The Book of Famous Iowans

by Douglas Bauer

Book Overview

A classic tale of infidelity and its consequences, this novel is set against the austere beauty of the Iowa heartland. "The Book of Famous Iowans" is about the undoing of a marriage and, thus, a family as well as a childhood, told with the same elegiac retrospection that haunts such wonderful books as "A River Runs Through It" and "Montana 1948".

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0805043004
• ISBN13: 9780805043006
• Release Date: January 1997
• Publisher: Henry Holt & Company
• Length: 246 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.8" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

a writer through and through

Bauer is a writer through and through. Neither this nor any of his other books ("Dexterity." "The Very Air") has anything ground-breaking to say, so thematically this is just another coming-of-age novel. But it (they) makes for a great reading experience. He writes like a dream--the pure sensuousness of his prose is a pleasure. Yet it has an appealing simplicity--it never lapses into preciousness or syntactic complications. He also has a wonderful sense of place--he's written with equal authority on New York State ("Dexterity"), the Southwest ("Very Air"), and Iowa. The Fox

I Can't Get This Book Out of My Mind!

I've read the other reviews posted here including the Kirkus diss. What troubles me about this novel is that it is so true--what the boy feels, what his father feels and how he is unable to say it, how his mother feels and is unable to act it out, and how his friend Bobby feels. That's a minor miracle of writing. I too thought of Madison County, but this is real literature, not a romance to cry over. I identify with the boy, as many of us must, and it's too bad that the author doesn't give us a mother who at least would contact her son in later life, having declared to her husband that she was taking him away. But that's not an essential plot point. Bauer gets inside the skin as well as the head. His use of words, his sentences, his writing style, have been banging around in my head for week. Read it and see for yourself.

Finding a Place, and then Losing It

Jumping into The Book of Famous Iowans is jumping into a landscape--a farm that becomes so familiar that you undertand the loss the main character feels when you, like he, finish the book and leave it. Bauer is able to captures the wildy varying feelings of a young boy, his grandmother, his father, his mother, and her lover, designating no favorites among them. It's a true life story, showing how nothing, and everything, happens in a small town...how we who come from small towns can never leave them, and why we search for glimpses of them in well written books like this. If you like Wallace Stegner, Doris Lessing, and Ian Frazier, you'll like Doug Bauer.