Author is my brother-in-law - who won Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in April 2017 - obviously quite an achievement. This leads to book opportunities with top publishing houses - they eventually settle on Viking (which the frontispiece tells me is an "imprint of Penguin Random House") i.e. a real deal.
The guy can write.I cannot evaluate the book in any objective manner (of course I'm not a professional (or even amateur) reviewer anyway so who cares - I keep this website as a memory aid anyway). Some reasons why an objective evaluation is impossible:
- There are quite a few family references interspersed throughout - I very much enjoy the way they are handled. Especially the interactions with my dad - which are fairly significant to the exposition - Art captures him quite well! These passages are highly interesting to me.
- Then there are all of the Iowa references, including many from the 1960s or 1970s - author's path has more overlap with mine than I had realized - again, highly interesting to me.
- I came to the book with a decent level of familiarity with Storm Lake's unique demographics and challenges (and opportunities) - so pretty well versed on that part (meaning I read through these pages pretty quickly).
For readers who pick this up "cold" - I expect there's quite a bit to learn via the Storm Lake story - this at a time when immigration issues are front and center - quite a few positive aspects here. Also for this group of "cold" readers - I hope they can relate somewhat to the story elements revolving around the family. Hard to know.
Useful discussions of the evolution of agriculture and resulting social changes.
Perhaps my main reaction: deeply grateful that someone with actual writing skills has chronicled a few of the pieces of our family's story line. That is highly valuable to me.
Art & Dolores have a lot to be proud of.
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