Storm Lake
A Chronicle of Change, Resilience, and Hope from a Heartland Newspaper
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Narrated by:
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Chris Henry Coffey
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By:
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Art Cullen
About this listen
"A reminder that even the smallest newspapers can hold the most powerful among us accountable."—The New York Times Book Review
Watch the documentary Storm Lake on PBS.
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 audiobook, 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 15,000 in Northwest Iowa, as much survivors as their town.
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Critic reviews
"Cullen’s book demonstrates the important role that local editors play in standing up and speaking to power in America.... Storm Lake is an engaging, folksy read about how a small-town newspaper editor copes with existential threats to a way of life and an industry vital to American democracy in a state known for its extremes of weather, economics, and politics. [Cullen] tells good stories and writes with a journalistic flair that prefers punch to polish.... The pages of Storm Lake clearly demonstrate why Cullen won journalism’s most revered prize." (The National Book Review)
"With a self-effacing, homespun honesty...Cullen makes an eloquent case that community newspapers are integral to the fabric of small towns..[and] that diversity is keeping Storm Lake alive. Many Latino, Laotian, and Vietnamese families work in the packinghouses. Cullen argues that these families have thrown a much-needed life preserver to Storm Lake’s economy." (StarTribune)
“[A] memoir that gracefully illuminates the challenges facing the American heartland. Composed of political history, tales of civic controversies, and human interest stories, the subject matter is elevated by Cullen’s passion into parables relevant to all Americans...a window into small-town America.” (Publishers Weekly)
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-
Story
Many of the men and women doing today's most consequential environmental work - restoring America's grasslands, wildlife, soil, rivers, wetlands, and oceans - would not call themselves environmentalists; they would be too uneasy with the connotations of that word. What drives them is their deep love of the land - the iconic terrain where explorers and cowboys, pioneers, and riverboat captains forged the American identity. They feel a moral responsibility to preserve this heritage and natural wealth.
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great stories
- By GMMT on 05-15-18
By: Miriam Horn
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The Good Food Revolution
- Growing Healthy Food, People, and Communities
- By: Will Allen, Charles Wilson - with, Eric Schlosser - foreword
- Narrated by: Mirron Willis
- Length: 8 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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A pioneering urban farmer and MacArthur "Genius Award" winner points the way to building a new food system that can feed - and heal - broken communities. An eco-classic in the making, The Good Food Revolution is the story of Will's personal journey, the lives he has touched, and a grassroots movement that is changing the way our nation eats.
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This story teaches how to take back the soil
- By Shawn Borup on 11-09-19
By: Will Allen, and others
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Where I Was From
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Gabrielle De Cuir
- Length: 6 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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In her moving and insightful new book, Joan Didion reassesses parts of her life, her work, her history and ours. A native Californian, Didion applies her scalpel-like intelligence to the state’s ethic of ruthless self-sufficiency in order to examine that ethic’s often tenuous relationship to reality. Combining history and reportage, memoir and literary criticism, Where I Was From explores California’s romances with land and water; its unacknowledged debts to railroads, aerospace, and big government; the disjunction between its code of individualism and its fetish for prisons.
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California belongs to Joan Didion.
- By Darwin8u on 11-04-15
By: Joan Didion
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The Meat Racket
- The Secret Takeover of America's Food Business
- By: Christopher Leonard
- Narrated by: John Pruden
- Length: 11 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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How much do you know about the meat on your dinner plate? Journalist Christopher Leonard spent more than a decade covering the country's biggest meat companies, including four years as the national agribusiness reporter for the Associated Press. Now he delivers the first comprehensive look inside the industrial meat system, exposing how a handful of companies executed an audacious corporate takeover of the nation's meat supply.
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Hits the nail on the head.
- By Anonymous 8888 on 02-04-15
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An Hour Before Daylight
- Memories of a Rural Boyhood
- By: Jimmy Carter
- Narrated by: Jimmy Carter
- Length: 6 hrs and 50 mins
- Abridged
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In an American story of enduring importance, former President Jimmy Carter re-creates his Depression-era boyhood on a Georgia farm, before the civil rights movement that changed the country.
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A rare view of rural America
- By Samantha on 07-05-03
By: Jimmy Carter
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Methland
- The Death and Life of an American Small Town
- By: Nick Reding
- Narrated by: Mark Boyett
- Length: 9 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Crystal methamphetamine is widely considered to be the most dangerous drug in the world, and nowhere is that more true than in the small towns of the American heartland. Methland tells the story of Oelwein, Iowa (pop. 6,159), which, like thousands of other small towns across the country, has been left in the dust by the consolidation of the agricultural industry, a depressed local economy, and an out-migration of people.
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Beautifully written, but insubstantial
- By Flavius Krakdaddius on 02-10-10
By: Nick Reding
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We Are Each Other's Harvest
- Celebrating African American Farmers, Land, and Legacy
- By: Natalie Baszile
- Narrated by: Tina Lifford
- Length: 13 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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In this impressive anthology, Natalie Baszile brings together essays, poems, quotes, conversations, and first-person stories to examine Black people’s connection to the American land from Emancipation to today. We Are Each Other’s Harvest elevates the voices and stories of Black farmers and people of color, celebrating their perseverance and resilience, while spotlighting the challenges they continue to face. Luminous and eye-opening, this eclectic collection helps people and communities of color today reimagine what it means to be dedicated to the soil.
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Various Voices
- By Peggy Sweeney on 11-06-21
By: Natalie Baszile
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The Longest Road
- Overland in Search of America, from Key West to the Arctic Ocean
- By: Philip Caputo
- Narrated by: Pete Larkin
- Length: 11 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Philip Caputo, who had just turned 70, his wife, and their two English setters took off in a truck hauling an Airstream camper from Key West, Florida, en route via back roads and state routes to Deadhorse, Alaska. The journey took four months and covered 17,000 miles, during which Caputo interviewed more than 80 Americans from all walks of life to get a picture of what their lives and the life of the nation are really about in the 21st century.
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Very Disappointing
- By Amazon Customer on 03-25-18
By: Philip Caputo
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Strange Stones
- By: Peter Hessler
- Narrated by: George Backman
- Length: 13 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Full of unforgettable figures and an unrelenting spirit of adventure, Strange Stones is a far-ranging, thought-provoking collection of Peter Hessler’s best reportage - a dazzling display of the powerful storytelling, shrewd cultural insight, and warm sense of humor that are the trademarks of his work. Over the last decade, as a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of three books, Peter Hessler has lived in Asia and the United States, writing as both native and knowledgeable outsider in these two very different regions.
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funny, entertaining
- By Katherine on 08-02-13
By: Peter Hessler
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Rez Life
- An Indian's Journey Through Reservation Life
- By: David Treuer
- Narrated by: Peter Berkrot
- Length: 10 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Celebrated novelist David Treuer has gained a reputation for writing fiction that expands the horizons of Native American literature. In Rez Life, his first full-length work of nonfiction, Treuer brings a novelist's storytelling skill and an eye for detail to a complex and subtle examination of Native American reservation life, past and present. With authoritative research and reportage, Treuer illuminates misunderstood contemporary issues of sovereignty, treaty rights, and natural-resource conservation.
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Rez Life needs a Rez voice not a Suyapi narrator..
- By Deaxkaash on 09-11-13
By: David Treuer
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Lentil Underground
- Renegade Farmers and the Future of Food in America
- By: Liz Carlisle
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 7 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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The story of the "Lentil Underground" begins on a 280-acre homestead rooted in America's Great Plains: the Oien family farm. Forty years ago, corporate agribusiness told small farmers like the Oiens to "get big or get out." But 27-year-old David Oien decided to take a stand, becoming the first in his conservative Montana county to plant a radically different crop: organic lentils. Unlike the chemically dependent grains American farmers had been told to grow, lentils make their own fertilizer and tolerate variable climates, so their farmers aren't beholden to industrial methods.
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Fingers on the pulse of sustainable ag
- By shakinfist on 06-30-20
By: Liz Carlisle
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West of the West
- Dreamers, Believers, Builders, and Killers in the Golden State
- By: Mark Arax
- Narrated by: Mark Arax
- Length: 13 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Teddy Roosevelt once exclaimed, "When I am in California, I am not in the West. I am west of the West", and in this book, Mark Arax spends four years travelling up and down the Golden State to explore its singular place in the world. This is California beyond the clichés. This is California as only a native son, deep in the dust, could draw it.
By: Mark Arax
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The Chain
- Farm, Factory, and the Fate of Our Food
- By: Ted Genoways
- Narrated by: Michael Kramer
- Length: 8 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Interviewing scores of line workers, union leaders, hog farmers, and local politicians and activists, Genoways reveals an industry pushed to its breaking point. Along the way, he exposes alarming new trends: sick or permanently disabled workers, abused animals, water and soil pollution, and mounting conflict between small towns and immigrant labor.
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Great Writing, Performance and Content
- By Kevin S. Grail on 09-29-19
By: Ted Genoways
What listeners say about Storm Lake
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Andy Johnson
- 05-14-22
A great story.
Art showed so much respect and honesty as he described a cast of characters that make up any rural community. He has a great objectivity and understanding of the twists, turns, and motivations behind the history and journeys of all the people.
So enjoyable!!!
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- JudyKay Lindholm
- 08-07-19
More than a story about people
We have “raped” our mother. And while self-correcting, she is not happy and will extract a price for our greed. That debt, I fear, will take thousands of years to pay - if ever.
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