From Hell to Iowa

From Hell to Iowa

Author: Charles Notis

Publisher: Corn Publishing

Published: 2014-05-26

Total Pages: 152

ISBN-13: 1627750150

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“From Hell to Iowa” is about an incredible journey taken by Charles Notis. Charlie and his mother were separated from the rest of the family when the border between Albania and Greece was suddenly closed at the end of World War II when Charlie was less than a year old. Charlie’s father, older sister, grandmother, and uncle emigrated to the U.S., but Charlie and his mother were stuck in Albania for ten long years. Albania was more backward than a Third World country is today. It was under the ruthless dictatorship of Enver Hoxha, who cared more about building hundreds of thousands of machine gun bunkers to protect Albania against the bitter enemy, America, than he cared about the wellbeing of the population. In fact, he imprisoned or executed many thousands of innocent people. Charlie and his mother made a miraculous escape from this hell on earth in October 1954 and joined the rest of the family in Brockton, Massachusetts, in September 1955. While living in Massachusetts, the author experienced some incredible historical events that took place in the turbulent 1960s. One of these, the Vietnam War, is a very special event that greatly affected Charlie’s life. The author also acquired an amazing fascination with the weather soon after arriving in Brockton. This eventually led him to enroll at Iowa State University, where he received a master’s degree in meteorology. During graduate school at Iowa State, the author met a young lady who was majoring in mathematics, and he ended up marrying this beautiful lady. The fascinating story continues when Charlie along with Harvey Freese founded a weather consulting company called Freese-Notis Weather in Des Moines, Iowa. The contrast between where Charlie lived for the first ten years of his life compared to where he ended up, and everything that happened between, is appropriately titled, “From Hell to Iowa.”


From Hell to Iowa

From Hell to Iowa

Author: Charles Notis

Publisher:

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 141

ISBN-13: 9781627750202

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"From Hell to Iowa" is the story of an incredible journey taken by Charles Notis. The author was born in 1944 in far southern Albania, which was under the ruthless dictatorship of Enver Hoxha for about forty years. Charlie and his mother were separated from the rest of the family when the border between Albania and Greece was suddenly closed in the spring of 1945. After living in this hell on earth for the first ten years of his life, Charlie and his mother made a miraculous escape from Albania in October 1954. They then joined the rest of the family a year later and settled in Brockton, Massachusetts. The chain of events that followed are miraculous in their own regard. The Vietnam War was especially significant in the author's life, although he served in the Army only a short time. He found his way to graduate school at Iowa State University where he earned a master's degree in meteorology and then, with meteorologist Harvey Freese, founded a weather consulting company called Freese-Notis Weather. This process, along with raising a family in Iowa, is also fascinating in the way it came about. This hard-to-believe contrast in the author's life is appropriately titled "From Hell to Iowa."


A Glimpse of Hell

A Glimpse of Hell

Author: Charles C. Thompson

Publisher: W. W. Norton

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 430

ISBN-13: 9780393047141

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Probes the explosion of the center gun on the USS Iowa, a disaster that killed several sailors onboard instantly, and the fouled investigation that took followed, resulting in a large-scale cover-up that almost ruined forever the reputation of innocent men.


A Perfect Picture of Hell

A Perfect Picture of Hell

Author: Ted Genoways

Publisher: University of Iowa Press

Published: 1998-04

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 1587293277

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From the shooting of an unarmed prisoner at Montgomery, Alabama, to a successful escape from Belle Isle, from the swelling floodwaters overtaking Cahaba Prison to the inferno that finally engulfed Andersonville, A Perfect Picture of Hell is a collection of harrowing narratives by soldiers from the 12th Iowa Infantry who survived imprisonment in the South during the Civil War. Editors Ted Genoways and Hugh Genoways have collected the soldiers' startling accounts from diaries, letters, speeches, newspaper articles, and remembrances. Arranged chronologically, the eyewitness descriptions of the battles of Shiloh, Corinth, Jackson, and Tupelo, together with accompanying accounts of nearly every famous Confederate prison, create a shared vision


Storm Lake

Storm Lake

Author: Art Cullen

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2018-10-02

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 0525558888

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"A reminder that even the smallest newspapers can hold the most powerful among us accountable."—The New York Times Book Review Watch the documentary Storm Lake on PBS. Iowa plays an outsize role in national politics. Iowa introduced Barack Obama and voted bigly for Donald Trump. But is it a bellwether for America, a harbinger of its future? Art Cullen’s answer is complicated and honest. In truth, Iowa is losing ground. The Trump trade wars are hammering farmers and manufacturers. Health insurance premiums and drug prices are soaring. That’s what Iowans are dealing with, and the problems they face are the problems of the heartland. In this candid and timely book, Art Cullen—the Storm Lake Times newspaperman who won a Pulitzer Prize for taking on big corporate agri-industry and its poisoning of local rivers—describes how the heartland has changed dramatically over his career. In a story where politics, agri­culture, the environment, and immigration all converge, Cullen offers an unsentimental ode to rural America and to the resilient people of a vibrant community of fifteen thousand in Northwest Iowa, as much sur­vivors as their town.


Explosion Aboard the Iowa

Explosion Aboard the Iowa

Author: Richard L. Schwoebel

Publisher: US Naval Institute Press

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781557508102

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Written by the head of the technical investigating team, this book examines the key factors in the 1989 explosion that killed 47 crewmen.


By the Iowa Sea

By the Iowa Sea

Author: Joe Blair

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2013-03-05

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 1451636067

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Recounts the author's transformation from an idealistic, freedom-loving youth to a jaded and financially struggling father of four and how a catastrophic flood helped him to reconnect with the faith and courage of his childhood.


Of This New World

Of This New World

Author: Allegra Hyde

Publisher: University of Iowa Press

Published: 2016-10-01

Total Pages: 141

ISBN-13: 1609384431

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Of This New World offers a menagerie of utopias: real, imagined, and lost. Starting with the Garden of Eden and ending in a Mars colony, the stories wrestle with conflicts of idealism and practicality, communal ambition and individual kink. Stories jump between genres—from historical fiction to science fiction, realism to fabulism—but all ask that fundamental human question: is paradise really so impossible? Over the course of twelve stories, Hyde writes with a mix of lyricism, humor, and masterful detail. A group of environmental missionaries seeks to start an ideal eco-society on an island in The Bahamas, only to unwittingly tyrannize the local inhabitants. The neglected daughter of a floundering hippie commune must adjust to conventional life with her un-groovy grandmother. Haunted by her years at a collegiate idyll, a young woman eulogizes a friendship. After indenturing his only son to the Shakers, an antebellum vegan turns to Louisa May Alcott’s famous family for help. And in the final story, a former drug addict chases a second chance at life in a government-sponsored space population program. An unmissable debut, the collection charts the worlds born in our dreams and bred in hope.


Immigrant Secrets

Immigrant Secrets

Author: John F. Mancini

Publisher:

Published: 2021-10-06

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13:

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My father never mentioned his Italian immigrant family. Never. We only knew - or thought we knew - that his parents died in the 1930s. Except they didn't. I spent decades working with records managers, archivists, and genealogists on the technologies used to preserve information. Despite this, I never spent any time looking at my own family history. The only thing my father ever said about his family was that his parents died in the 1930s. Once I began the search for my grandparents, I mostly ran into frustrating dead-ends - until the release of the 1940 Census. My grandparents magically appeared in the Census - but as "inmates" at the Rockland Insane Asylum - along with an extended family of aunts and uncles and cousins, all living within driving distance, but never mentioned.What happened? Who were these people? And why all the secrecy?The book is part mystery, part family history, part historical reconstruction. The story in the book of the search itself is a rather typical family history journey, albeit one that revealed things I never could have imagined about our family. The story in the book of my Italian grandparents is in fact a story. But it is, as they say in the movie industry, "based on a true story." As Christian columnist and New York Times bestselling author Rachel Held Evans said in her 2018 book Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again, "Origin stories are rarely straightforward history. Over the years, they morph into a colorful amalgam of truth and myth, nostalgia and cautionary tale."


Escape from Hell

Escape from Hell

Author: Larry Niven

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2009-02-17

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 142998208X

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Allan Carpenter escaped from hell once but remained haunted by what he saw and endured. He has now returned, on a mission to liberate those souls unfairly tortured and confined. Partnering with the legendary poet and suicide, Sylvia Plath, Carpenter is a modern-day Christ who intends to harrow hell and free the damned. But now that he's returned to this Dantesque Inferno, can he ever again leave? At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.