EBOOK
Brooding Upon the Waters
A Memoir Of Farming, Fishing, And Failure In America's Lost Landscape
Howard Schaap(0)
About
When
thirty years of untreated bipolar disorder left his father fighting for his
life, Howard Schaap began to wonder how this man had fallen so far-from
Minnesota's Young Farmer of the Year to financial failure in the farm crisis to
a bed in the neurology wing of Mayo Clinic.
Brooding
Upon the Waters is
Howard Schaap's memoir-at once deeply compassionate and searingly honest-of his
father's anguished journey. In his search for answers, Howard looks first to
the landscape itself, where hard-luck fishing trips to the mud lakes of the
tallgrass prairie mirrored his father's dark moods and darkening theology.
But there
is also local history, where his father's fall from grace, his manic decisions,
and his political swing-not simply from moderate Republican to fervent
populist, but "from someone broad-minded and warm-hearted to someone narrow and
bitter"-have a precedent in American letters and history: Midwest settler
Charles Ingalls, "Pa" in the famous Little House on the Prairie books.
Brooding
Upon the Waters
recreates the stark beauty and haunting isolation of growing up on a failing
family farm in the 1980s and 1990s. Along the way, Howard Schaap grapples with
how these forces-as disparate as distorted theology and short-sighted financial
greed-complicate his own struggle to remain loyal to the place he has always
called home. Brooding Upon the Waters recounts not only a mental health
crisis but also a crisis of the American Dream in the Upper Midwest, America's
lost landscape.
thirty years of untreated bipolar disorder left his father fighting for his
life, Howard Schaap began to wonder how this man had fallen so far-from
Minnesota's Young Farmer of the Year to financial failure in the farm crisis to
a bed in the neurology wing of Mayo Clinic.
Brooding
Upon the Waters is
Howard Schaap's memoir-at once deeply compassionate and searingly honest-of his
father's anguished journey. In his search for answers, Howard looks first to
the landscape itself, where hard-luck fishing trips to the mud lakes of the
tallgrass prairie mirrored his father's dark moods and darkening theology.
But there
is also local history, where his father's fall from grace, his manic decisions,
and his political swing-not simply from moderate Republican to fervent
populist, but "from someone broad-minded and warm-hearted to someone narrow and
bitter"-have a precedent in American letters and history: Midwest settler
Charles Ingalls, "Pa" in the famous Little House on the Prairie books.
Brooding
Upon the Waters
recreates the stark beauty and haunting isolation of growing up on a failing
family farm in the 1980s and 1990s. Along the way, Howard Schaap grapples with
how these forces-as disparate as distorted theology and short-sighted financial
greed-complicate his own struggle to remain loyal to the place he has always
called home. Brooding Upon the Waters recounts not only a mental health
crisis but also a crisis of the American Dream in the Upper Midwest, America's
lost landscape.