{"product_id":"9781587296819","title":"Prairie City, Iowa: Three Seasons at Home","description":"\u003cp\u003eWeary from the journalistic treadmill of \"going from one assignment to the next, like an itinerant fieldworker moving to his harvests\" and healing from a divorce, Douglas Bauer decided it was time to return to his hometown. Back in Prairie City, he helped on his father's farm, scooped grains at the Co-op, and tended bar at the Cardinal. The resultant memoir is a classic picture of an adult experiencing one's childhood roots as a grown-up and testing whether one can ever truly go home again.\u003cbr\u003e    Bauer grew up \"awkward with soil and with machines\" in a small town east of Des Moines,  As a teenager, he left the farm for college life twenty miles away and, after graduation, took a job with \u003ci\u003eBetter Homes and Gardens\u003c\/i\u003e in Des Moines, writing in the junk-mail fictional persona of \"Barbara Joyce,\"asking millions of people to subscribe. After a few years he  moved to Chicago to work as an editor and writer for \u003ci\u003ePlayboy \u003c\/i\u003eand eventually as a freelance journalist. In the summer of 1975, he returned home to attend his grandmother's funeral and by autumn he moved back to Prairie City, where he stayed for the next three seasons.\u003cbr\u003e    Bauer's book is neither a wistful nostalgia about returning to a simpler time and place nor a patronizing look at those who never leave the town in which they were born. What emerges is an unsentimental yet loving account of life in the Midwest. Not just a portrait of Prairie City, Iowa, but of everyone's small town, everywhere.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"University of Iowa Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47055299674352,"sku":"9781587296819","price":19.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781587296819_p0.jpg?v=1763801656","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781587296819","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}