Iowa

Teddy Rose said, "Here are two books I came up with to cover two states and my reviews of them: IA = IOWA: The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir by Bill Bryson."

Bill Bryson was born in the middle of the American century — 1951 — in the middle of the United States — Des Moines, Iowa — in the middle of the largest generation in American history — the baby boomers. As one of the best and funniest writers alive, he is perfectly positioned to mine his memories of a totally all-American childhood for 24-carat memoir gold. Like millions of his generational peers, Bill Bryson grew up with a rich fantasy life as a superhero. In his case, he ran around his house and neighborhood with an old football jersey with a thunderbolt on it and a towel about his neck that served as his cape, leaping tall buildings in a single bound and vanquishing awful evildoers (and morons) — in his head — as "The Thunderbolt Kid."

Using this persona as a springboard, Bill Bryson re-creates the life of his family and his native city in the 1950s in all its transcendent normality — a life at once completely familiar to us all and as far away and unreachable as another galaxy. It was, he reminds us, a happy time, when automobiles and televisions and appliances (not to mention nuclear weapons) grew larger and more numerous with each passing year, and DDT, cigarettes, and the fallout from atmospheric testing were considered harmless or even good for you. He brings us into the life of his loving but eccentric family, including affectionate portraits of his father, a gifted sportswriter for the local paper and dedicated practitioner of isometric exercises, and OF his mother,whose job as the home furnishing editor for the same paper left her little time for practicing the domestic arts at home.

Iowa

Gracie said, "IA - A Thousand Acres and Moo by Jane Smiley."

Oops! I already posted A Thousand Acres, Gracie, but I don't think I mentioned that it won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction. Excellent book!

Moo, by the same author, is about Moo University which is, of course, an agricultural school. The publisher says: "Nestled in the heart of the Midwest, amid cow pastures and waving fields of grain, lies Moo University, a distinguished institution devoted to the art and science of agriculture. Here, among an atmosphere rife with devious plots, mischievous intrigue, lusty liaisons, and academic one-upmanship, Chairman X of the Horticulture Department harbors a secret fantasy to kill the dean; Mrs. Walker, the provost's right hand and campus information queen, knows where all the bodies are buried; Timothy Nonahan, associate professor of English, advocates eavesdropping for his creative writing assignments; and Bob Carlson, a sophomore, feeds and maintains his only friend: a hog named Earl Butz. In this wonderfully written and masterfully plotted novel, Jane Smiley, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Thousand Acres, offers us a wickedly funny comedy that is also a darkly poignant slice of life."

Iowa

Bonnie suggests two possibilities for Iowa: A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley and Gilead by Marilynne Robinson.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, Smiley's novel of family life on an Iowa farm is a retelling of Shakespeare's King Lear, about a father and his three daughters. When Larry Cook, the aging patriarch of a rich, thriving farm in Iowa, decides to retire, he offers his land to his daughters. For Ginny and Rose, who live on the farm with their husbands, the gift makes sense — a reward for years of hard work, a challenge to make the farm even more successful. But the youngest, Caroline, a Des Moines lawyer, flatly rejects the idea, and in anger her father cuts her out — setting off an explosive series of events that will leave none of them unchanged. A classic story of contemporary American life, A Thousand Acres strikes at the very heart of what it means to be a father, a daughter, a family.

In 1956, toward the end of the Reverend John Ames's life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowan preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine, saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and came west to Kansas to fight for abolition. Ames's grandfather "preached men into the Civil War," then, at age fifty, became a chaplain in the Union Army, losing his right eye in battle. Reverend Ames writes to his son about the tension between his father -- an ardent pacifist -- and his grandfather, whose pistol and bloody shirts, concealed in an army blanket, may be relics from the fight between the abolitionists and those settlers who wanted to vote Kansas into the union as a slave state. And he tells a story of the sacred bonds between fathers and sons, which are tested in his tender and strained relationship with his namesake, John Ames Boughton, his best friend's wayward son. Gilead won both the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction.
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Sept. 21, 2007 ~ Jill has a review of this book on her blog.