Prairie City, Iowa: Three Seasons at Home (Bur Oak Book) - Softcover

Douglas Bauer

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1587296810 ISBN 13: 9781587296819

Publisher: University of Iowa Press, 2008

Synopsis

Weary from the journalistic treadmill of 'going from one assignment to the next, like an itinerant fieldworker moving to his harvests' and healing from a divorce, Douglas Bauer decided it was time to return to his hometown. Back in Prairie City, he helped on his father's farm, scooped grains at the Co-op, and tended bar at the Cardinal. The resultant memoir is a classic picture of an adult experiencing one's childhood roots as a grown-up and testing whether one can ever truly go home again.'Awkward with soil and with machines,' Bauer grew up in a small town east of Des Moines. As a teenager, he left the farm for college life twenty miles away and, after graduation, took a job with Better Homes and Gardens in Des Moines, writing in the junk-mail fictional persona of 'Barbara Joyce,' asking millions of people to subscribe. After a few years he moved to Chicago to work as an editor and writer for Playboy and eventually as a freelance journalist. In the summer of 1975, he returned home to attend his grandmother's funeral and by autumn he moved back to Prairie City, where he stayed for the next three seasons.Bauer's book is neither a wistful nostalgia about returning to a simpler time and place nor a patronizing look at those who never leave the town in which they were born. What emerges is an unsentimental yet loving account of life in the Midwest. Not just a portrait of Prairie City, Iowa, but of everyone's small town, everywhere.

About this title

Product Description:

Rare Book

Review:

Kindly, shrewd, and endlessly absorbing - this is as good as a book gets. - Bill Bryson

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Iowa Press
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 1587296810
• ISBN 13: 9781587296819
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 344