Bøker utgitt av University of Iowa Press

The author tells of the excavation of Rivas, a great ceremonial centre at the foot of the Talamanca Mountain range which flourished between AD900 and 1300. He discusses Rivas' builders and users, theories on chiefdom societies and the daily interactions and surprises of modern archeology.

Reading like one long odyssey, the author takes the reader on his many adventures which range from the ludicrous to the life-threatening with Carlyle flying into the light and carrying the reader with him on his perplexing and fanciful journey.

Here, the author confronts the slipperiness of language and perception as she probes natural processes - the lives of insects, the uncertainty of love and the deaths of human beings. The poems negotiate between desire for something irrefutable and an uneasy bedrock of paradox.

Since the 1980s, Ecuador has seen the development of numerous significant indigenous and ethnic movements and organizations, leading to a new president and constitution for 2003, reflecting these changes. These essays explore the cultural, political and social developments.

In this study, Bruce McConachie uses the primary metaphor of containment - what happens when we categorize a play, a television show, or anything we view as having an inside, an outside and a boundary between the two - as the dominant metaphor of Cold War theatre-going.

From 1900 until the early 1920s, an unusual community existed in America's heartland. It was the largest unincorporated coal-mining community in Iowa and the majority of its 5000 residents were African Americans - unusual for a state which was over 90 per cent white.

In these poems, Lesle Lewis's craft rides the waves of the New England landscape, both internal and external. If her world is a collage, as she says, then her poems provide the glue that anchors everything from shifts in the weather to world events to a cacophony of thoughts.

How do you thank the person who gave you a vantage from which to see the world? The opening question of this volume of essays reflects its central theme: the connections between fathers, fathering and nature. It offers personal stories of the important roles of fathers and nature.

Parenthood is full of secrets. The pregnant body, labour, the mysteries of a new child, the transformation of relationships - men and women are themselves reborn as they become parents. This text collects the work of 50 accomplished writers to guide new parents through this complex terrain.

In this psychological portrait of a family bound together by the uneasy permutations of love, Abramson relies not on sensationalist narrative but on a collection of the many small moments that glitter along the bumpy path of her life.

From the Anglo-American woman who makes a spectacle of herself trying to be Cuban, to the estranged son leading his father on a hostile hike in New Mexico, Valeri's characters are loaded with desire and anger. The stories grow through subtle shifts, and reveal unexpected moments of clarity.

This volume contains 21 stories that won the Iowa Short Fiction Award between 1991 and 2000. The authors include David Borofka, Mark Brazaitis, Tereze Gluck, Elizabeth Harris, Renee Manfredi, Sondra Spatt Olsen, Nancy Reisman and Don Zancanella.

Using jazz as the key metaphor, Porter refocuses old interpretations of Ellison by placing jazz in the foreground and by emphasizing, especially as revealed in his essays, the power of Ellison's thought and cultural perception.

Diaspora constitutes a powerful descriptor for the modern condition of the contemporary poet, the spokesperson for the psyche of America. The poems in this collection focus on the struggles and pleasures of creating a physical and mental home out of displacement, exile, migration, and alienation.

This is the diary of Sarah Fisher, an Old Order Amish woman from Kalona, Iowa. Written throughout 1976 and 1977, it is an ongoing account of her seasonal routine, telling of a life where all tasks are undertaken without the conveniences of electricity, telephones or automobiles.

This anthology gathers work by 80 poets inspired by Emily Dickinson. Beginning with Hart Crane's 1927 poem ""To Emily Dickinson"" and moving forward through the century to such luminary figures as Archibald MacLeish and Yvor Winters, this book offers both a celebration and a homage to a great poet.

Though Walt Whitman created no Irish characters in his early works of fiction, he did include the Irish as part of the democratic portrait of America that he drew in ""Leaves of Grass"". In this book Joann Krieg argues their importance within the larger framework of Whitman studies.

This collection of short lyric poems evoke certain themes: interaction of and struggle between the human and natural world; violence, particularly against women and children; alienation and betrayal; the mysteries of the universe, God and death; and poetry itself.

This collection of poems explores various kinds of longing and loss - sex, death, exile, story, love, and time. These poems draw from culture, both high and low - Eno and Aquinas, Lassie and Donne, Silicon Valley and Walden Pond.

Although she is now best known as a writer of novels and short stories, Gilman was known to her contemporaries as an advocate of reform on social, economic and religious fronts. These essays seek to remind the reader that the main purpose of her writing was reform.

This guide to the prairie plants native to Iowa provides all the information necessary for identifying and distinguishing even the most similar species. Species are described from the ground up: stem, leaf, bud, flower, fruit and habitat. The time of flowering/fruiting is given for central Iowa.

In 1990 an international group of biologists, meeting to discuss rumors of declines in the number of amphibians, discovered that amphibian disappearances once thought to be a local problem were not--the problem was global. And, even more disturbing, amphibians were disappearing not just from areas settled by humans but from regions of the world once believed to be pristine. Under the mantle of the Declining Amphibian Populations Task Force, this timely book addresses three fundamental questions for the midwestern United States: are amphibians declining; if so, why; and, if so, what can be done to halt these losses?In the Midwest--defined here as Missouri, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan--there can be no doubt that the number of salamanders and frogs has declined with Euro-American settlement and the conversion to an agriculturally dominated landscape. Habitat loss and landscape fragmentation have been major factors in this decline, as have aquacultural uses of natural wetlands. Bullfrog introductions have eliminated populations of native amphibians, and collecting for the biological supply trade has reduced the number of individuals within many populations. The goal of the forty-two essays in this well-documented, well-illustrated book is to put between two covers all we know now about the status of midwestern amphibians. By doing this, the editor has created a readily accessible historical record for future studies.Organized into sections covering landscape patterns and biogeography, species status, regional and state status, diseases and toxins, conservation, and monitoring and applications, this landmark volume will serve as the foundation for amphibian conservation in the Midwest.

Resource protection and public recreation policies have always been subject to the shifting winds of management philosophy governing both national and state parks. Somewhere in the balance, however, parks and preserves have endured as unique places of mind as well as matter. Places of Quiet Beauty allows us to see parks and preserves, forests and wildlife refuges - all those special places that the term "park" conjures up - as measures of our own commitment to caring for the environment. In this broad-ranging book, historian Rebecca Conard examines the complexity of American environmentalism in the twentieth century as manifest in Iowa's state parks and preserves.

In 1985 Time magazine ran on its cover Garrison Keillor's face superimposed across the fictional town of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, taking the publication of Keillor's book of the same name as an occasion to raise some hoopla over this "radio bard" (he was then host of the highly acclaimed "A Prairie Home Companion" variety show) and humorist nonpareil. Not since Will Rogers has a crackerbarrel philosopher become a national figure, a celebrity. And it is the rare down-home fellow from the prairies ("radio's tallest shy person") who also happens to write for the New Yorker. In this lucid, well-researched study Peter A. Scholl follows chronologically the dual career of Garrison Keillor, the pen name Gary Edward Keillor has been using since he was 13, exploring the Minnesotan's double mastery of the arts of storytelling and writing. Scholl looks at how Keillor's writing and conceptions for radio - particularly the News from Lake Wobegon on "A Prairie Home Companion" - has influenced his writing. Keillor's humorous sketches and stories have appeared in the New Yorker since 1970 (he was on its staff from 1987 to 1992); his books - Happy to Be Here (1982), Lake Wobegon Days (1985), We Are Still Married (1989), Leaving Home (1987), and WLT: A Radio Romance (1991) - have met critical and popular success. Scholl finds that if Keillor attained his widest acclaim as a yarnspinner in the nineteenth-century traditions of local color and literary comedy - the foremost progenitor of which being Mark Twain - he revitalized those traditions while adopting comic modes and playing roles that had little precedent in eras other than his own. Keillor's being a New Yorker writer has, according to Scholl, almost symmetrically affected the structure and nuance of his oral tales: they represent a cross-pollination between traditional oral storytelling and the verbal artistry of not only the New Yorker writers the young Keillor so admired - James Thurber, S. J. Perelman, A. J. Liebling, and E. B. White - but also such experimentalist writers as Donald Barthelme. Scholl in fact compares the darker side of Keillor's humor with the postmodernism of Barthelme - and, perhaps at the other end of the spectrum, he draws some parallels between Keillor's tales and those of Jean Shepherd, whose fictional town of Hohman, Indiana, has served him in the same way Lake Wobegon has Keillor. In this engaging, balanced literary portrait, Scholl analyzes how Keillor's public career as a radio performer has often put him at odds with his more solitary life as a writer. At least four times Keillor has quit his positions in radio to devote himself more exclusively to writing, and this oscillation between two callings, notes Scholl, reveals a complex ambivalence in Keillor's career - an ambivalence that might just add to the poignancy and uniqueness of the stories Keillor tells.

Iowa is the only state that lies entirely within the natural region of the tallgrass prairie. Early documents indicate that 85 percent of the state - close to 30 million acres - was covered by prairie vegetation at the time of Euro-American settlement. By 1930 the prairie sod had been almost totally converted to cropland; only about 30,000 acres of the original "great green sea" remained. Now, in this gracefully illustrated manual, Shirley Shirley has created a step-by-step guide to reconstructing the natural landscape of Iowa and the Upper Midwest. Chapters on planning, obtaining and selecting plants and seeds, starting seeds indoors, preparing the site, planting, and maintenance set the stage for comprehensive species accounts. Shirley gives firsthand information on soil, moisture, sun and pH requirements; location, size, and structure; blooming time and color; and propagation, germination, and harvesting for more than a hundred wildflowers and grasses. Shirley's sketches - all drawn from native plants and from seedlings that she grew herself - will be valuable for even the most experienced gardener. While other books typically feature only the flowering plant, her careful drawings show the three stages of the seedling, the flower, and the seedhead with seeds as well as the entire plant. This practical and attractive volume will help anyone dedicated to reconstructing the lost "emerald growth" of the historic tallgrass prairie.

This stimulating collection of essays, the first comprehensive critical examination of the work of two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright August Wilson, deals individually with his five major plays and also addresses issues crucial for the role of history, the relationship of African ritual to African American drama, gender relations in the African American community, music and cultural identity, the influence of Romare Bearden's collages, and the politics of drama. With essays by virtually all the scholars who have currently published on Wilson along with many established and newer scholars of drama and/or African American literature.

In the final years of the twentieth century we live with omnipresent worries. Will the Amazonian forests survive current deforestation trends? Will Amazonia's native populations survive the spread of diseases and the expropriation of traditional territories? Will the promise of biotechnology ever be fulfilled, given the genetic losses we are experiencing? Will scientists find new chemical substances in the forests of Amazonia to cure diseases heretofore incurable or yet unknown? Will we learn to use, rather than thoughtlessly destroy, the thousands of tropical species that we now consider without value? Will we invest in agronomic research to find ways to achieve sustainable cultivation in the humid tropics? In June 1992, at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the world was finally ready to ask these questions. In this well-written, comprehensive, reasonable yet passionate volume, Emilio Moran introduces us to the range of human and ecological diversity in the Amazon Basin. Beginning with a description of its Indian and peasant populations and their knowledge of their environment, he describes the Amazon's widely contrasting ecosystems, their ecological variations, and the human strategies of resource use workable within each environment. Every ecosystem - from upland forests to floodplains, savannas to blackwater rivers - offers opportunities as well as limitations; each has unique characteristics that can be used advantageously or resisted at great cost. By describing the complex heterogeneity of the Amazon's ecological mosaic and its indigenous populations' conscious adaptations to this diversity, Moran leads us to realize that there are strategies of resource use which do notdestroy the structure and function of ecosystems. Finally, and most important, he examines ways in which we might benefit from the study of human ecology to design and implement a balance between conservation and use. Through Amazonian Eyes shows that the traditional inhabitants of Ama