Iowa Press Celebrates Its Very Own

In November 2008, University of Iowa Press is publishing two fascinating reprints by Iowa native sons. The first is Prairie City, Iowa: Three Seasons at Home by novelist/teacher Douglas Bauer. This was originally published in 1982 by the now defunct Iowa State University Press. The book is a memoir of returning home to Prairie City, a town East of Des Moines in central Iowa. Philip Lopate called this book “one of the finest books about place I know.” Bauer spent time in Des Moines working for Better Homes and Gardens, and then in Chicago working as an editor and writer for Playboy Magazine. In 1975 he returned home to work on his father’s farm and to mingle with people in his hometown. The reviews say it all, this book is a regional classic: -- according to Bill Bryson, “Kindly, shrewd and endlessly absorbing – this is as good as a book gets.” The Des Moines Sunday Register said, “Bauer’s book is, at least, the most brilliant report of an Iowa small town ever written …” This book is neither wistful nostalgia nor a harsh look at those who choose to stay on in a small town (so-called Stay Morons), but a unsentimental and loving account of life in a small Midwestern town. This could be a town anywhere.

John Madson is considered to be the father of the modern prairie restoration movement, and his book Out Home is a collection of essays on hunting, fishing and wildlife management, originally published in 1979. Iowa previously reprinted Madson’s brilliant book, Where the Sky Began: Land of the Tallgrass Prairie, called “a lovely little study” by the New York Times, and “instructive and entertaining” by the New Yorker, and now they are following up with this gem of a book. The essays herein were originally penned for such venues as Sports Afield, Outdoor Life, Audubon, and Guns and Ammo. Madson died in 1995, and the Kansas City Star said of his books, “Reading Madson is like reading some of his more illustrious and heady predecessors in the American experience … namely Emerson and Thoreau.” This is the first paperback edition of these ageless wilderness tales. All readers and writers of natural history need to take notice of this amazing book.