Showing posts with label Iowa Books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Iowa Books. Show all posts

Sunday, October 16, 2016

Staff Audiobook Review: The Boys of My Youth by Jo Ann Beard

https://catalog.dubuque.lib.ia.us/cgi-bin/koha/opac-detail.pl?biblionumber=183531&query_desc=kw%2Cwrdl%3A%20the%20boys%20of%20my%20youth
I don't know why it has taken me almost twenty years to notice the essay collection The Boys of My Youth by Jo Ann Beard and read (or, rather, listen to) it. First published in 1998 to a loud chorus of high praise, the book led to Beard's being awarded both a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Whiting Award.

The collection constitutes a patchwork memoir. At the time of its publication, it drew most attention for one piece, previously published in the The New Yorker. That essay, "The Fourth State of Matter," is a meticulous and heartbreaking narrative of the 1991 mass shooting at the University of Iowa by a disturbed physics graduate student, which claimed six lives, including the shooter's, and left another victim paralyzed from the neck down. The narrative of that horrific event is woven into finely-grained depictions of the author's own domestic woes: a dying dog and dissolving marriage. It makes for a poignant weave that in no way diminishes the relative magnitude of the shooting.

Jo Ann Beard, a graduate of the University of Iowa and of Iowa's MFA writing program, was an editor of the physics department's academic journal at the time of the shootings and very close to several of the victims. She had left the office early that day to tend to her old, ailing pet. At home, her phone soon began ringing off the hook. In her essay, which, like all the essays in the book, is precisely detailed, wryly but not inappropriately funny, and strikingly well-written, Beard conjures the tragedy in such a vividly authentic way that I listened, heart in throat, grieved for the victims, and glimpsed the scale of the incident's extensive collateral damage.

Other essays breathe life into Beard's early childhood, adolescence, high school and college beaus, and her ultimately failed marriage. She presents her life in a non-linear way, each essay forming its own discrete story. Beard is a master of the exquisite detail and one has to wonder at her powers of recollection and suspect some poetic license in the telling. Usually I'm pretty particular about strict truth in the memoirs I read, but this book is so artfully written and profoundly affecting that I was willing to park my skepticism at the door.

Her masterful handling of a seemingly infinite number of precise details results in one stunning piece after another. Her mother, especially, is finely-wrought and we see exactly where Beard gets her cleverness and wry humor, which are powerful mechanisms in a book that depicts so much dysfunction, disorder, death, and divorce. As I listened, my heart's pangs were frequently accompanied by my laughter. I've rarely experienced such a seamless blend of humor and sorrow.

The author reads this audiobook and does a serviceable job. She sounds a little hypnotized, but she has written a hypnotic book so maybe it's fitting. And her deadpan delivery of very funny material only accentuates the humor. Jo Ann Beard is one sharp woman and I highly recommend this audiobook.

~Ann, Adult Services 

Thursday, March 10, 2016

Classic Lit vs. Lusty Wenches

Recently the Dubuque Telegraph-Herald posted a "Throwback Thursday" article from March 11, 1951 about the then Dubuque County Attorney, John L. Duffy, ordering the confiscation of a few books from the library in conjunction with an obscenity case.

The article can be accessed via microfilm at the library and soon you will be able to search articles digitally.  Thanks to a old Google project, you can read the first page of the article here and the second page here.

The obscenity case was picked up in Time magazine and published in the April 2, 1951 edition.  You can come to the library and read the article; we have bound copies of Time magazine going back to 1936.

One of the books cited in the news article and Time magazine happens to be our April 17, 2016 book discussion selection, A Stretch on the River by Dubuque's own Richard Bissell. Bissell's book was selected along with three French and English classics so the grand jury would have "something to make comparisons with."  In 1951, A Stretch on the River was on a restricted list at the library and not given out to children. Today anyone with a library card can check out a copy. There are several different covers of the book out there; the one to the left seems to be from 1959.  If this was the 1951 cover, you can imagine why it might have been considered "obscene."  

Bissell himself commented on the case in his book "My Life on the Mississippi or why I'm not Mark Twain"


If you are interested in more of Richard Bissell's works, you can place a hold on many of his items here.  

Our microfilm room is available anytime the library is open. We have a large collection of Dubuque newspapers on film, a few as far back as 1836.  Stop by the Recommendations Desk for help finding a Bissell book, and come to the Reference area to browse magazines and newspapers both past and present.  

~ Amy, Adult Services.