Böcker av Douglas Bauer

What is life about but the continuous posing of the questions: what happens next, and what do we make of it when it arrives? In these highly evocative personal essays, Douglas Bauer weaves together the stories of his own and his parents' lives, the meals they ate, the work and rewards and regrets that defined them, and the inevitable betrayal by their bodies as they aged.

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. This memoir is a picture of an adult experiencing one's childhood roots as a grown-up.

Douglas Bauer's profound and exquisitely written first novel quickly established him as one of America's best new writers. This is the story of Ed and Ramona, high school lovers who married young. And when Ramona, seeing the ever-clearer reality of life with Ed, turns and walks away from her house, from her life, and from her small baby boy, Ed is stunned into a depth of uncomprehending rage.

A tale of memory and hero worship and the restless pulse of longing, The Book of Famous Iowans examines those forces that define not only a state made up of a physical geography, but more important, those states of the wholly human spirit.