"Nature-study not only educates, but it educates nature-ward; and nature is ever our companion, whether we will or no. Even though we are determined to shut ourselves in an office, nature sends her messengers. The light, the dark, the moon, the cloud, the rain, the wind, the falling leaf, the fly, the bouquet, the bird, the cockroach-they are all ours. If one is to be happy, he must be in sympathy with common things. He must live in harmony with his environment. One cannot be happy yonder nor tomorrow: he is happy here and now, or never. Our stock of knowledge of common things should be great. Few of us can travel. We must know the things at home."―from "The Meaning of the Nature-study Movement"
"To feel that one is a useful and cooperating part in nature is to give one kinship, and to open the mind to the great resources and the high enthusiasms. Here arise the fundamental common relations. Here arise also the great emotions and conceptions of sublimity and grandeur, of majesty and awe, the uplift of vast desires―when one contemplates the earth and the universe and desires to take them into the soul and to express oneself in their terms; and here also the responsible practices of life take root."―from The Holy Earth
Before Wendell Berry and Aldo Leopold, there was the horticulturalist and botanist Liberty Hyde Bailey (1858–1954). For Wendell Berry, Bailey was a revelation, a symbol of the nature-minded agrarianism Berry himself popularized. For Aldo Leopold, Bailey offered a model of the scholar-essayist-naturalist. In his revolutionary work of eco-theology, The Holy Earth, Bailey challenged the anthropomorphism―the people-centeredness―of a vulnerable world. A trained scientist writing in the lyrical tradition of Emerson, Burroughs, and Muir, Bailey offered the twentieth century its first exquisitely interdisciplinary biocentric worldview; this Michigan farmer's son defined the intellectual and spiritual foundations of what would become the environmental movement.
For nearly a half century, Bailey dominated matters agricultural, environmental, and scientific in the United States. He worked both to improve the lives of rural folk and to preserve the land from which they earned their livelihood. Along the way, he popularized nature study in U.S. classrooms, lobbied successfully for women's rights on and off the farm, and bulwarked Teddy Roosevelt's pioneering conservationism.
Here for the first time is an anthology of Bailey's most important writings suitable for the general and scholarly reader alike. Carefully selected and annotated by Zachary Michael Jack, this book offers a comprehensive introduction to Bailey's celebrated and revolutionary thinking on the urgent environmental, agrarian, educational, and ecospiritual dilemmas of his day and our own. Culled from ten of Bailey's most influential works, these lyrical selections highlight Bailey's contributions to the nature-study and the Country Life movements. Published on the one-hundredth anniversary of Bailey's groundbreaking report on behalf of the Country Life Commission, Liberty Hyde Bailey: Essential Agrarian and Environmental Writings will inspire a new generation of nature writers, environmentalists, and those who share with Bailey a profound understanding of the elegance and power of the natural world and humanity's place within it.

Liberty Hyde Bailey: Essential Agrarian and Environmental Writings

Politics & Social Sciences

Zachary Michael Jack

Liberty Hyde Bailey

Sociology

Cornell University Press

In PERFECTLY AGAINST THE SUN, Zachary Michael Jack takes his readers to a middle west more far-out and more fantastical than ever imagined. In these groundbreaking tone poems, the great swath of middle country from Akron, to Wichita, to Paducah is bathed in blue, shadowed by archetypes animal and human, burned through by a fiercely purifying sun. In Jack's exquisitely layered poetic vision, the black-dirt Delta towns of Memphis and Cairo turn modern-day necropolis; Waterloo, Iowa becomes the waterloo of a thousand last stands; and row upon row of Kansas corn suggests an afterlife. The book's protagonist, alternately wearing the masks of tragedian, librettist, auteur, athlete, and impressionist, unearths the deep roots that sustain and bind, imagining his way into, and way out of, losses suffered deep in the heart of the Heartland. Here, the camp horror of Hollywood assumes eerie resonance, the athletic field reads as timeless epic, and the famously blank canvas of the Great Plains whirls into a painterly starry night. From the author of THE INANITY OF MUSIC AND WINGS comes a second book-length collection of poems announcing a poet-storyteller among the best of his generation.

Perfectly Against the Sun

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

Smithtown Pr

What's the single most important piece of advice you would share with a young Iowan growing up or coming of age in the Hawkeye State? Iowa editor and author Zachary Michael Jack posed this timeless question to more than 100 Iowa luminaries, asking them to respond in a letter to all Iowans. The result ... a once-in-a-lifetime collection of common sense and hard-won wisdom penned for young people everywhere by a who s who of contemporary Iowans, including the likes of Robert D. Ray, Dan Gable, Mary Swander, and Christie Vilsack. Ranging from the mundane how to walk a gravel road to the comically profane what Iowa men have in common with Iowa pigs to the sublime how an ethic of care redeems us the letters and photographs in Letters To A Young Iowan tell the story of a state known far and wide for its down-to-earth nurture and its high-flying dreams. A perfect gift for rites of passage of all kinds, Letters To A Young Iowan is proof positive that one is never too old, or too young, to know wisdom beyond their years.

Letters To A Young Iowan: Good Sense From The Good Folks of Iowa For Young People Everywhere

History

Ice Cube Press

Iowa, the Definitive Collection gathers for student, teacher, researcher, and leisure reader alike a rich harvest of Iowa lore as told by a bevy of its most famous and forgotten voices Iowa history as made and told by Iowans, for Iowans. Totaling over 500 browsable pages and nearly 100 highly readable, classic and contemporary selections, this mammoth compendium of Iowa history, literature, and lore captures the Hawkeye State more diversely and more comprehensively than ever before. Here is a book a big book of Iowa readings of every conceivable kind (campaign platforms, creeds, diaries, editorials, ethnographic studies, fictions, government documents, history, humor, journalism, legal opinions, letters, memoirs, pamphlets, speeches, travel narratives, and more) and of every historical vintage (from Black Hawk s lament on being ordered to move west to Iowa in 1831 to Iowa writer-anthropologist Robert Leonard s freshly-penned roll call of the many different Iowans he has known). Between these covers, world-famous sons and daughters of Iowa, including Carrie Chapman Catt, Bob Feller, Susan Glaspell, Herbert Hoover, Ted Kooser, Aldo Leopold, Glenn Miller, Wallace Stegner, Henry Wallace, Grant Wood, and many others join a chorus of forgotten or neglected native greats to tell the story of their home state as only Iowans can tell it. Perfect fodder for Iowa history and literature classes, book clubs, civic organizations, museums, libraries, and visitor centers across the Land Between Two Rivers, Iowa, the Definitive Collection offers a first-of-its-kind, popular documentary history suitable for singing loudly, proudly, and circumspectly across the State, and across generations.

Iowa: The Definitive Collection

United States

Part romantic comedy, part whodunit, part great American road trip, What Cheer asks a lover's ageless questions: where, when, and with whom? Here's a celebration of love sprung from perfectly surreal yet real places What Cheer, Lost Nation, Story County. Here s a comedy of errors featuring three not-yet-over-the-hill friends, a series of dreamy love letters, and a mysterious list of warm, nearly-gone touchstones that inspire a rollicking ride through the Heartland. What Cheer is love medicine for those whose daisy chains reach the sweetest, most far-flung places.

What Cheer: A Love Story

Contemporary

Tall Corn Books

A real-life sequel to the award-winning romance novel What Cheer At the height of a Heartland summer a seventh generation Midwesterner unlucky in love sets forth from a faraway farm on a quest to road-test what he calls his Beach Boys hypothesis: What if we really do live in a world where native boy meets native girl...What if the cutest girls and boys in the world really do live right under our nose? So begins a Cinderella season in search of a love homegrown. Pursuing the dream wherever it may lead, the author delivers speeches in far-flung farm burgs and readings in well-to do college towns while setting up listening posts in libraries and chautauquas in barns. Part 1500-mile travelogue and part real-life love story, Native Soulmate offers not just an account of a magical trek and its uncanny, sweetcorn settings, but a moving argument for how voting with your feet and leading with your heart really can matter.

Native Soulmate: A Season in Search of a Love Homegrown

Parenting & Relationships

Some folks may say Samuel Pond Ball Clintock drew the short stick in life. He wasn't born with a Cadillac in his driveway, a Titleist in his fairway, or a caddy on his bag. He isn't one of the "in" kids at Harry S. Truman middle school. His best friend in life and partner in crime is his golf-gifted father, Chip, who s mysteriously sworn off the game, and who hasn't held a driver s license, a 9-iron, or a real job in years. Still, Sammy has reason to be happy, what with a mostly friendly goat in his back pasture, a legendary golf course in his back yard, and pond balls aplenty in his back pocket. There s one problem, though. The course he s bringing back to life, Mimosa G.C., has been shuttered and mothballed since the dark days of the Great Depression, when its infamous, cigar-smoking Scottish architect Alistair McCrackup last stalked its sand traps alongside Sammy's great-granddaddy. So when Pond Ball, his diamond-in-the-rough dad, and his best friends Daisy and A.J. begin resurrecting the abandoned lay-out during summer vacation, they can t help but stir up 18 holes worth of ghosts. Before they can holler fore! Pond Ball and company find themselves struggling to save the divine old course from the memories, heavenly and dastardly, some would prefer to see buried along with it. From pine woods so deep they re spiritual to cornfields so endless they might be eternal from 30,000 feet in the air squarely back down to the blessed turf of the magical Mimosa G.C. Pond Ball and friends prove it s not what brand of golf ball you play or what golf cart you drive that gives you soul, but whom and what you believe in.

Pond Ball Clintock and the Gods of Golf: A Novel for True Believers

Teen & Young Adult

Tall Corn Books, Ice Cube Press

One part Mark Twain, and two parts Garrison Keillor, prize-winning humorist and essayist Homer Croy was a man of many distinctions: The first student of the first school of journalism in the United States, the first person to tour the world shooting motion pictures, and the first author of his day to write a best-selling novel that happened to be anonymous. Dale Carnegie dedicated his opus "How to Win Friends and Influence People" to him; Will Rogers, for whom Croy wrote more films than any other, made him honored guest at his Thanksgiving table. In between his pioneering studies in journalism at the University of Missouri and his mid-life, Missouri farm memoirs that sold in the hundreds of thousands, Croy flunked out of college, moved to the Big Apple, filmed his way around the world, tied the knot in the first marriage ever captured on a Universal newsreel, worked for Theodore Dreiser, earned a fortune, moved to Paris, tragically lost two children, wrote for Hollywood, earned an honorary doctorate, and, in the end, lost his fortune all while maintaining the down-home humor and heart that earned him a reputation among peers as the towering cornstalk of midcentury, midwestern memoir.

Homer Croy Corn Country

Humor & Entertainment

Humor

Tall Corn Books, imprint of Ice Cube Books

Part political satire, part earnest call for electoral reform, and one unforgettable campaign tale, Corn Poll: A Novel of the Iowa Caucuses is a story for political junkies and political cynics alike, for anyone who ever held their nose and cast a vote and everyone who ever dreamed We the People might one day stand up and demand the candidates we deserve. Not since the novel Primary Colors has the Middle American landscape yielded up such rich political fodder. Find out why Dr. Timothy Walch, Director Emeritus, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, says 'Corn Poll is hoot and a holler for political reform.'

Corn Poll: A Novel of the Iowa Caucuses

Genre Fiction

Tall Corn Books, imprint Ice Cube Press, LLC

The Essential Agrarian Commentaries of Zachary Michael Jack. Fresh and far-ranging, these timely commentaries illuminate an important paradox: how, as the population living on the land plummets, the popularity of agrarianism rises anew. From buying organic to shopping local; from homesteading to homeschooling to homegrowing and slow-fooding; from DIYing to grassroots social justice to sustainable living and populist resistance, we resurrect and reenact timeless rural values. Featuring more than forty plainspoken pieces, Country Views champions the grounded perspective at a time ripe for resowing our democracy, reminding that no matter where we hang our hats, when we cultivate conscience and community we are all agrarians engaged in yeoman's work.

Country Views: The Essential Agrarian Commentaries of Zachary Michael Jack

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Diseases & Physical Ailments

Ice Cube Press, Tall Corn Book

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Books by Zachary Michael Jack