Category: Reviews

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Reviews

Summer Reading 2019

Lake Macbride

For the next five weeks I’ll be covering weekdays for our editor Trish Nelson who is on summer break. This is my seventh year to provide summer posts, and more than ten years since I began posting at Blog for Iowa.

Regular readers know my topics: politics, foreign affairs, the climate crisis, the Iowa legislature and nuclear abolition. I’ll contribute those types of posts and more as I compete to gain your interest in a busy media landscape.

While Iowa lakes struggle to maintain safe water quality for summer activities like boating, low impact water sports, and swimming, Lake Macbride experienced its first-ever public health warnings about microcystins produced by blue-green algae. Department of Natural Resources staff recommended people not swim in the lake because of high levels of toxins in the water. While the swimming ban was lifted, there is another traditional summer activity for those skeptical about the water’s suitability: reading a book. Following is a list of books readers might consider for summer reading.

I know the 720-page Mueller Report published by The Washington Post sounds like a lot and maybe a straight through reading isn’t for everyone. However, read ten pages per day and it can be finished in 2.4 months.

Willard “Sandy” Boyd, the fifteenth president of the University of Iowa, published a memoir this year, A Life on the Middle West’s Never-ending Frontier. He was university president when I was an undergraduate and graduate student. Boyd remains active as Rawlings/Miller professor of Law at the university and is president emeritus. The memoir offers his views of the role of a public university and how it evolved since he first worked at the University of Iowa in 1954. I picked it for my personal connection to Boyd, but there is a lot more to the memoir, especially if your interest is in higher education.

If folks haven’t read a history of the great migration of black citizens fleeing the south in the 20th Century in search of a better life, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson offers an option. After fifteen years of research and writing, Wilkerson published the book in 2010. It “examines the three geographic routes that were commonly used by African Americans leaving the southern states between 1915 and the 1970s, illustrated through the personal stories of people who took those routes,” according to her Wikipedia page. Knowing the history of the Great migration is essential to maintaining progressive values.

What is a single book to better understand the climate crisis? I found an answer in The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells. Fair warning: there is not much good news within these 310 pages. What the book does do is present a broad array of the effects of the climate crisis and how they impact us now and near term. Wallace-Wells seeks to address denial that climate change poses immediate consequences that are both ever-changing and happening in front of us. Required reading for anyone advocating a sustainable life on Earth. That should include almost everyone.

Democrats expecting a fair fight in the 2020 election aren’t playing by the same rules as Republicans. When we consider how progressive values might again gain dominance in American culture it is important to learn how we arrived at this Trump moment. Two books highlight how we got here and are worth reading: Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (2016) by Jane Mayer, and Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America (2017) by Nancy MacLean. When people talk about getting money out of politics they are just flapping their gums if they don’t understand how it got in. These two books provide that insight and are essential progressive reading.

It seems like yesterday I was having a cup of coffee with Kurt Michael Friese in Iowa City. It’s hard to believe he’s gone. In A Cook’s Journey: Slow Food in the Heartland Friese offers a guided tour of the slow food movement in the Midwest around 2008. While a little dated, the book is worth reading for the landscape of Midwestern local food it presents and people in the local food movement. It’s also a way to remember his work as a chef.

That’s what’s on my summer reading list. Feel free to share what’s on yours in the comments.

~ Written for Blog for Iowa

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Kitchen Garden Reviews

Rainy Days and Smarshing it Up

Tray of spinach and lettuce seedlings ready to plant in the ground.

Early planting is done… then it rained.

The ground has been too wet for planting so Friday became a day for weeding and staking the sugar snap peas.

I moved seedlings from the garage to the dining room to protect them from wind and rain while I worked my usual shifts at the home, farm and auto supply store. They are back outside waiting for the ground to dry. There is a lot of gardening to do over the next four weeks.

While the grass dried I drove across Mehaffey Bridge to the BioVentures Center in the University of Iowa Research Park. A friend arranged an impromptu round table discussion of affordable housing centered around Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown’s trip to Iowa to support his wife Connie Schultz. Schultz interviewed author Sarah Smarsh at an Iowa City Public Library fund raiser in the county seat that evening.

The round table consisted of community leaders introducing themselves and discussing issues raised by the recent purchase of a mobile home park by a group of out of state investors. The new owners plan substantial rent increases which current residents can ill afford. My role was to listen and learn.

Sarah Smarsh is author of the memoir Heartland: Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth. My brief review after reading it last year is as follows:

I was skeptical at first about the reach of this book about rural poverty, hard work, and economic injustice. Yet, I was drawn in to a world I knew existed but hadn’t been articulated in such words. Smarsh’s story resonates with how I was raised, and with much of what I see in rural Iowa today. It was a marvelous read.

Several of my farm friends attended the event. We gathered under the marquee of the Englert Theatre for a photograph. Those who read Heartland felt as I did, that it articulated something about modern life in the Midwest that had been missing. We also concurred that Smarsh had drawn a clear line between what she presented in the book and her personal life which was not up for public conversation. After discussing the book we told jokes and laughed (a lot) in the marquee light before finding our ways home.

Some political friends attended the fund raiser, including my state senator Zach Wahls and his biggest fan, Chloe Angyal. I complained to Wahls I couldn’t remove his bumper sticker from my aging Outback. “American made, baby,” he responded.

I met Angyal who is a contributing editor to MarieClaire.com. We discussed her arrival in the Hawkeye state where she is writing a series of dispatches (here and here) related to the first in the nation Iowa caucuses and the unprecedented number of women running for president. Originally from Australia, she relocated to Iowa from Manhattan. After surviving the polar vortex and one of our coldest winters in years, she said she likes it in Iowa.

I didn’t get the lawn mowed, which means another morning of waiting for grass to dry, followed by the long process of bagging it up then mulching the kale. The forecast is sunny and clear. Hopefully the rest of the apple blooms will open, followed by pollination. Fingers crossed. I’m ready for a solid day’s work in the garden after Friday night smarshing it up in the county seat.

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Reviews

Tallgrass Conversations – Book Review

“Prairie is among the most altered and threatened ecosystems in the world,” Thomas Dean of Iowa City wrote in a new book he co-authored with Cindy Crosby of Glen Ellyn, Ill. “Care of the world is always essential, and care arises from conversation.”

Tallgrass Conversations: In Search of the Prairie Spirit was released April 22 by Ice Cube Press. It is a compilation of Crosby and Dean’s recent writing and photographs of tallgrass prairie in the Midwest. Organized in a series of 26 conversations, the book touches on many of the current issues pertaining to preservation and restoration of tallgrass prairie.

Prairie used to cover more than 85 percent of Iowa land, according to the Neal Smith National Wildlife Refuge. Today less than one tenth of a percent of original tallgrass prairie remains in the state.

“Remnant prairie functions in a way we can’t replicate through planting prairie,” Crosby wrote. “We can educate ourselves about what we are losing. We can care for what remains. We can continue to plant prairie, then research, paint, write about and ensure tallgrass prairie is a part of future conversations about development, agriculture, and conservation.”

If one participates in the experience of tallgrass prairie as Dean and Crosby encourage us to do, it is decidedly cultural. They provide a window into current tallgrass ecosystems and their modern discovery and management. The authors want more writers and artists, poets and photographers to document what’s left of tallgrass prairie and enter into a conversation about what it means and what can be learned. They want to be partners in that conversation and the book serves as an example of how to begin.

“We hope you’ll enjoy seeing the various ways we invite you to think about some of these words and images that showcase the prairie spirit,” Crosby wrote.

To learn more about Cindy Crosby’s work, visit her website, Tuesdays in the Tallgrass: Exploring exterior and interior landscapes through the tallgrass prairie at https://tuesdaysinthetallgrass.wordpress.com.
Thomas Dean is senior presidential writer/editor at the University of Iowa, where he also teaches interdisciplinary courses.

~ First published in Issue 262 of Little Village

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Reviews

Becoming by Michelle Obama

Becoming

Becoming by Michelle Obama
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

What surprised me was the clarity with which Obama depicted a life on the South Side of Chicago and how it influenced her both while coming up and once she had means to be on her own. The first two sections of the book are by far the strongest. That’s partly because as First Lady events in the third part had plenty of previous play in the media creating a background noise that interfered somewhat with her meticulous and thoughtful narrative.

She crafted a story almost anyone could relate to. Highly recommend you check this book out from the library and give it a read. Better yet, have your children read it, or read it with a group of friends.

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Reviews

An Uncivil War by Greg Sargent

An Uncivil War: Taking Back Our Democracy in an Age of Trumpian Disinformation and Thunderdome PoliticsAn Uncivil War: Taking Back Our Democracy in an Age of Trumpian Disinformation and Thunderdome Politics by Greg Sargent
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Written before the 2018 Midterms and Bret Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court, Greg Sargent provides an outline of key issues to help Democrats as we prepare for the 2020 general election. He covers voter suppression, gerrymandering, the role of disinformation in our current politics, and refreshes our memory of the hardball constitutional politics played by Republican leadership in recent years. He frames up what Democrats can do about our politics that favors democracy and fair play in governance.

In a couple hundred pages Sargent brings together national issues that resonate on a local level. If a person were to read a single book about national politics, An Uncivil War should be the one.

~ Review first appeared on Goodreads

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Kitchen Garden Reviews

Summer Begins

First Marketmore Cucumber

A letter from our rural medical clinic reached me early this morning. I read every word it had to say.

I said, the letter reached me early this morning, I read every word it had to say.

Rural life ain’t nothing but the blues, how much longer can we live this way?

The physician I saw in April is moving his practice to Williamsburg — too far to drive for routine appointments. His replacement is an ARNP, which stands for advanced registered nurse practitioner. I read the definition but don’t understand what it means except we’re changing from two physicians to one… another nail in the coffin of rural health care.

We’re lucky to live close to the clinic’s hospital, and a large teaching hospital operates in the county seat. We won’t be deprived of care. I don’t look forward to changing physicians for the fourth time since leaving my transportation career.

I’ll try the new arrangement. What else is there to do?

This is the last weekend for soil blocking at the two CSA farms. After that, the farmers will make their own for the remaining fall share starts. I’m taking a break before returning to the orchard in August.

I finished reading The Shepherd’s Life: Modern Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape by James Rebanks before heading to the garden.

The shepherd went to Oxford, so it’s natural he would do something outside the normal range for a sheep herder. He’s been traveling and speaking to groups of farmers about his life in the Lake District of England. Last January in Ames, he spoke to members of Practical Farmers of Iowa at their annual convention. They made a YouTube of his speech. I haven’t viewed it yet.

What struck me about the book is the comparison with Iowa. Not necessarily what one might think.

On the one hand a well-settled place of William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Beatrix Potter and the Lake Poets. In front of us a landscape barely settled since the Black Hawk War of 1832. Any sense of ancient Iowa prairie is long gone and replaced with a grid of roads outlining row cropped fields and concentrated animal feeding operations. The long history of sheep herding in the Lake District served as a reminder most Iowa farmers are recent trespassers as agriculture and land use continue to evolve. There won’t always be soy and corn in what was once an ancient lake bed.

Rebanks informed my view of the annual cycle of sheep farmers. Now I know why some of my friends are so stressed during spring lambing. I’m sorry I missed the speech, and when spring farm work is done, I plan to spend the hour to watch it.

For the time being back to working on the garden to chase away these summertime blues.

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Home Life Reviews

Waning Lilacs

Fallen Lilac Flowers

Flowers began to fall from lilac bushes. Air is fragrant with sweet smell.

It won’t last long. It is spring, which continues as it has for millennia, reminding us we are but a speck of dust in time by comparison.

It’s the last day before the end of my hiatus from the home, farm and auto supply store.

Two days a week isn’t much to work. When quitting time on the second day rolls around I feel I accomplished something but am not committed. That’s what I want.

I’m reading Natchez Burning by Greg Iles. Part of me likes it and part doesn’t. What I like is it was checked out from our digital library during recent rainfall and I’m reading it on my mobile device. It’s an easy read, a thriller. The story moves along and while I’m reading it’s easy to finish a chapter. What I don’t like is the obvious handles which are part of the narrative. Characters, settings, the former music store, iconography of popular culture — it all seems too easy a construct and such awareness while reading is a distraction. There are thousands of on line reviews of the book, so it’s easy to find people who agree with me. Many others liked the book. Because of the convenience and quick pace I’ll read on for now. If I don’t finish before the lending period is over, I’m not sure I will renew. Life’s long enough to try it, but too short to follow the novel to its conclusion through sheer determination.

Rain fell and it’s been good. Green up is here and the clean look of leaves and branches before insects get to work is inspiring. Time to weed the garden and harvest spinach and spring onions.

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Reviews

Heads in the Sand by Matthew Yglesias

Heads in the Sand: How the Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws Up the Democrats by Matthew Yglesias
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Yglesias’ book was a timely read in the context of the Trump administration’s forays into foreign policy, notably the April 13, 2018 bombing of Syrian chemical weapons capacity. Written before the Obama presidency, the lines of thought and policy started during the George W. Bush administration continue to the present. There is little evidence liberals received the author’s message or have done much to support a sustainable, bold foreign policiy. Rather they often co-opt neocon positions.

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Reviews

No Surrender by Jack Hatch

No Surrender by Jack Hatch

If interested in Iowa Democratic politics, read No Surrender: Building a Progressive Agenda for Iowa with the Five Securities by former state senator Jack Hatch. Read it now.

There are few long, contemporary narratives about the state of the Iowa Democratic Party. Hatch’s 2016 book recounts where we are, where we have been and where we could go.

The importance of the book is twofold.

It serves as a great way for political newcomers to get up to speed on Democratic politics. The results of the 2016 general election activated people around the state to become more involved in politics. No Surrender serves as a briefing book of major policy issues and how Democrats addressed them. Our approach stands in sharp contrast to Republicans, according to Hatch.

The author has standing to address flaws in Democratic approaches to elections and governance. A 22-year state legislator, chair of the White House Task Force of State Legislators for Health Care Reform, and 2014 gubernatorial candidate, Hatch tells the story of the rise of Democrats in 2006 and what we did while occupying the governor’s mansion and holding majorities in both chambers of the legislature. He also recounts how we fell. To be effective going forward, politically active Democrats need the sense of history No Surrender provides.

As with most contemporary political writing, there is a short shelf life to this book. Nonetheless, Hatch asserts Democratic values are more enduring: a progressive tax system, better jobs and livable wages, soil and water protection, life-long education, and health care for all.

Hatch lays out how a focus on policy could contribute to Democratic electoral wins and effective policy-making going forward. No Surrender provides a framework for policy-making much needed in these turbulent political times.

~ First posted on Amazon.com

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Living in Society Reviews

I Call Bullshit by David Shorr

david-shorrI was predisposed to like David Shorr’s latest book.

Shorr and I met in 2009 when I persuaded him to write an opinion piece for the Des Moines Register advocating for Senate ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. He willingly did so with co-author Tom Tully. It ran Dec. 15, 2009, titled, The real peace prize: Ban nuclear testing.

I found his new book valuable to surviving the tumult created by the recent election of a Republican president with Republican majorities in the federal government and the Iowa statehouse. His explanation of why Republicans “have wandered off into substantive incoherence” is cogent. His description of four fallacies regarding job creation, healthcare, foreign policy and voter suppression helped turn social media buzzwords into nuggets of understanding. I particularly enjoyed his discussion of why President Donald Trump makes House Speaker Paul Ryan look like a moderate politician when he isn’t.

While readers may take issue with some of Shorr’s arguments, that’s really his point: we should be able to disagree and make social progress at the same time. Until our national and local politics returns to reasonably working together, this book will help us get by and make the case for reality-based politics again.

~ This review was first posted on Amazon.com