by Ted Kooser (2002)
"Ted Kooser describes with exquisite detail and humor the place he calls home in the Bohemian Alps of southeastern Nebraska. Like many other people in this rural area, he has what he calls "wolf vision"--He sees every change in the landscape around him. Nothing is too big or too small for his attention. Memories of his grandmother's cooking are juxtaposed with reflections about the old-fashioned outhouse on his property." "In the end, what makes life meaningful for Kooser are the ways in which his neighbors care for one another and how an afternoon walking with an old dog, or baking a pie, or decorating the house for Christmas can summon memories of his Iowa childhood. This writer is a seer in the truest sense of the word, discovering the extraordinary within the ordinary, the deep beneath the shallow, the abiding wisdom in the pithy Bohemian proverbs that are woven into his essays. And when casting his eye on social progress, Kooser reminds us that the closing of local schools, thoughtless county weed control, and irresponsible housing development destroy more than just the view. At stake are communities, as well as families, our health, and arguably our very souls."--Jacket.
Pete Davies
Welcome to the great Plains--where tornadoes convert barns to matchsticks in seconds and generations of work can be destroyed in a single day. Two years ago, English novelist Pete Davies decided to search for the soul of America's heartland. Storm Country is the result--written with the same black humor that made his Last Election and Dollarville cult favorites.
Bland Simpson
Simpson mixes personl experience, travel narrative, oral history and natural history to produce an intriguing portrait of the Great Dismal Swamp and its people.
Ian Frazier
With his unique blend of intrepidity, tongue-in-cheek humor, and wide-eyed wonder, Ian Frazier takes us on a journey of more than 25,000 miles up and down and across the vast and myth-inspiring Great Plains. A travelogue, a work of scholarship, and a western adventure, Great Plains takes us from the site of Sitting Bull?s cabin, to an abandoned house once terrorized by Bonnie and Clyde, to the scene of the murders chronicled in Truman Capote?s In Cold Blood. It is an expedition that reveals the heart of the American West.
photos. and text by Barbara McKenzie
"Succinct text from photographer Barbara McKenzie and a foreword by Robert Coles provide context for this moving collection of photographs of the middle Georgia Flannery O’Connor depicted in her fiction. Whether capturing highway signs proclaiming Christ or a restaurant five hundred yards up the road, the frenzied motions of persons seized by the Holy Spirit, or quiet folks, black and white, sitting on benches in town squares, these photographs portray strikingly and sympathetically the world O’Connor wrote about in her remarkable stories."--Amazon.com.