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Seed Keeper
by Diane Wilson
Narrated by Kyla Wilson
10 hours, 42 minutes
The Seed Keeper is the 2024 All Iowa Reads book selection. It’s a rich source of information for community conversation in our state where Pioneer Seed Corn led the hybrid seed transformation of agriculture. Set in neighboring Minnesota, the story starts with Rosalie Iron Wing aging out of the White foster family that has been paid to raise her. Nearly assimilated, Rosalie’s gradual reconnection with her extended indigenous family, present and past, is the beating heart of a story rich in fascinating details. The now-infamous government boarding schools’ impact on children and their tribes is sadly consequential. But this book is much more. It is a sensory and factual guide into the beauty and mystery of this land we share with plants and animals. In recent years the topic of plant communication has been explored. Diane Wilson’s blend of science and reverence is well handled. Wilson is a Minnesotan with a Swedish father and mother who is Dakhota (or Dakota or Lakota) and registered on the Rosebud reservation. It is while detasseling corn that Rosalie meets the White farmer she marries. The author uses that relationship to gently lay out the basics of the GMO (genetically modified organism) controversy, without advocacy beyond reverence for the seeds and their unique role in the survival of humanity. The global impact of Norman Borlaug and “The Green Revolution” are not mentioned. Near my apartment in downtown Des Moines Borlaug’s statue stands in the garden of the World Food Prize building. Here, where the Raccoon and Des Moines rivers merge, there is an excavation that revealed a Meskwaki village reminding us of this land’s history.
Butcher
by Joyce Carol Oates
Narration by Several Voices
13 Hours, 11 minutes
Before Joyce Carol Oates spoke at the Des Moines Public Library’s June 2024 AVID (Authors Visiting in Des Moines) event, I had decided to NOT read this, her 64th book. The title Butcher and description of a horrid doctor’s brutal medical experiments on the genitalia of patients in the Women’s Lunatic Asylum in Trenton, NJ were red light warnings. Comforted by her intelligent charm I chose to bravely dive in and am glad that I did.
If you liked Eric Larson’s 2003 The Devil in the White City, I think you’ll appreciate Butcher even though you’ll not admit it in polite company. The interplay of lurid displays of torture in the context of expansive social change is engrossing. In this reform era, when a “curse” diagnosis is newly considered as an illness, science with its theories and experiments was a seductive success path for the ambitious doctor eagerto publish in professional journals. Derived from historical documents, accounts of the torturous and callous attempts to test medicines and treatments are jaw-droppingly shocking. Alongside the main narrative of Dr. Silas Weir, his family, and his beautiful assistant are fascinating explorations of their lives, minds, and times. The hypocrisy of Northern abolitionists with their indentured servants as well as the racist hostility of Calvinist English for Irish newcomers are insightful.
Oates captures the tone and style of this time when male dominance in the home and the world was not challenged. Dr. Weir is so pompous, so duplicitous, so ignorant, so devoid of humility and humanity that I wanted to join the inmates’ insurrection in savagely attacking him. How can Joyce Carol Oates find the words to touch me so deeply?
These books are also available in print at Beaverdale Books.
