Available Book Series

The Vital Community Series

Two new reading experience programs from HI use the texts of the humanities--in this case, history, literature, anthropology, journalism, and political philosophy--to explore the many facets of community in the US: "Visions Across Time" and "Who Will We Be?". The first reading experience takes an historical view of community, while the second looks hardest at the present and the future.

Communities exist everywhere; they don't always start and end at the town or city limits. The traditions that define a group as a community change over time, as do the economic and demographic conditions which contribute to the creation, decline, and reforming of communities. The Vital Community will explore some of the facets of those changes, expand awareness of the many meanings of community and offer a forum to share visions for the future of your own communities.

The Vital Community : Visions Across Time

Main Street, Sinclair Lewis
A portrait of 20th century Midwestern small town life, this book explores the predicament of America's turn- of-the-century "emancipated woman." Main Street looks at the ingrown mores of tradition.

Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville
19th century visions and observations of American civic life, culture, institutions, and community are presented by an astute French observer and visitor.

The Open Cage, Anzia Yezierska
The turn-of-the-century account is offered by an immigrant Jewish woman, living first on Manhattan's lower East side, then moving through the American dream to Hollywood and the "Promised Land."

Bailey's Cafe, Gloria Naylor
The blues, the Bible, and a touch of magical realism come together in this novel, which tells the story of outcast Americans searching for a community of any kind.

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, Fannie Flagg
This book describes the story of an uncommon "community" in Alabama in the first half of the 20th century where the lives of blacks and whites are intertwined and an unconventional family finds acceptance.

The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros
The House on Mango Street, the story of Esperanza Cordero, a young girl growing up in the Hispanic quarter of Chicago, allows us to wander through a landscape of concrete and tenements, where we discover Esperanza's realities of class, gender, racial hostility, and more.

The Vital Community : Who Will We Be?

In the Heart of the Valley of Love, Cynthia Kadohata
In the year 2052, America is deteriorating: water and gas are rationed, disease flourishes, and every person is regarded as a stranger. Los Angeles is a petrified landscape where people disappear and corruption is rampant. This is where 19-year-old Japanese-American Francie lives. When tragedy strikes, she must venture out on her own into a world gone mad, and finds that pockets of community exist, even when survival takes precedence over everything else.

Upscaling Downtown: Stalled Gentrification in Washington, D.C., Brett Williams
Upscaling Downtown, an ethnography of an urban neighborhood, "Elm Valley," in Washington, D.C., examines a period of stalled gentrification when unlikely people lived side by side: working-class blacks, newly immigrated refugees, and affluent whites.

Whose Art Is It?, Jane Kramer
In 1991, John Ahearn, a white artist with a "downtown" gallery, installed three life-size bronze figures on a traffic triangle in the South Bronx: A hooded man crouching beside a pit bull, a sassy-looking girl on roller skates, and a pudgy man with a basketball under his arm. Ahearn lived nearby, and the models were people he knew from the neighborhood. Five days later, the artist took the sculptures down: they had been called "outrageously racist"-an insult to the community. But who, exactly, is the community?

Edge City: Life on the New Frontier, Joel Garreau
First there was downtown. Then there were the suburbs. Then there were the malls. Now, there is Edge City. What is Edge City? According to Garreau, it is the urban landscape of the future. Is Edge City doomed to be "a barren, sterile wasteland of the spirit?" Or, may we find hope for community, even in Edge City?

Changing Community: The Graywolf Annual, Scott Walker, ed.
For nearly all of human history, our notion of community was centered on the family, tribe, and/or village. That notion is at the core of our values. However, today, due to technology and globalization , we no longer continually live in one place our entire lives, and our cities, towns, and regions change beyond recognition. As a result, we have to think about the different levels and new faces of community.

This series was created by and is housed at Humanities Iowa.

Iowa Time Slices

The Time Slices are four different reading experiences, each of which focus on four distinct periods of Iowa's history and culture, from about the time of Black Hawk's War to the present.

Time Slice I: Putting Down Roots, 1833-1875
The first Time Slice contains three autobiographies, a fictional history, and a social history. All five of the works provide perspectives on settling and uprooting, the privation and struggle of living on the land, and the stress of intercultural conflict.
Black Hawk: An Autobiography
Frontierswomen: The Iowa Experience, Glenda Riley
The Diary of Elisabeth Koren: 1853-1855, David T. Nelson, translator and editor
Vandermark's Folly, Herbert Quick
"A Secret to Be Buried": The Diary of Elizabeth Hawley Gillespie, Judy Nolte Lensink

Time Slice II: Patterning the Land: Community and Agriculture, 1876-1913
The second Time Slice features Iowa's transition from isolated pioneer life to small-town community life.
Boy Life on the Prairie, Hamlin Garland
Spillville, Patricia Hampl
Miss Bishop, Bess Streeter Aldrich
Gentlemen on the Prairie, Curtis Harnack
Esther's Town, Deemer Lee

Time Slice III: Land, Town and the World, 1914-1945
In Time Slice III, a span that includes two World Wars as well as the Great Depression, the outside world collides with rural and small-town Iowa.
A Ruth Suckow Omnibus
Open Country Iowa: Rural Women, Tradition and Change, Deborah Fink
In No Time at All, Carl Hamilton
We Have All Gone Away, Curtis Harnack
Years of Struggle: The Farm Diary of Elmer G. Powers

Time Slice IV: The Heartland in Flux: Losing the Past, 1946-1990
Time Slice IV comes full circle and takes a hard look at how the past--so much of which seems lost irrevocably--has turned into a present that we did not foresee.
Shoeless Joe, W.P. Kinsella
Just Beyond the Firelight, Robert James Waller
Blooming: A Small Town Girlhood, Susan Allen Toth
Prairie City, Iowa, Douglas Bauer
Broken Heartland: The Rise of America's Rural Ghetto, Osha Gray Davidson

This series was created by and is housed at Humanities Iowa.

American Voices, World Views

The works to be read and discussed for the reading experience called "American Voices, World Views" focus on contemporary strangers to the American Promised Land. African-Americans, Native Americans and two other great immigrant groups of today--Chinese and Mexicans--are represented. Two novels, two autobiographies, and a book of "letters from the country," all bear witness in different ways to the same struggle for survival and adjustment that European immigrants experienced in an earlier era.

The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan
In The Joy Luck Club, four elderly members meet each month to play mah-jong and brag to one another about their American-born daughters: the yawning but unmentionable gulf between The Mothers, each of whom left China on the brink of Mao Tse-Tung's takeover in 1949, and The Daughters, who speak a different language from their mothers and dream different dreams. The chapters--each of which can stand as a story on its own--give both a chance to speak.

Lakota Women, Mary Crow Dog
Lakota Women is the autobiography of Mary Crow Dog, a Lakota Sioux who grew up in the late 60's and early 70's on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota. Lakota Women tells an unremittingly tragic story of a people "deprived of everything that had given meaning to their lives." The violence, oppression, and hopelessness of life on the "Res" strain our belief. How, we find ourselves wondering, can she be describing twentieth-century America?

The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison's novel demonstrates the puzzle and potential tragedy of being black in a culture whose standards of value and beauty don't seem to apply. Full of humor, courage, and beauty that is all too often invisible to the characters themselves, Morrison's novel offers a telling critique of Western values.

Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriquez, Richard Rodriquez
Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriquez is a success story: the son of Mexican immigrants starts school knowing fifty words of English and ends up studying at Stanford, Columbia and the British Museum. However, it is also a story of estrangement and loss.

Letters from the Country, Carol Bly
In these essays, Carol Bly argues against unremitting sameness in rural lives, against being conventional and agreeable at all costs.

This series was created by and is housed at Humanities Iowa.

The Search for Identity in Chamber Music and Literature

This series is a unique combination of the study of literature and music appreciation. Local music groups are asked to participate in this series by playing selections of music from the different time periods represented by the series. Applicants can choose four or five of the books listed for their own personalized program.

Candide, Voltaire
Candide, the naive protagonist, studies with Pangloss the philosopher, whose idea it is that "all is the best in this best of all possible worlds," and lusts after the beautiful Cunegonde. Barely has Candide had the opportunity to dabble in love with Cunegonde that he is thrown from the sheltering castle of thunder-ten-tronckh. Throughout the rest of the book, Candide, Cunegonde and Pangloss, sometimes together, sometimes traveling apart, encounter misadventure after misadventure, severely testing the simple philosophy of Pangloss.

Amadeus, Peter Schaffer
Amadeus is a play about the genius of Mozart seen through the eyes of Salieri, a less talented musician of the era who was all ambition and no genius. As the play opens, we see Salieri as an old man remembering himself as a court musician faced with the specter of the young Mozart, whose talent as performer and composer was of such a magnitude that the work of most musicians of his era seemed diminished.

English Romantic Poetry, Stanley Applebaum, ed.
The Romantic poets were never an official group but earnest writers like John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelly, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Blake were kindred spirits in a literary rebellion that shook England and, indeed, all of Europe at a time of great political upheaval. The American Revolution and the French Revolution had shaken the foundations of European authoritarian monarchies and opened a world of possibilities, social, political and artistic for a new generation of intellectuals.

Dvorak in Love, Josef Skvorecky
Dvorak in Love retells the life of Czechoslovakia’s greatest composer, with a special emphasis on the years he spent in the United States, exploring her rich tapestry of folk music, some of which was completely new to him and much of which was to influence his greatest music.

My Antonia, Willa Cather
My Antonia is the story of the Shimerda family, Bohemian immigrants to Nebraska. The novel is narrated by Jim Burden, who tells the story of the daughter, Antonia Shimerda, overburdened with work after her father’s suicide, but courageous and strong against the sometimes brutal homesteader’s life.

Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
Their Eyes Were Watching God traces the experience of Janie Crawford, a light-skinned African-American woman, through three marriages and countless sorrows in her search of freedom and fulfillment. Hurston has a deep respect for the power and utility of African-American folk culture both in problem solving situations and in deeper matters of the heart and spirit.

World’s Fair, E.L. Doctorow
World’s Fair is one of Doctorow’s lightest-hued novels relating the tale of the Altschulers, a Jewish-American family, as the make their way through the 1930’s. The story is told through the eyes of the youngest son with contrapuntal commentary from his mother and older brother.

On Gold Mountain, Lisa See
Ms. See is of Chinese background but looks Caucasian, so that the observations are those of one identified by a confusing mixture of emotions. Her Chinese relatives see her as Caucasian while she sees herself quite differently. This tribute to her family and her ancestry is artfully told and filled with information most European-Americans have no way of accessing.

Jasmine, Bharati Mukherjee
Jasmine is the story of a young girl growing up in the Punjab, who, through a series of adventures and misadventures, crosses several worlds to become an American. The character of Jasmine represents the new immigrant of the latter half of the twentieth century at a time when the differences between the technological nations of the west and the traditional cultures of the east have grown huge, at a time in history when new cultures shake off traditions with a flick of their technological tails.

This series was created by Hancher Auditorium at the University of Iowa in Iowa City and donated to Humanities Iowa. The series has been done very successfully in a number of communities in Iowa. Applicants are encouraged to call HI to determine how this series could work in your community!

In the Middle of the Nation: Reading and Discussing Midwestern Literature

Grass Roots: The Universe of Home, Paul Gruchow
Eloquent essays about living with the land and reinvigorating the values of community from the author of The Necessity of Empty Places. Combining personal reflection and memoir with a powerful look at the state of our neglected rural towns and people, Gruchow postulates a society in which our lives are more than commodities and our land is more than an extension of our industries.

Grassland: The History, Biology, Politics and Promise of the American Prairie, Richard Manning
In an exploration of the grasslands of North America that is both sweeping and intimate, Manning makes interesting connections between economics, botany, farming and democracy.

The Midwest and the Nation (Midwestern History and Culture), Andrew R.L. Cayton and Peter S. Onuf

The Middle West: Its Meaning in American Culture, James R. Shortridge
Shortridge examines the idea of the Middle West, relating the changing meaning of the term, regional identity, the past oralism of the area.

The Short History of a Prince, Jane Hamilton
This story portrays human life in miniature, as valid a lens as any when the subject is loss, yearning, and the exhausting effort of retrieving from the flux of personal history some incorruptible value.

Townships (A Bur Oak Original), Michael Martone, ed.
These stories portray the disappearance of family farms, while Kohn relates, in wry detail, how a golf course came to exist in a rural township, and of one man’s father’s resistance and eventual capitulation. Flawlessly intelligent essays, variously nostalgic, angry, and prophetic.

This series was created by the Matthias M. Hoffman Library in Dyersville, Iowa, and donated to Humanities Iowa.

In the Middle of the Midwest: Reading and Discussing Midwestern Literature

Honest Effort, Michael Carey
Carey’s poetry effectively captures small experiences that gives us sharp-edged images of Iowa that ring true. Carey’s experience of growing up elsewhere and coming to farming as an adult offer a unique perspective on living in Iowa.

A Place of Sense: Essays in Search of the Midwest, Michael Martone, ed.
This collection of essays invites readers, especially Midwestern readers for whom this place is home, to make sense of what makes us "Midwestern."

Take This Exit: Rediscovering the Iowa Landscape, Robert F. Sayre, ed.
At first glance, this book may appear to join the ranks of travel guides, but what it offers is far more than tips for tourists. Rich with information in a variety of fields including natural history, cultural history, architecture, politics, and economics, it is a valuable source of information of all kinds.

Out of This World: A Journey of Healing, Mary Swander
Struck by Environmental Illness that makes her allergic to much of what surrounds us in modern life, Swander moved to a one-room school-house in an Amish community. Swander’s account of her new life of simplicity and search for physical, spiritual and intellectual balance is by turns poignant, funny and thoughtful.

Black Eagle Child: The Facepaint Narratives, Ray A. Youngbear
Based on part in his own experiences and in part in his powerful imagination, the story combines autobiography and fictionalized biography with myth and fantasy as Young Bear creates a forceful image of one specific cultural community within Iowa’s larger general community.

One-Armed Bandits: And Other Stories of Iowa’s Past and Present, George Mills
Drawing upon Mills’ considerable experience as a writer for the Des Moines Register, this collection contains fact-filled accounts of a variety of incidents in Iowa’s social history

This series was created by the Matthias M. Hoffman Library in Dyersville, Iowa, and donated to Humanities Iowa.