Our next Read a Million Minutes book was Dewey: There’s a Cat in the Library! by Vicki Myron and Bret Witter, illustrated by Steve James. This was a SHE WRITES book. It’s also the children’s version of Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World.
As promised, here’s a list of Iowa books and authors.
Memoirs
by Mary Swander, Iowa’s 2009 Poet Laureate
by Bret Witter with Vicki Myron
by Merry Corbin
by Dwight W. Hoover
by Carol Bodensteiner
by Bill Bryson
by Mildred Armstrong Kalish
by John Price
by Doris C. Steffy
by C. Vivian Stringer, who led the Hawkeyes women’s basketball team to the 1993 Final Four and the first coach in NCAA women’s history to bring three teams to the Final Four. She is now head coach of the Rutgers University women’s basketball team and a member of the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame.
by Marjorie Hart, who is in her 80s and living in California. She tells the story of spending the summer of 1945 in New York and working at Tiffany’s with her friend and classmate at the University of Iowa.Novels
by Marilynne Robinson, who teaches at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and lives in Iowa City. She has written several other books, including Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead and Housekeeping. She also wrote two non-fiction books, Mother Country and The Death of Adam. Home is a companion piece to Gilead and a variation of the prodigal-son parable. The son, Jack Boughton, returns in 1957 to Gilead, Iowa, where his story unfolds.
by Daniel Dundon, who is a former reporter and editor for the Waterloo Courier and the Cedar Rapids Gazette. He now lives in Jacksonville, Fla. Lassiter Hill is a novel inspired by an Iowa murder case.
by Tricia Currans-Sheehan, who grew up on a farm along the Des Moines River. She now lives in Sioux City and teaches at Briar Cliff University. The River Road is the sequel to her first book, The Egg Lady and Other Neighbors.Places
by Dale Maharidge and photographer Michael Williamson. Maharidge lived in Denison for a year to record daily details of a small town in Iowa. Maharidge and Williamson, both Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists, have collaborated on books before.
by David S. Faldet, a professor of English at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa. He grew up in the Decorah area and is in the fifth generation of his family living in the river basin.
by Stephen G. Bloom and photographer and artist Peter Feldstein. Bloom also wrote Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America. Feldstein took photographs of 670 residents of Oxford (population 676) in 1984. He did it again 20 years later and asked Bloom to interview people. Everyone has a story, he said. Both teach at the University of Iowa.
by Douglas Bauer, a journalist who returned to his hometown after leaving it as a teen-ager. He wrote several other books, including the novel Book of Famous Iowans.True crime
by Patricia L. Bryan and Thomas Wolf