Customer Reviews

Denison, Iowa: Searching for the Soul of America Through the Secrets of a Midwest Town

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While I loved this book, there are those here who despised it. The writing is excellent, the stories are true, and I discovered we are more interesting than I had previously thought! As Denison continues to change and grow, be advised that the spirit of Donna Reed is alive and well. While I am not a native Denisonian, it is a really great place to live. When you read this book - and you really should - you'll be interested to know that Nathan Mahrt was just (11/8) elected Mayor by quite a substantial margin. I think Maharidge should come back in about five years and write a sequel!

On occasion, I read two books at about the same time which can be an "odd couple" indeed. For example, this book and New York Stories. As editor of the latter, Constance Rosenblum focuses on what she characterizes as the "glories, frustrations, and peculiar appeal" of New York City and the same can be said of Maharidge's perspectives on Denison. Although there are many stunning differences between the two cultures, both exemplify the best and worst of what is often referred to as the "American Experience."

With regard to this book, it is the latest of several collaborations by Maharidge and Williamson. In this instance, we accompany them during their search for "the soul of America through the secrets of a midwestern town." I do not recall being in Denison specifically but as described so vividly by Maharidge, the town seems very familiar...especially when I look at Michael Williamson's photographs. I am reminded of countless other small towns in the Midwest I visited in my childhood and adolescence, and then later while in college. Of course, they changed a great deal during subsequent decades (as have I) and that is one of the most fascinating subjects (among many) in this book.

Children are born, grow up, and then most leave as soon as they can for better jobs, brighter lights, a faster pace, etc. A "dying" town is one which loses appeal to its youth as its economy irrevocably declines. There are more burials than baptisms. (This process of deterioration is effectively portrayed in Larry McMurty's novels The Last Picture Show and its sequel, Texasville, as well as in films based on them.) Many of those who remain have nowhere else to go or lack the desire to seek a better life elsewhere. Here are some key facts:

About 60% of the state's college graduates leave.
Denison's population is almost 8,000.
Latinos comprise about 25% of that number.
Meat packing plants are the backbone of Denison's economy.
Maharidge and Williamson lived in Denison for a year.
Most residents seem willing, at times eager to share their thoughts and feelings.
Maharidge adds his own opinions from time to time, when appropriate.
He also provides relevant historical information to establish a frame-of-reference.
Denison adopted "It's a Wonderful Life" as its motto.

As for that civic motto, proudly featured on a water tower, it is explained by the fact that Donna Reed is a native of Denison. As Maharidge suggests, the motto is true of many residents but certainly not of all. Similar to so many other small towns throughout the United States, Denison is in the midst of an especially difficult transition. With all due respect to the significance of shifting demographics, Maharidge and Williamson concentrate almost entirely on specific residents and what appear to be their representative human experiences. The "secrets" to which the subtitle refers are best revealed within the narrative.

Of all the people with whom Maharidge and Williamson associated for more than a year, the one of greatest interest to me is Louis Navar. Consider this brief excerpt with which the book concludes. Navar has just landed a job doing a roof for Dick Knowles, a "nemesis" of two other residents, Al Roder and Ken Livingston. "I thought we were friends," one of them said. Read carefully Navar's response:

"I told them it was business, that I do business with everyone, that in Mexico it is much rougher than here. You don't trust anybody, you are only a friend after you prove it, when it really matters. It is earned. You do business with people, and you shake hands and smile and call each other `friend,' but you're not really friends. You don't trust them. It is just business. So I am doing business with Mr. Knowles [and then extending his hand to the mayor]...and with you, friend."

Navar has so many dreams but almost no illusions. His intelligence, passion, ambition, decency, and -- especially -- his energy and "street smarts" are precisely what are needed to revitalize Denison. In several respects, he is whatever future the town has.

Those who share my high regard for this book are urged to check out others co-authored by Maharidge and Williamson: And Their Children After Them: The Legacy of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Homeland, Journey to Nowhere: The Saga of the New Underclass, and The Last Great American Hobo. Also three books by William Least Heat-Moon: Blue Highways: A Journey into America, PrairyErth (A Deep Map): An Epic History of the Tallgrass Prairie Country, and River Horse: The Logbook of a Boat Across America.

If your preference is for relevant works of fiction, I recommend the short stories of Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor as well as Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio and Edgar Lee Masters' poems, notably those in his Spoon River Anthology.

Dale Maharidge, a former newspaper reporter, brings a well-rounded account of how cultural change presses upon the lives of a few citizens in a small town in Western Iowa.

This book fascinated me. I think it did so because of how well it oscillates between the worlds of economic development and narrative non-fiction. I have read "And Their Children After Them," but this book is cut from something finer. Maharidge has wandered into the disparate lives of many of Denison's people.

He even weaves a fable into the broader message of the story. There is a story about a white buffalo that comes back to haunt the white settlers who made victims of the Native Americans who once roamed the plains. Maharidge suggests that the waves of Central Americans and Mexicans, who happen to often have Indian blood, represent a reclaiming of the Plains by the Native Americans.

I lived in a small town like Denison for a year. In this case, it was Marshall, Missouri. Like Denison, Marshall relied on meatpacking. The town had beautiful homes on Arrow Street and a great past. The future, though, was clearly going to be different. The schools were full of Hispanics and Pacific Islander immigrants whose parents came to work in the slaughterhouses. It was a better life for the newcomers.

The problem in Denison, and in Marshall, is the one that Maharidge so eloquently captures. How do you get the existing townspeople to recognize that they must change or wither? Maharidge sees great hope in the ambition of immigrants like Luis Navar, a man who wants to become an independent contractor. At the same time, the long-time resident serving his lunch at the Hy-Vee disappoints Maharidge. She sees the newcomers as separate from the real members of Denison. "The White Buffalo is going to eat you alive," thinks Maharidge.

Cultural change is the new mandate of globalization. It is a hard lesson to adopt. That resistance is not just in the lunch counter servers. The same Navar clashes with the leaders of the town over contracts to repair a famous building. The town's leaders, in a poor moment, reward the contract through a shady backroom deal.

Going back to how this book is fascinating as piece of Journalism, Maharidge lives well beyond the constraints of news reporting. He develops a compassion to achieve his explanatory journalism. The book even discusses some of the difficult interpersonal decisions that portrayers of a place are confronted with as they work. Maharidge includes the stories of the townsfolk who wanted to befriend him beyond the point of comfort.

I would recommend this book to students of documentary journalism. This is such a better treatment of the topic of journalist-subject relationships than one might find in Janet Malcolm's "The Journalist and the Murderer." Whereas Malcolm picks apart the journalist as a seducer, Maharidge shows more of the reason for why a journalist must make friends in order to gain the trust that is needed to learn the secrets of a place. Maharidge samples the winter moonshine in one scene.

This book was recommended to me by a friend as we were starting to set up the 50th reunion for our Denison High School Class of '60. Both sides of my family had lived in Denison since the late 1800's - but currently I only have one distant relative living there. I personally left right after graduating from high school and have been back less than a half dozen times since. That seems to be the experience of the majority of my classmates as well - very few still live in Denison.

The book really captures Denison as it currently is - including the conflict between "old timers" and newly arrived Hispanics. The analogy to the earlier German/non-German conflicts is generally accurate - but the conflicting sides in that case arrived at about the same time. In fact, the German side of my family was probably there earlier.

Denison is dying simply because the farm land is too rich to do anything else with it - and with current farming equipment, that doesn't take many people. The packing industry is a good employer, but the skill set required is very minimal (meaning the pay is relatively poor) and the work is hard (farming and butchering always have been).

If you're not a Denison native, read the book to get a feel for what is currently happening throughout the Midwest. If you are, prepare to feel sad as well.

"Denison" is an essential book about America's trajectory, years ahead of its time; Maharidge is a keen observer and analyst. In his 1990s "The Coming White Minority," the author coined language about the US turning "brown around the edges," meaning that immigration showed itself most notably along borders and coasts where ports are located -- without the whites realizing their decline into racial minority in California, for example. But now he's turned that theory inside out -- rightly chronicling the racial, economic, and societal change roiling small-town America and invisible to a mainstream press hungry for cheap sound bytes.

Maharidge did not parachute into Iowa but instead set aside one year of his life to experience and contribute to a forgotten hamlet. He lived in a derelict house with predatory ghosts, stuffing his windows with old clothing against the prairie wind and lying awake, alone, through train whistles screaming through the night and valley below him. He taught English as a second language to newcomers from Mexico who worked in the meatpacking plant while rebuffing advances from lonely midwestern women. He saw prejudice carried on through forgotten history, and also the rewards not only of a new, mostly Hispanic generation's industry, but also in the passions of the old guard -- represented by an open-minded young Denisonite's identity with his homeland.

Read this book to step into the minds and hearts of everyday Americans, old and new. Conflict, sorrow, hope, and faith merge in a book that will propel Maharidge to yet higher achievements.

Having actually been born and raised in Denison, Ia, I found this book very hard to put down. I learned more about the history of my home town than I ever knew before and also how it has changed since I left. But it was also a book that left me with hundreds of questions. I wish he could have written more!

there are two types of books - those that entertain and those that inform. This book manages to bridge the gap. It's a fast read and a fun one, and you actually learn somerthing along the way. I leanred more about the history and dynamic of this place called Denison than I ever thought I would.

It's amazong just how interesting "off the beaten path" can be.

I have known Dale Maharidge for almost thirty years now, since he was a raw and restless young man in Cleveland, dreaming of becoming a writer. It didn't take him long to realize that dream. Or to win a Pulitzer Prize. Or to be snatched up by the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism to teach a new crop of dreamers how it's done. Denison, Iowa is Maharidge at his best. And journalism at its best. No one can truly say they know what makes America ticks until they read this book. A masterpiece.

I live 15 minutes from Denison so this book was lauded as a must read. That is exactly what it is. For all of us to take a few minutes and understand how the small towns work. Why some of us are here and how the towns are changing and wondering what will become of them. I for one think someday they will be a thing of the past but, I hope that as in Dale's eyes just maybe it is the time of the white buffalo. I highly recommend this book to all who question life. I am so glad to finally know what happened to the night man. May his soul rest in peace.

Maharidge's work is a paean to illegal immigration--he talks about jobs working in the town's packing plants, as if the local native-born youth had simply turned up their noses at them. But their parents worked there, so what has changed? Clearly, it's not just a Baby Boomer vs. Gen X work ethic problem.

Maharidge doesn't spend much time explaining that these were once union jobs that paid a decent wage. He makes the "local white youths" sound like slackers, yet the fact is that the pervasive availability of below-market illegal laborers has dramatically reduced the wages and benefits in this sector, and the continuing expansion of illegal labor in this country (estimates of 10-20 million currently here) only exacerbates the employment problems of low-skilled citizens. In cities like Los Angeles, union janitorial jobs once providing a good living and a stepping stone to many African-Americans. But these jobs disappeared with the latest wave of illegal immigration, while the schools and social services were overburdened with the tide of uneducated, unskilled immigrants and their children. Ironically, the unions are now working hard to organize illegal immigrants so that they can get a "fair" wage (and, one imagines, so the unions can get their diminished treasuries refilled).