In language that is scientifically sound but accessible to the layperson, Kathleen Woida explains how Iowa's soils formed and have changed over centuries and millennia. Its soils are what make Iowa a premier agricultural state, both in terms of acres planted and bushels harvested. But in the last hundred years, large-scale intensive agriculture and urban development have severely degraded most of our soils. However, as Woida documents, some innovative Iowans are beginning to repair and regenerate their soils by treating them as the living ecosystem and vast carbon store that they are.
There's something about vintage garden photos: preserved moments of beauty from gardens long gone. Iowa Gardens of the Past features 300+ color and grayscale images of beautiful Iowa gardens, together with lovely seed catalog art, from the mid-nineteenth century through 1980. From impressive mansion grounds to humble flower-filled farmsteads, they include: Victorian-style flower bedding; formal rose gardens; exotic Japanese-style gardens; midcentury modern landscaping. Discover how Iowans coped with severe weather events, economic depressions, world wars, grasshopper plagues and Dutch Elm Disease. Despite these challenges, Iowans have made countless gardens of great beauty. Now these gardens can be admired and enjoyed once again, in these hauntingly beautiful images of Iowa Gardens of the Past.
FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION In the nine expansive, searching stories of A Lucky Man, fathers and sons attempt to salvage relationships with friends and family members and confront mistakes made in the past. An imaginative young boy from the Bronx goes swimming with his group from day camp at a backyard pool in the suburbs, and faces the effects of power and privilege in ways he can barely grasp. A teen intent on proving himself a man through the all-night revel of J’Ouvert can’t help but look out for his impressionable younger brother. A pair of college boys on the prowl follow two girls home from a party and have to own the uncomfortable truth of their desires. And at a capoeira conference, two brothers grapple with how to tell the story of their family, caught in the dance of their painful, fractured history. Jamel Brinkley’s stories, in a debut that announces the arrival of a significant new voice, reflect the tenderness and vulnerability of black men and boys whose hopes sometimes betray them, especially in a world shaped by race, gender, and class—where luck may be the greatest fiction of all.
"What can organizational leaders in business, education, government, and most any enterprise learn from an unemployed, unmarried woman who lived in patriarchal, misogynistic rural England more than 200 years ago? As it turns out, a great deal. In identifying the core virtues of Austen's heroines-confidence, integrity, humility, playfulness, pragmatism, and diligence-Andrea Kayne uncovers the six principles of internally referenced leadership. Utilizing practical exercises, real-life case studies, and literary and leadership scholarship, Kicking Ass in a Corset is a road map for effective leadership that teaches readers of any age or profession how to tune out the external noise and listen to themselves"--
Follow a food trail and you’ll find yourself crisscrossing oceans. Join M. F. K. Fisher Grand Prize for Excellence in Culinary Writing award-winning author Nina Mukerjee Furstenau as she picks through lost tastes with recipes as codes to everything from political resistance to comfort food and much more. Pinpoint the entry of the Portuguese in India by following green chili trails; find the origins of limes; trace tomatoes and potatoes in India to the Malabar Coast; consider what makes a food, or even a person, foreign and marvel how and when they cease to be. Food history is a world heritage story that has all the drama of a tense thriller or maybe a mystery. Whose food is it? Who gets to tell its tale? Respect for food history might tame the accusations of appropriation, but what is at stake as food traditions and biodiversity ebb away is the great, and not always good, story of us.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Thousand Acres comes “an uproariously funny and at the same time hauntingly melancholy portrait of a college community in the Midwest" (The New York Times). In this darkly satirical send-up of academia and the Midwest, we are introduced to Moo University, a distinguished institution devoted to the study of agriculture. Amid cow pastures and waving fields of grain, Moo’s campus churns 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 Monahan, 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. Wonderfully written and masterfully plotted, Moo gives us a wickedly funny slice of life.
Scores of talented and dedicated people serve the forensic science community, performing vitally important work. However, they are often constrained by lack of adequate resources, sound policies, and national support. It is clear that change and advancements, both systematic and scientific, are needed in a number of forensic science disciplines to ensure the reliability of work, establish enforceable standards, and promote best practices with consistent application. Strengthening Forensic Science in the United States: A Path Forward provides a detailed plan for addressing these needs and suggests the creation of a new government entity, the National Institute of Forensic Science, to establish and enforce standards within the forensic science community. The benefits of improving and regulating the forensic science disciplines are clear: assisting law enforcement officials, enhancing homeland security, and reducing the risk of wrongful conviction and exoneration. Strengthening Forensic Science in the United States gives a full account of what is needed to advance the forensic science disciplines, including upgrading of systems and organizational structures, better training, widespread adoption of uniform and enforceable best practices, and mandatory certification and accreditation programs. While this book provides an essential call-to-action for congress and policy makers, it also serves as a vital tool for law enforcement agencies, criminal prosecutors and attorneys, and forensic science educators.
How does contemporary literature contend with the power and responsibility of authorship, particularly when considering marginalized groups? How have the works of multiethnic authors challenged the notion that writing and authorship are neutral or universal? In Novel Subjects, Leah Milne offers a new way to look at multicultural literature by focusing on scenes of writing in contemporary works by authors with marginalized identities. These scenes, she argues, establish authorship as a form of radical self-care—a term we owe to Audre Lorde, who defines self-care as self-preservation and “an act of political warfare.” In engaging in this battle, the works discussed in this study confront limitations on ethnicity and nationality wrought by the institutionalization of multiculturalism. They also focus on identities whose mere presence on the cultural landscape is often perceived as vindictive or willful. Analyzing recent texts by Carmen Maria Machado, Louise Erdrich, Ruth Ozeki, Toni Morrison, and more, Milne connects works across cultures and nationalities in search of reasons for this recent trend of depicting writers as characters in multicultural texts. Her exploration uncovers fiction that embrace unacceptable or marginalized modes of storytelling—such as plagiarism, historical revisions, jokes, and lies—as well as inauthentic, invisible, and unexceptional subjects. These works ultimately reveal a shared goal of expanding the borders of belonging in ethnic and cultural groups, and thus add to the ever-evolving conversations surrounding both multicultural literature and self-care.
Unlike their colleagues in music theory and music education, teachers of music history have tended not to commit their pedagogical ideas to print. This collection of essays seeks to help redress the balance, providing advice and guidance to those who teach a college-level music history or music appreciation course, be they a graduate student setting out on their teaching career, or a seasoned professor having to teach outside his or her speciality. Divided into four sections, the book covers the basic music history survey usually taken by music majors; music appreciation and introductory courses aimed at non-majors; special topic courses such as women and music, music for film and American music; and more general issues such as writing, using anthologies, and approaches to teaching in various situations. In addition to these specific areas, broader themes emerge across the essays. These include how to integrate social history and cultural context into music history teaching; the shift away from the 'classical canon'; and how to organize a course taking into consideration time constraints and the need to appeal to students from a diverse range of backgrounds. With contributions from both teachers approaching retirement and those at the start of their careers, this volume provides a spectrum of experience which will prove valuable to all teachers of music history.
Poetry. "Clearly, these poems are the Chinese fortunes dandelions would dispense, that is, if you woke up too in cities like these that would give Continental Bards a run for their money, and then some, that is, if verse finally managed to gain the upper hand on prose--local banalities upended in an orgy of absurd lyrical excess."--Timothy Liu "'We are all just trying / to make it through yesterday,' writes Matt McBride in this painfully insightful exploration of our twenty-first-century brand of alienation. In poems that are stylish and skewering, with uncommon wit and unsettling resonance, McBride takes on technology, militarism, love, nostalgia, divorce, the ubiquity of advertising, the institution of the presidency, and the ever-expanding surveillance state. This is a deeply sad and strangely fun and totally shining book that has given me, among other things, the best slogan I've heard yet for the current moment: 'no flag is small enough.'"--Natalie Shapero
