The United States has more public libraries than it has McDonald’s restaurants.

 

By any measure, the American public library is a heavily used and ubiquitous institution. Popular thinking identifies the public library as a neutral agency that protects democratic ideals by guarding against censorship as it makes information available to people from all walks of life. Among librarians this idea is known as the “library faith.” But is the American public library as democratic as it appears to be?

 

 In Main Street Public Library, eminent library historian Wayne Wiegand studies four emblematic small-town libraries in the Midwest from the late nineteenth century through the federal Library Service Act of 1956, and shows that these institutions served a much different purpose than is so often perceived. Rather than acting as neutral institutions that are vital to democracy, the libraries of Sauk Centre, Minnesota; Osage, Iowa; Rhinelander, Wisconsin; and Lexington, Michigan, were actually mediating community literary values and providing a public space for the construction of social harmony. These libraries, and the librarians who ran them, were often just as susceptible to the political and social pressures of their time as any other public institution.

 

By analyzing the collections of all four libraries and revealing what was being read and why certain acquisitions were passed over, Wiegand challenges both traditional perceptions and professional rhetoric about the role of libraries in our small-town communities. While the American public library has become essential to its local community, it is for reasons significantly different than those articulated by the “library faith.”

John Price’s Man Killed by Pheasant is a loving ode to the prairies of the Midwest, to west central Iowa, and to family connections that stretch from his Swedish ancestors to his parents to his wife and children. Throughout he embraces “the opportunity, as always, to settle, to remember, and be ready.” This quest sounds more portentous than it is once enriched with Price’s gentle humor and endearing empathy. Sharing stories of home, secrets of landscape, and binding ties to both, he weaves history and memory to create permanent kinships for himself and for his readers.

Food historian Cynthia Clampitt pens the epic story of what happened when Mesoamerican farmers bred a nondescript grass into a staff of life so prolific, so protean, that it represents nothing less than one of humankind's greatest achievements. Blending history with expert reportage, she traces the disparate threads that have woven corn into the fabric of our diet, politics, economy, science, and cuisine. At the same time she explores its future as a source of energy and the foundation of seemingly limitless green technologies. The result is a bourbon-to-biofuels portrait of the astonishing plant that sustains the world.

This richly illustrated collection profiles the bold innovators in landscape architecture who, around the turn of the twentieth century, ventured into the nation's heartland to develop a new style of design celebrating the native midwestern landscape.
The pioneers of landscape architecture in the Midwest are responsible for creating some of the most recognizable parks, cemeteries, recreation areas, and other public gathering places in the region. Midwestern Landscape Architecture includes essays on Adolph Strauch, who introduced a new concept of visually integrated landscape treatment in Cincinnati's Spring Grove Cemetery; William Le Baron Jenney, designer of Chicago's diverse West Parks; and Jens Jensen, who created the American Garden in Union Park in Chicago (a celebration of native flora) and founder of The Clearing, a unique school of the arts and humanities in Wisconsin. Other major figures include Frederick Law Olmsted Sr., co-designer of New York's Central Park, whose work in the Midwest included the layout of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, and Ossian Cole Simonds, who helped reconcile the formal approach of the City Beautiful movement with the naturalism of the Prairie School in urban park design.
This volume also details the contributions of crusaders for ecological awareness and an appreciation of the region's natural heritage. These include horticultural writer Wilhelm Miller, who spread the ideals of the Prairie style, and Genevieve Gillette, a landscape architect and conservationist whose preservation efforts led to the establishment of numerous Michigan state parks and wilderness areas.
Midwestern Landscape Architecture fosters a better understanding of how landscape design took shape in the Midwest and how the land itself inspired new solutions to enhance its understated beauty. Despite Olmsted's assessment of the Illinois prairie as "one of the most tiresome landscapes that I ever met with," the Midwest has amassed an important legacy of landscape design that continues to influence how people interact with their environment in the heartland.
 

Midwestern gardeners and landscapers are becoming increasingly attracted to noninvasive regional native wildflowers and plants over popular nonnative species. The Midwestern Native Garden offers viable alternatives to both amateurs and professionals, whether they are considering adding a few native plants or intending to go native all the way. Native plants improve air and water quality, reduce use of pesticides, and provide vital food and reproductive sites to birds and butterflies, that nonnative plants cannot offer, helping bring back a healthy ecosystem. The authors provide a comprehensive selection of native alternatives that look similar or even identical to a range of nonnative ornamentals. These are native plants that are suitable for all garden styles, bloom during the same season, and have the same cultivation requirements as their nonnative counterparts. Plant entries are accompanied by nature notes setting out the specific birds and butterflies the native plants attract. The Midwestern Native Garden will be a welcome guide to gardeners whose styles range from formal to naturalistic but who want to create an authentic sense of place, with regional natives. The beauty, hardiness, and easy maintenance of native Midwestern plants will soon make them the new favorites.

In this companion volume to the bestselling The Midwestern Native Garden: Native Alternatives to Nonnative Flowers and Plants, Charlotte Adelman and Bernard L. Schwartz offer another indispensible guide to replacing nonnative plants with native alternatives. This time, their subject is the native woody species that are the backbone of our gardens and landscapes. Among other ecological benefits, native shrubs and trees provide birds and butterflies with vital food and reproductive sites that nonnative species cannot offer. And they tend to be hardier and easier to maintain. The authors provide a comprehensive selection of native woody alternatives that, season by season, provide effects similar to those of nonnative shrubs and trees used for ornamental purposes and shade. These plants are suitable for all garden styles, provide blooms and fall color, and have the same cultivation requirements as their nonnative counterparts. Nature notes alert readers to the native species’ unique ecological roles. Unlike other gardening guides, Midwestern Native Shrubs and Trees goes beyond mere suggestion to provide gardeners with the tools they need to make informed, thoughtful choices. Knowing which native species to plant for desired effects empowers landscapers and gardeners to take on a greater role in protecting our midwestern environment.

The midwestern pastoral is a literary tradition of place and rural experience that celebrates an attachment to land that is mystical as well as practical, based on historical and scientific knowledge as well as personal experience. It is exemplified in the poetry, fiction, and essays of writers who express an informed love of the nature and regional landscapes of the Midwest. Drawing on recent studies in cultural geography, environmental history, and mythology, as well as literary criticism, The Midwestern Pastoral: Place and Landscape in Literature of the American Heartland relates Midwestern pastoral writers to their local geographies and explains their approaches. William Barillas treats five important Midwestern pastoralists—Willa Cather, Aldo Leopold, Theodore Roethke, James Wright, and Jim Harrison—in separate chapters. He also discusses Jane Smiley, U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser, Paul Gruchow, and others. For these writers, the aim of writing is not merely intellectual and aesthetic, but democratic and ecological. In depicting and promoting commitment to local communities, human and natural, they express their love for, their understanding of, and their sense of place in the American Midwest. Students and serious readers, as well as scholars in the growing field of literature and the environment, will appreciate this study of writers who counter alienation and materialism in modern society.

This completely revised second edition provides all the information necessary to identify mushrooms in the field in the midcontinental region of Iowa, Illinois, Nebraska, Missouri, Minnesota, South Dakota, and Wisconsin: the tallgrass prairies and the western parts of the eastern deciduous forests.

The first edition has been improved in significant ways. The authors have updated scientific names, added photos where there were none and replaced poor photos with better ones, improved the keys, added some species and deleted others, added a section on truffles, and annotated the bibliography. There were originally 224 species; now there are 248. Some of the new photos—125 in all—serve as a second photo for a species, where it is helpful to show details that cannot be viewed in a single photo.

The authors describe each species’ cap, gills, stalk, annulus, and season when it is most likely to be seen as well as such characteristics as edibility and toxicity. In their detailed and lively introduction they discuss the economic and environmental aspects of fungi, basic mushroom biology, nomenclature, edibility and toxicity, and habitats and time of fruiting. Most important are the keys, which lead the dedicated reader to the major groups of fungi included in this guide. The section on mushrooms includes keys to their genera in addition to the species within each family discussed, and each of the subsequent sections has a key to the genera and species except where so few species are discussed that a key is not necessary. The volume also includes a glossary and two bibliographies, one with general and one with technical references.

Through their detailed technical descriptions and captivating color photos the authors convey their passionate fondness for these diverse and colorful organisms, whose mysterious appearances and disappearances have long made them objects of fascination.

Fusing general interest in mushrooming with serious scholarship, Mushrooms of the Midwest describes and illustrates over five hundred of the region's mushroom species. From the cold conifer bogs of northern Michigan to the steamy oak forests of Missouri, the book offers a broad cross-section of the fungi, edible and not, that can be found growing in the Midwest’s diverse ecosystems.

With hundreds of color illustrations, Mushrooms of the Midwest is ideal for amateur and expert mushroomers alike. Michael Kuo and Andrew Methven provide identification keys and thorough descriptions. The authors discuss the DNA revolution in mycology and its consequences for classification and identification, as well as the need for well-documented contemporary collections of mushrooms.

Unlike most field guides, Mushrooms of the Midwest includes an extensive introduction to the use of a microscope in mushroom identification. In addition, Kuo and Methven give recommendations for scientific mushroom collecting, with special focus on ecological data and guidelines for preserving specimens. Lists of amateur mycological associations and herbaria of the Midwest are also included. A must-have for all mushroom enthusiasts!