Janusz Bardach with Kathleen Gleeson |
Man Is Wolf to Man 
(University of California Press)
Now retired from a distinguished career in reconstructive surgery at the
University of Iowa, Dr. Janusz Bardarch reveals how he, as a young Polish
Jew, survived mental and physical torture in Stalin's labor camps. (Author
is retired UI faculty member; Gleeson is a UI graduate) |
T. C. Boyle
 |
Riven Rock
(Viking Books)
A story of strange love and stranger psychiatry. I can't forget the book
and wish I knew how much of it--if any--tells the true story of a McCormick
heir gone mad. (Graduate and former faculty member of Writers' Workshop) |
Robert Olen Butler |
The Deep Green Sea
(Henry Holt and Company)
Ben, a Vietnam veteran, returns to Southeast Asia in search of peace and
closure more than 20 years after the fighting ceased. Pulitzer Prize-winning
author Butler, himself a Vietnam veteran, once again explores a clash of
cultures. (UI graduate) |
Frank Conroy |
Stop-Time
(Penguin U.S.A.)
A memoir of the author's childhood and adolescence, this book by the current
director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop describes an incredible range of
experiences that alternately horrifies, entertains, and educates.
Body and Soul
(Bantam Books)
Talent and uncommon luck pull Claude Rawlings up from a slovenly New
York basement apartment into a rich musical society.
|
Osha Gray Davidson |
The Enchanted Braid
(John Wiley & Sons)
Coral reef--animal, vegetable, mineral, or all three? Well-researched and
well-written educational reading about one of the natural wonders of the
world. Will man persist in destroying it all? (Former IAQ magazine
staffer and UI graduate) |
Kathryn Harrison
 |
The Kiss
(Bard)
This memoir reveals an obsessive love affair between a daughter and her
father, as well as other dysfunctions in the family's life. The book sparked
considerable controversy when it was published in 1997. (Writers' Workshop
graduate) |
Peter Hedges |
What's Eating Gilbert Grape
(Pocket Books)
Gilbert Grape leads a life of quiet desperation in a small town near Iowa
City. Hedges puts the reader into Gilbert's mind and reveals his thoughts
about his relationship with a married woman, his embarrassment of his 500-lb
mother, his exasperated love for his retarded younger brother, and his
growing desire to hit the road and leave it all behind. (Iowa native) |
John Irving |
The Water-Method Man
(Ballantine Books)
Lost in the wake of his greater commercial successes, such as The World
According to Garp and A Prayer for Owen Meany, this second novel
contains some of Irving's finest prose and most entertaining idiosyncracies.
Irving adds humorous real-world Iowa City allusions as the title character
battles bill collectors and tries to film his own marriage and life as
they fall apart. An underrated gem. (Former Writers' Workshop faculty member) |
Donald Justice |
New and Selected Poems
(A. A. Knopf)
Renowned for the purity of his form and the exactness of his language,
Justice won the Pulitzer Prize for the original edition of this volume.
(Former Writers' Workshop faculty member) |
W. P. Kinsella
 |
Shoeless Joe
The book that inspired the popular Field of Dreams (which was filmed
outside Dyersville in northeast Iowa). It's about love, miracles, and baseball--what
more can you ask from summer reading?
The Iowa Baseball Confederacy
Another baseball-related novel, in which Iowa City's infamous Black Angel
comes to life! (Writers' Workshop graduate)
|
David Morrell |
First Blood
(Out of print--check the library!)
Forget the movies--the real Rambo lives in this hard hitting adventure/drama
about a traumatized Vietnam vet who engages in another war with the enemy
at home. In 1982, I bought a hardcover copy at Prairie Lights as a Christmas
gift for my dad. We both thought it was a great book, and when I took a
class from Morrell some years later I made sure to get it autographed.
(Former UI faculty member) |
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. |
Slaughterhouse Five
(Dell)
A great time-travel and anti-war story, the novel centers on the infamous
bombing of Dresden, where we start to follow the odyssey of Billy Pilgrim,
an American GI and prisoner of war unstuck in time. (Former Writers' Workshop
faculty member) |
| Charles Wright
 |
Black Zodiac
(Noonday Press)
A 1998 winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and then the Pulitzer
Prize, this volume of poetry has been called musical and meditative, and
treats subjects that range from landscape to language to ideas about God
and Eastern philosophy. (UI faculty member) |
Ray Young Bear |
Black Eagle Child
(University of Iowa Press)
Young Bear, who lives in the Mesquakie settlement in Tama, Iowa, has been
widely praised for his candid, poetic account of childhood and young manhood
through the eyes of a Native American. (Iowa native) |
Nolan Zavoral |
A Season on the Mat: Dan Gable and
the Pursuit of Perfection
(Simon & Schuster)
When the 1996-97 season began, everyone knew that Iowa wrestling coach
Dan Gable was thinking hard about retiring from a sport he'd dominated
for decades. Nolan Zavoral followed the team and its coach for months,
creating a memorable portrait of the sport and the man. (Subject is legendary
UI coach) |
