Deep Midwest

Product Description

A deep dive into the Midwest experience through thought-provoking poems, recollections, essays, and vivid stories. Pondering nature and neighbors, bars and commutes Bob Leonard’s perspectives on these quiet aspects of life open up new ways of seeing everyday life. These little nods of Leonard’s are at once tiny, but also everything. This is a book to provoke appreciation in the things we take for granted, and spark evenings spent reminiscing with friends and family about what it means to live in the Midwest, or anywhere one calls home.

Review

This is my kind of book fun, provocative and easy to read. Bob Leonard blends prose and poetry with a ring of authenticity true to the ear of a community journalist to give us a portrait of small-town life in Rural America, and its abiding wonders. –Art Cullen, editor of The Storm Lake Times, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of the book, Storm Lake: A Chronicle of Change, Resilience, and Hope from a Heartland Newspaper

Robert Leonard is a pseudonym for a guy I know named Dr. Bob. Dr. Bob is a suspendered radio reporter of a certain age who is curious to a fault. He hears and sees stuff the rest of us miss. And thank goodness he s taken the time to write some of it down. Loved the book. –Harry Smith, NBC News

You don’t have to have a PhD in anthropology to understand rural Iowa, but it helps. Reading Deep Midwest helps, too, and there is a lot for readers to understand. From the small-town bar owner who stops fights dead in their tracks by firing up his chainsaw, to the presidential candidate who has no idea what the locals mean by the low price of corn and beans, to the luckless widow and mother of four small children whose husband commits suicide, these poems and stories about the Iowa countryside will tug at the reader s heart, sometimes plucking at its strings, sometimes tearing it in two, but most often causing it to soar through stories about courage and even humor. And then there is love, the love of a father for his wife and children, or the love of an elderly couple she with cancer and he with a heart condition encouraging each other along on their daily walk inside Des Moines Merle Hay indoor shopping mall. Dr. Robert Leonard has been many things in his life: an Iowa radio personality, a cab driver, a playwright, a university professor, a carpenter, a roofer, a champion heavyweight wrestler, and a journalist whose work has been in the New York Times and Kansas City Star. Dr. Bob, as he is called in Marion County, Iowa, has interviewed over 8,000 people along the way, and has a deep understanding of life in the rural Midwest, deepened even more by his doctorate in anthropology. His perspective on people, places and events is not only influenced by education and experience but also tempered by love: love for a place and love for its people regardless of generation, political stance, or social status. As Dr. Leonard advises us all, Look for love, and when you find it, hold its warm and tender hand in your own, gently. –James Blasingame, Professor, Department of English, Arizona State University

About the Author

Robert Leonard graduated from Johnston High School in 1972, and received his BA in history from the University of Northern Iowa in 1977 and his MA in Anthropology from the University of Washington, Seattle in 1983. He received his PhD in anthropology from the UW in 1986. He worked in historic preservation for the Zuni Tribe in New Mexico in the mid 1980 s until accepting a position teaching in the Department of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico in 1987 where he taught until 2005 when he and his family decided to return home to Iowa. He has also conducted field research in Washington, Oregon, California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Mexico. He and his family have lived in Marion County since 2005. He is the author of dozens of scientific books, papers, and newspaper articles, as well as an unusual ethnography (short stories and poetry)