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Zusatztext 100353399 Informationen zum Autor Art Cullen Klappentext "A reminder that even the smallest newspapers can hold the most powerful among us accountable."-The New York Times Book Review Iowa plays an outsize role in national politics. Iowa introduced Barack Obama and voted bigly for Donald Trump. But is it a bellwether for America, a harbinger of its future? Art Cullen's answer is complicated and honest. In truth, Iowa is losing ground. The Trump trade wars are hammering farmers and manufacturers. Health insurance premiums and drug prices are soaring. That's what Iowans are dealing with, and the problems they face are the problems of the heartland. In this candid and timely book, Art Cullen-the Storm Lake Times newspaperman who won a Pulitzer Prize for taking on big corporate agri-industry and its poisoning of local rivers-describes how the heartland has changed dramatically over his career. In a story where politics, agriculture, the environment, and immigration all converge, Cullen offers an unsentimental ode to rural America and to the resilient people of a vibrant community of fifteen thousand in Northwest Iowa, as much survivors as their town. Chapter 1 The First Question: Why? A good reporter's first task is to ask questions. It's a family habit of ours, learned early on. My first memory is of waving good-bye to Dad on our sun-drenched lawn one Sunday morning a hundred yards north of the sparkling lake. I was two. Dad piled into a car bound for Madison, Wisconsin, where he would be a guinea pig for a potential cure for tuberculosis. The year was 1959. Why did he leave me there? Where was he going? Would he come back? A childhood friend of his from Whittemore, Iowa, Lloyd Roth, head of the department of pharmacology at the University of Chicago, was working on this project at the Veterans Administration hospital. Roth was also a physicist and had worked on the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb. Dad had picked up TB during World War II while stationed in Sicily with the Army Air Corps. He was a captain in charge of a supply depot at an air base; it's a wonder the planes could fly because he didn't know a screw from a screwdriver. The disease didn't fully manifest itself until after the war. When it did, more than a decade later, our family was in quarantine in Storm Lake, Iowa, a meatpacking town of about seven thousand with a small college and, yes, a lake. There we were, Mom alone with six kids, I the youngest. Brother Bill let loose hamsters in the basement that spread throughout the house. Brother Jim and I painted the basement red—including the clothes and bedding drying in the furnace room. Brother Tom, the eldest, tore the screen doors off the Corral Drive-In theater with a beery buddy. Brother John wanted to run away. Sister Ann was taking care of me, after a fashion. Mom called Dad in the hospital hoping for sympathy. He laughed. They took out a lung and he wasn't supposed to last more than a few months. He made it fourteen years, just long enough for me not to understand him. Meantime, Mom had been battling the VA ever since the war ended, trying to get him promised benefits. The records building in St. Louis burned down and with it the evidence that Dad contracted TB while in service. She had been through an endless siege for information before. Her first husband and father of my oldest brother, Tom, Omer Kelly, was shot to death in a Chicago bar when Tom was about two. Mom spent years trying to find out how he died. Her father, Art Murray, traveled from Bancroft, Iowa, to Chicago with his lawyer, Luke Linnan, to find justice. Linnan had an old friend who was a judge there. The judge told them to go home, and to quit asking questions. She never quit asking. Our mother reared us to do the same. Sometimes ...
