icelandic women's movement, the transformation of the fishing industry, the idea of mystical power in modern Iceland, and archaeological research in Iceland merge to form an international, comparative discourse.

Individually and collectively, by bringing the insights of anthropology to bear on Iceland, the native and foreign authors of this volume carry Iceland into the realm of modern anthropology, advancing our understanding of the island's people and the practice of anthropology.

Even the tamest characters in Imaginary Men test the rules to see where they can be broken and where they hold true. In Enid Shomer's world, endless misunderstandings sprout from goodwill, women and men burn with a desire that forces them to create themselves as they evolve, people grasp their relatedness to others only fleetingly, goodness is as great a mystery as evil.

For the unappreciated Harry Goldring, tormented by his unshakable label of familymensch, wildness is expressed first in panic attacks, then in daydreams. At the other end of Shomer's highly colored spectrum is killer Elvis Thornberry, a “man you wouldn't notice unless he held a gun to your head or saved your life.” Balancing these more troubled characters are Shomer's many improbable lovers and friends: Lavell, who sees something of herself in the untrainable hunting dog owned by her younger lover; Diane, who takes back her unfaithful husband only after inventing a lie that puts her on an equal footing; Leila Pinkerton and Fontane Walker, who were "as close to friendship as they could get, given that Leila was white, Fontane was black, and they lived in a world full of people who claimed to know what that meant."

In all of Shomer's powerful stories, family is the mold we break out of as well as the lap we seek comfort in; family myths create mysterious emblems of freedom. Listening to her resonant voice, we witness the wild, raw moments when people lose control, when the wildness—submerged or not—that they both avoid and rush toward bleeds through.

The collection of nine stories which won the 1980 Iowa Short Fiction Award is woven in a pattern so subtle that reading it is like writing your own nine-part novel. The author allows brief glimpses into the tormented journals of Joseph Quaile, a man of acute compassions and consuming hungers, then juxtaposes them with the fiction Quaile writes to scourge his demons and come to terms with himself and the people he loves. This is a dispassionate intelligence in passionate pursuit of freedom and reconciliation.

Showcasing poems by more than ninety contemporary American poets, In a Fine Frenzyreveals what Shakespeare’s poetic children have made of their inheritance. Particularly interested in Viola, Miranda, Prospero, Desdemona, Iago, Lear, Cordelia, Hamlet, Horatio, and Ophelia, the poets respond to the sonnets, the comedies, the tragedies, the romances, and, to a lesser degree, Shakespeare the man. In so doing they reveal the aspects of his work most currently captivating to modern writers.

Those who cherish Shakespeare’s mercurial wit will delight in the rapid shifts, from grief to hilarity, so characteristic of the bard himself. Comic poems about tragedies follow decidedly somber poems about comedies. Single poems contain multiple emotional twists and turns. Some pay homage; most interact directly with the original Shakespearean text. Collectively, they corroborate Ben Jonson's assertion that Shakespeare is “not of an age, but for all time.”

Driven by grit and determination during the Depression, John Ruan parlayed a one-truck business into Ruan Transportation Management Systems, one of the nation’s leading trucking, leasing, and logistics companies. The trucking business made John Ruan one of the wealthiest and most influential people in Iowa and was the foundation for his vast fortune which included interests in insurance, banking, financial services, international trade, and real estate.

In the 1970s and 80s, Ruan led Des Moines’s renaissance with the construction of the 36-story original Ruan Center, the Marriott Hotel tower, and the Two Ruan Center office complex. But his contributions reached far beyond the confines of Iowa. As a philanthropist, Ruan was a long-time sponsor of the World Food Prize, which recognizes the importance of a nutritious and sustainable food supply for all people.

Based on extensive interviews with Ruan, family members, business associates, friends, and colleagues, as well as privately held papers and archives, In for the Long Haul presents a discerning portrait of this hard-charging yet compassionate businessman.

In the closing decades of the nineteenth century Minnesota produced three young men of great talent who each went east to become writers. Two of them became famous: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sinclair Lewis. This is the story of the third man: Charles Macomb Flandrau.

Flandrau, a model of style and worldly sophistication and destined, almost everyone agreed, for greatness, was among the most talented young writers of his generation. His short stories about Harvard in the 1890s were called “the first realistic description of undergraduate life in American colleges” and sold out of the first printing in a few weeks. From 1899 to 1902 Flandrau was among the most popular contributors to the Saturday Evening Post. Alexander Woollcott rated him the best essayist in America. And Viva Mexico!, Flandrau’s account of life on a Mexican coffee plantation, is a classic, perhaps the best travel book ever written by an American. Yet Flandrau turned his back on it all. Financially independent, he chose a solitary, epicurean life in St. Paul, Mexico, Majorca, Paris, and Normandy. In later years, he confined his writing to local newspaper pieces and letters to his small circle of family and friends.

Using excerpts from these newspaper columns and unpublished letters, Larry Haeg has painstakingly recreated the story of this urbane, talented, witty, lazy, enigmatic, supremely private man who never reached the peak of literary success to which his talent might have taken him.

This very readable biography provides a detailed and honest portrayal of Flandrau and his times. It will fascinate readers interested in writers’ life stories and scholars of American literature as well as general readers interested in midwestern literary history.

In 1921 Solomon Orlovski, a Russian Jew born in 1904, emigrated to America and transformed himself into Robert Orlove, a pattern maker in two senses of the term: during the day, he worked in the fur trade in New York and Chicago, making patterns for toys and hats; in his private life he became a self-taught artist who created prints, sketches, and collages in his study. More than sixty years later his son Ben—an anthropologist educated at Harvard and Berkeley—walked through the doorway of the deceased Robert's study and began to explore more than a half century of his father's experiences, thoughts, and emotions as well as his own very different life. His wry, sensitive combination of biography, memoir, and autobiography taps a remarkably rich vein of individual and collective experience in our diverse society.

Ben Orlove's dual narrative constitutes a family history of notable breadth and immediacy. By turns passionate and cool, dramatic and analytic, he excavates his father Robert's lifetime accumulation of diaries, letters, clippings, photographs, and artworks to create a convincing, deeply satisfying portrait that link both father and son.

John Wood is well known for his brilliant writing on the history of photography, but for many years he has also centered on his work as a poet, publishing in some of the very best magazines and gaining the deep admiration of many writers and poets. This book is testimony of his devotion to his craft – a fully realized, mature, and carefully constructed collection.

But who was Donna Reed? Perhaps no celebrity of her symbolic importance is so little known. Moving from the backroads of Iowa to the mansions of Bel Air, Jay Fultz goes in search of the woman behind the image.

In Search of Donna Reed reveals a woman whose intelligence and force of character often put her at odds with the roles she portrayed both on and off screen. Reed, always angered by the treatment of women in Hollywood, turned political activist in middle age, confronting for the first time the arrogance of power. She was, said writer Barbara Avedon, a feminist before there was a feminist vocabulary. But she eludes any label.

This first biography of Donna Reed also contains the first extended discussion of her television show. The personal richness that Reed brought to her television role has been filtered out in the caricature perpetuated by pop critics. In the media "Donna Reed" is Donna Stone distorted as a female-manqué who wears pearls and high heels around the house. But Donna Reed's long hold on viewers depends on irreducible qualities that have nothing to do with this fixed image, as Fultz suggests.

He follows her development from Iowa farm girl to apprentice in Hollywood to mature juggler of the demands of family and career to antiwar activist. Drawing on Reed's letters and on interviews, Fultz looks for what was real in a very private person without discarding what is romantic in any pursuit of a public one. He shows why the rich and principled life of Donna Reed matters in this more cynical time.

 On a summer day in 1980 in Niederfeulen, Luxembourg, Suzanne Bunkers pored over parish records of her maternal ancestors, immigrants to the rural American Midwest in the mid 1800s. Suddenly, chance led her to the name Simmerl and to the missing piece in the genealogical puzzle that had brought her so far: Susanna Simmerl, Bunkers' paternal great-great-grandmother, who had given birth to an illegitimate daughter in 1856 before coming to America. Finding Susanna was the catalyst for Bunkers' intensely personal book, which blends history, memory, and imagination into a drama of two women's lives within their multigenerational family.

The ancient Hippocratic oath that every doctor pledges upon graduation from medical school is a code based on genuine devotion to people and a desire to serve them. It is also a code in urgent need of updating to reflect the technological and moral changes of modern society and the complicated dilemmas facing every practicing physician.

This collection of essays by some of the wisest observers of modern medicine probes the various forces affecting health care today: the power of the new technology in diagnosing and treating illnesses, the growing appreciation of mind/body interactions, the emergence of corporate hospitals and health care centers, and, most importantly, the essence of physicianhood—what makes a doctor want to practice medicine.

In considering these issues, the essayists question whether the medical-industrial complex will destroy physicians as we know them, making doctors employees of large profit-making institutions and more responsible to their companies than to their patients. Will increasing versatility in technological medicine remove doctors even further from the patient's bedside, weakening the diminishing bond between patient and doctor? Are there points of contact between western "scientific" medicine and holistic practices? Is there a place in modern medicine for work therapy and the placebo effect?

Each of these issues prevalent in medicine today has, in its own particular way, an effect upon the core relationship between doctor and patient. In Search of the Modern Hippocrates is dedicated to the premise that current changes in medicine can produce an altered and strengthened medical profession resolved to preserve the inextricable link between commitment and care. Ending with the development of a modern oath of ethics, it provides an important guide to medicine in the complex world we now face.

Maps may have been the stuff of his dreams, but they sometimes drew him away from places where he should have remained firmly rooted. In the Memory of the Map explores the complex relationship among maps, memory, and experience—what might be called a “cartographical psychology” or “cartographical history.” Interweaving a personal narrative structured around a variety of maps, with stories about maps as told by scholars, poets, and fiction writers, this book provides a dazzlingly rich personal and intellectual account of what many of us take for granted.

A dialog between desire and the maps of his life, an exploration of the pleasures, utilitarian purposes, benefits, and character of maps, this rich and powerful personal narrative is the matrix in which Norment embeds an exploration of how maps function in all our lives. Page by page, readers will confront the aesthetics, mystery, function, power, and shortcomings of maps, causing them to reconsider the role that maps play in their lives.

The twelve essays in this stimulating volume, written by health care professionals and others working with the important issue of institutional ethics, focus on the world of academic health centers and provide rich, informed commentaries on significant problems integral to the character and work of those centers. Daniel Steiner demonstrates how the viability of independent research may be threatened by university liaisons with industry. Donald Frederickson traces the history of the National Institutes of Health response to the ethical challenges in clinical investigation and fetal research. Edmund Pellegrino recommends ways in which health-related institutions may translate their concern into action. Robert Coles examines the tensions between institutional and personal values in a very provocative way. Other directions are explored by essayists Roger Bulger, Stephen Toulmin, H. Tristram Engelhardt, Kim Dunn, Mitchell Rabkin, James Haughton, Lawrence Green, and the editors themselves.

Every essay in this wide-ranging collection reveals the implications and effects of institutional values. The end result is a clear picture of conflicts of values: ethical, social, economic, ethnic, cultural, and pedagogic. Integrity in Health Care Institutions points out the need for a deliberate attempt to sort out the values of institutions and, when they are fully and clearly displayed, to use priorities as a guide to satisfying the obligations of academic health centers to those who work within their walls; to the patients, students, scientists, and teachers they serve; and to society in general.

Physicians and nurses, hospital and university administrators, attorneys, sociologists, and everyone concerned about the moral interaction between institutions and individuals will want to read this book.

Intricate Relations charts the development of the novel in and beyond the early republic in relation to these two thematic and intricately connected centers: sexuality and economics. By reading fiction written by Americans between 1789 and 1814 alongside medical theory, political and economic tracts, and pedagogical literature of all kinds, Karen Weyler recreates and illuminates the larger, sometimes opaque, cultural context in which novels were written, published, and read.

In 1799, the novelist Charles Brockden Brown used the evocative phrase “intricate relations” to describe the complex imbrication of sexual and economic relations in the early republic. Exploring these relationships, he argued, is the chief job of the “moral historian,” a label that most novelists of the era embraced. In a republic anxious about burgeoning individualism in the 1790s and the first two decades of the nineteenth century, the novel foregrounded sexual and economic desires and explored ways to regulate the manner in which they were expressed and gratified.

In Intricate Relations, Weyler argues that understanding how these issues underlie the novel as a genre is fundamental to understanding both the novels themselves and their role in American literary culture. Situating fiction amid other popular genres illuminates how novelists such as Charles Brockden Brown, Hannah Foster, Samuel Relf, Susanna Rowson, Rebecca Rush, and Sally Wood synthesized and iterated many of the concerns expressed in other forms of public discourse, a strategy that helped legitimate their chosen genre and make it a viable venue for discussion in the decades following the revolution.

Weyler’s passionate and persuasive study offers new insights into the civic role of fiction in the early republic and will be of great interest to literary theorists and scholars in women’s and American studies.

In 1952 Ralph Ellison won the National Book Award for his Kafkaesque and claustrophobic novel about the life of a nameless young black man in New York City. Although Invisible Man has remained the only novel that Ellison published in his lifetime, it is generally regarded as one of the most important works of fiction in our century.

This new reading of a classic work examines Ellison's relation to and critique of the American literary canon by demonstrating that the pattern of allusions in Invisible Man forms a literary-critical subtext which challenges the accepted readings of such major American authors as Emerson, Melville, and Twain.

Modeling his argument on Foucault's analysis of the asylum, Nadel analyzes the institution of the South to show how it moved blacks from "enslavement" to "slavery" to "invisibility"—all in the interest of maintaining an organization of power based on racial caste. He then demonstrates the ways Ellison wrote in the modernist/surreal tradition to trace symbolically the history of blacks in America as they moved not only from the nineteenth century to the twentieth, and from the rural South to the urban North, but as they moved (sometimes unnoticed) through American fiction.

It is on this latter movement that Nadel focuses his criticism, first demonstrating theoretically that allusions can impel reconsideration of the alluded-to text and thus function as a form of literary criticism, and then reading the specific criticism implied by Ellison's allusions to Emerson's essays and Lewis Mumford's The Golden Days, as well as to "Benito Cereno" and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Nadel also considers Ellison's allusions to Whitman, Eliot, Joyce, and the New Testament.

Invisible Criticism will be of interest not only to students of American and Afro-American literature but also to those concerned about issues of literary theory, particularly in the areas of intertextual relationships, canonicity, and rehistoricism.

Invisible Darkness offers a striking interpretation of the tortured lives of the two major novelists of the Harlem Renaissance: Jean Toomer, author of Cane (1923), and Nella Larsen, author of Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929). Charles R. Larson examines the common belief that both writers "disappeared" after the Harlem Renaissance and died in obscurity; he dispels the misconception that they vanished into the white world and lived unproductive and unrewarding lives.

In clear, jargon-free language, Larson demonstrates the opposing views that both writers had about their work vis-à-vis the incipient black arts movement; he traces each writer's troubled childhood and describes the unresolved questions of race that haunted Toomer and Larsen all of their lives. Larson follows Toomer through the wreckage of his personal life as well as the troubled years of his increasingly quirky spiritual quest until his death in a nursing home in 1967. Using previously unpublished letters and documents, Larson establishes for the first time the details of Larsen's life, illustrating that virtually every published fact about her life is incorrect.

With an innovative chronology that breaks the conventions of the traditional biographical form, Larson narrates what happened to both of these writers during their supposed years of withdrawal. He demonstrates that Nella Larsen never really gave up her fight for creative and personal fulfillment and that Jean Toomer's connection to the Harlem Renaissance—and the black world—is at best a dubious one. This strong revisionist interpretation of two major writers will have a major i mpact on African American literary studies.

This landmark collection features emerging poets who combine a commitment to innovation and experimentation with a love for the lyric tradition, whose poetry transcends “mainstream” and avant-garde practice to create new and exciting poetic territories.

These new American poetries for the twenty-first century and beyond reach back toward the Modernists and even earlier lyric poetries (such as those of Wyatt, Donne, Keats, and Dickinson) and, simultaneously, reach forward to poetic possibilities not yet realized or even imagined. Most of the poets included here have won publication prizes, awards, and fellowships, and some have had their work anthologized. Others are at earlier stages of recognition but have published in major journals. All are writing highly accomplished work that will soon find a wider audience.

One distinguishing feature of this collection is the inclusion of substantial artistic statements from each contributor, in which the poets discuss their works, their influences, their aims, and their poetics. These statements are invaluable in giving readers a point of entry to the poems and can contribute to the development of a conversation among American poets that transcends questions of “craft” to address fundamental issues of poetry as an artistic practice.

Shepherd, a leading poet, essayist, and literary critic, is uniquely situated to bring us this important collection: young enough to feel the spirit of newer poets and yet established enough to bring a more experienced eye and a wider view to this groundbreaking project.The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries highlights some of the most exciting, vital, and productive tendencies in contemporary American poetry and will be a significant milestone for students and teachers of poetry as well as for the general reader.

The Iowa Breeding Bird Atlas—the first comprehensive statewide survey of Iowa's breeding birds—provides a detailed record of the composition and distribution of the avifauna of the Hawkeye State. The atlas documents the presence of 199 species, 158 of which were confirmed breeding. This landmark volume will alert Iowans to the limited distribution of numerous species and serve as a guide to the management practices—such as forest and wetland management, set-aside programs, reduction in farm chemical use, and crop diversity—which could help insure that many future changes are positive ones. The Iowa Breeding Bird Atlas provides a welcome and much-needed baseline for future comparisons of changes in Iowa's birdlife and, by extension, the lives of all animals in the state.

Newcomers to Iowa are always amazed at the yearly changes in the heights of fields. The landscape expands from ground level to ten feet tall and back again every year: from frozen bare ground in winter to light green sprouts in late spring to dark green corn in late summer to acre upon acre of dry cornstalks at harvest time. Slow and unwieldy machines take up more than their share of the roads, clouds of black or yellow dust cover the fields in spring and fall, pigs (or are they hogs?) in various colors look out from fences, huge tractors with complicated add-ons lumber through the fields, shiny silos linked with tentacles tower above tidy white farmhouses dwarfed by huge red barns. What are the names of all these animals and crops and buildings and machines? As an introduction to the practical magic of Iowa farmscapes, Iowa Farm in Your Pocket won’t tell you everything you should know to be a true Iowan, but it will tell you enough that you can survive a day at the state fair without embarrassing yourself.

 Iowa ranks first in the U.S. in the number of hogs, egg layers, and pullets and in the production of corn and soybeans. Yes, the number of farms is shrinking, and their size is increasing. Yes, most Iowans now live in towns, compared to a hundred years ago, when the majority lived on farms. But despite urbanization and the rise of corporate farming, the family farm—more than 77,000 of them at last count—is still a vital part of Iowa’s identity. Fly over the state in summertime or drive across it in fall, when the headlights of tractors shine from the fields at night and golden mountains of corn are stacked around elevators, and it’s easy to see that an enormous percentage is farmland—more than 85 percent, in fact.

 Kirk Murray’s loving and endearing photographs make this guide the perfect companion for drives in the countryside in all seasons. They celebrate the rich activities and varied beauties of each season on the farm, from the starkness of winter whites to the pale and rich greens of spring and summer to the rust-reds and golds of fall. Murray’s photos of sprouting corn at dawn, a summer sun shining on a farm pond, and a full moon over a silver silo echo Grant Wood and Vincent Van Gogh; his photos of tilling, planting, and harvesting are bright and energizing; his scenes of barnyards and fields and farmsteads are colorful and luminous; and his photos of farm animals are just plain fun.

With eighty full-color photographs of the most common animals, activities, crops, and buildings that you can expect to see whenever you pass a family farmstead, Iowa Farm in Your Pocket will be a treat for all newcomers to a state where corn and beans and hogs rule, for both urban and rural children and their parents, and for all those who want to revisit memories of growing up on a farm.

Most, if not all, of Iowa’s gems and minerals are products of crystallization in underground cavities that filled with water containing dissolved chemicals. The famed Iowa geodes (Iowa’s state rock) are products of a complex process of replacement and cavity-filling in the Warsaw Shale. Armored by a rind of tough chalcedonic quartz, these spheroidal masses, which range up to more than a meter across, weather out of the host rock and accumulate along streams in the southeastern part of the state. During the Pleistocene Epoch, large masses of glacial ice rafted the ultra-fine-grained variety of quartz called Lake Superior agates, which had previously weathered out of their host rocks, southward into Iowa. They can be found in the gravels that have accumulated along major streams in the eastern half of the state.

Iowa’s long record of mining lead, coal, gypsum, and limestone contains a rich history; the forty-seven mineral specimens inIowa Gems and Minerals in Your Pocketmake up a fascinating illustrated guide to that history. Carefully lit and photographed to reveal both maximum detail and maximum beauty, each specimen becomes a work of art.

Today’s huge array of environmental problems can best be solved by people who have learned about nature within nature at a place with a long history of research and observation, people who thoroughly understand and appreciate nature’s cogs and wheels. Lakeside Lab and biological research stations like it have never been more relevant to science and to society at large than they are today. Michael Lannoo convinces us that while Lakeside’s past is commendable, its future, grounded in ecological principles, will help shape a more sustainable society. 

Popular culture remembers the settling of the Midwest as a golden era of unbounded opportunity, a time when every farm was a family farm and every farmer glowed with health. Pioneers in nineteenth-century Iowa, however, had to battle a formidable host of diseases during this golden era—malaria was endemic, smallpox and dysentery occurred in widespread epidemics, and typhoid, cholera, scarlet fever, and diphtheria had their seasons. Physicians in the growing Hawkeye State had little of the status and skill they command today, and herbalists, hydropaths, eclectics, Thomsonians, and homeopaths competed with purveyors of home remedies and patent medicines for their services.

The druggists of pioneer Iowa were artisan producers who compounded and prescribed botanical and chemical medicines, sold a variety of other merchandise from perfumes to paints, and dispensed the secret concoctions known as patent medicines, guaranteed to cure any condition, however alarming. In this compelling study, Lee Anderson tells the story of these early pharmacists and their hard-fought quest to legitimize their profession. While he confronts the politics of professionalism and the purpose of the pharmaceutical science and education, he also illuminates the mutual role of physicians and pharmacists in frontier health care.

With skill and humor, Anderson recreates an exciting time in midwestern history and provides insights into national issues of professionalism in medicine. His study will appeal to scholars in the history of medicine, pharmacy, and professionalism and to everyone interested in the history of the Midwest.

Although some people refer to Iowa as “flyover country,” presidential candidates and political reporters in the national press corps have no difficulty locating the state every four years at the beginning of presidential primary season.

When Iowa Democrats pushed forward their precinct caucuses in 1972, the Iowa caucuses became the first presidential nominating event in the nation. Politicos soon realized the impact of Iowa’s new status and, along with the national media, promoted the caucuses with a vengeance. The Iowa Precinct Caucuses chronicles how the caucuses began, how they changed, and starting in 1972 how they became fodder for and manipulated by the mass media. Hugh Winebrenner and Dennis J. Goldford argue that the media have given a value to the Iowa caucuses completely out of proportion to the reality of their purpose and procedural methods. In fact, the nationally reported “results” are contrived by the Iowa parties to portray a distorted picture of the process. As presidential primaries have grown in the media spotlight and superseded the parties’ conventions, Iowa has become a political proving ground for the confident, the hopeful, and the relatively unknown, but at what cost to the country?

The third edition of this classic book has been updated to include the elections of 2000, which saw the first winner of the Iowa caucuses to reach the White House since 1976; of 2004 and the roller-coaster fortunes of Howard Dean and John Kerry; and of 2008 and the unlikely emergence of Barack Obama as a presidential contender.

What began as a study of the Minneapolis & St. Louis Railway stretched into more than a dozen contributions on Hawkeye state railroad topics. By 1969 Donovan had examined Iowa's “Little Three”: Chicago Great Western, Illinois Central, and Minneapolis & St. Paul as well as the state's “Big Four”: Chicago & North Western; Chicago, Burlington & Quincy; Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul & Pacific; and Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific. In addition to these seven core carriers, Donovan covered the state's less prominent railroads: Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe; Great Northern; and Union Pacific and Wabash. Moreover, he contributed an issue on Iowa's principal interurbans, most of which survived into the 1950s as electric-powered freight-only short lines. In uniting Donovan's articles into a single volume, Iowa Railroads provides the most complete history of Iowa's rail heritage.

Matthew Mark Trumbull was a Londoner who immigrated at the age of twenty. Within ten years of his arrival in America, he had become a lawyer in Butler County, Iowa; two years later a member of the state legislature; and two years after that a captain in the Union Army. By the end of the Civil War, he was a brevet brigadier general, and in his later years he was an author and lecturer. Kenneth Lyftogt’s biography details the amazing life of this remarkable man, also shedding light on the histories of the Third Iowa Volunteer Infantry and the Ninth Iowa Volunteer Cavalry.

Iowa's rock record is the product of more than three billion years of geological processes. The state endured multiple episodes of continental glaciation during the Pleistocene Ice Age, and the last glacier retreated from Iowa a mere (geologically speaking) twelve thousand years ago. Prior to that, dozens of seas came and went, leaving behind limestone beds with rich fossil records. Lush coal swamps, salty lagoons, briny basins, enormous alluvial plains, ancient rifts, and rugged Precambrian mountain belts all left their mark. In Iowa's Geological Past, Wayne Anderson gives us an up-to-date and well-informed account of the state's vast geological history from the Precambrian through the end of the Great Ice Age.

Anderson takes us on a journey backward into time to explore Iowa's rock-and-sediment record. In the distant past, prehistoric Iowa was covered with shallow seas; coniferous forests flourished in areas beyond the continental glaciers; and a wide variety of animals existed, including mastodon, mammoth, musk ox, giant beaver, camel, and giant sloth.

The presence of humans can be traced back to the Paleo-Indian interval, 9,500 to 7,500 years ago. Iowa in Paleozoic time experienced numerous coastal plain and shallow marine environments. Early in the Precambrian, Iowa was part of ancient mountain belts in which granite and other rocks were formed well below the earth's surface.

The hills and valleys of the Hawkeye State are not everlasting when viewed from the perspective of geologic time. Overall, Iowa's geologic column records an extraordinary transformation over more than three billion years. Wayne Anderson's profusely illustrated volume provides a comprehensive and accessible survey of the state's remarkable geological past.

A little over a century ago, the Irish in America were the targets of intense xenophobic anxiety. Much of that anxiety centered on their mobility, whether that was traveling across the ocean to the U.S., searching for employment in urban centers, mixing with other ethnic groups, or forming communities of their own. Granshaw argues that American variety theatre, a precursor to vaudeville, was a crucial battleground for these anxieties, as it appealed to both the fears and the fantasies that accompanied the rapid economic and social changes of the Gilded Age.

The short lyric poems in Larissa Szporluk's new collection, Isolato, search for meaning and beauty—for poetry—in an unpredictable and incomprehensible world. Their voices break from the contemporary preoccupation with autobiography, held together by language rather than a sustained narrative or plot. Yet the narrative fragments clearly evoke certain themes and moods: interaction of and struggle between the human and natural world; violence, particularly against women and children; alienation and betrayal; the mysteries of the universe, God, and death; and, of course, poetry itself.

Variously called a religious, a metaphysical, or a visionary poet, Szporluk has been compared to Emily Dickinson and George Herbert as well as to twentieth-century poets like Sylvia Plath, Mark Strand, and Louise Glück. Her work is concise, experimental, and challenging. Language and syntax are often elusive, the logic that of dreams or music, the imagery mysterious. The poems, once read, are not easily dismissed. Like the poet's “Deer Crossing the Sea,”readers find “the promise of nectar / haunts them forever, the shore pecked out / of their eyes, and there, in its stead, / something greater to catch, / a scent that would paralyze God.”