Zachary Michael Jack – författare

First published in 1946, Walter Thomas Jack's classic book of agricultural essays, The Furrow and Us, intensified the till versus no-till debate, called by Time magazine "the hottest farming argument since the tractor first challenged the horse." Hailed as "the answer" to Edward Faulkner's Plowman's Folly, Jack's cautionary memoir of agricultural progress between world wars treats the soil's intimate needs, its "hidden hungers," with the lyricism and love characteristic of an Iowa Quaker, schoolteacher, and conservation farmer. Released here in a sixtieth anniversary edition and updated and introduced by Walter Jack's great-grandson Zachary, this new edition serves as a timely call to steward the good soils that sustain us.

Jay G. Sigmund stands as America's most forgotten Regionalist writers of the Jazz Age. Championed by Carl Sandburg, Sherwood Anderson, and Grant Wood, the Iowa writer/insurance man helped make his home state the epicenter of a national Regionalist Movement. The literary stir Sigmund created caused even popular Boston-based critic E. J. O'Brien to declare Iowa as America's new literary center and to choose six of Sigmund's short stories among the best of 1930. From 1921 to 1937, the late-blooming, dark-horse Sigmund shocked East Coast literati with glowing New York Times reviews while delighting tens of thousands of readers each week with down-to-earth verse in the biggest and best Midwestern dailies. The man Ilya Tolstoy hailed as "an American Chekhov and Maupassant," published over 1200 poems, 125 short stories, and over 25 plays while simultaneously working full-time as an insurance executive.Editor Zachary Michael Jack, himself a celebrated Iowa poet, reintroduces contemporary agrarian writers, poets of place, and eco-critics to Sigmund's essential oeuvre in a jam-packed collection featuring eight Sigmund short stories, more than fifty poems, and a complete one-act play.

Long before journalist George Plimpton donned shoulder pads for Paper Lion, sportswriters were stepping onto the field, arena, track and ring. This first-of-its-kind anthology of participatory sportswriting collects 48 pieces from the Gilded and Golden Age greats. Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Frances Elizabeth Willard, John Muir, Jack London, Zane Grey, Ernest Hemingway, Ring Lardner, Bill Tilden, Bobby Jones, Helen Mills, Paul Gallico, and many more prowled America's sporting grounds with pen in hand in a time when, as Grantland Rice put it, "a flame...lit up the sporting skies and covered the world."

"Nature-study not only educates, but it educates nature-ward; and nature is ever our companion, whether we will or no. Even though we are determined to shut ourselves in an office, nature sends her messengers. The light, the dark, the moon, the cloud, the rain, the wind, the falling leaf, the fly, the bouquet, the bird, the cockroach-they are all ours. If one is to be happy, he must be in sympathy with common things. He must live in harmony with his environment. One cannot be happy yonder nor tomorrow: he is happy here and now, or never. Our stock of knowledge of common things should be great. Few of us can travel. We must know the things at home."—from "The Meaning of the Nature-study Movement""To feel that one is a useful and cooperating part in nature is to give one kinship, and to open the mind to the great resources and the high enthusiasms. Here arise the fundamental common relations. Here arise also the great emotions and conceptions of sublimity and grandeur, of majesty and awe, the uplift of vast desires—when one contemplates the earth and the universe and desires to take them into the soul and to express oneself in their terms; and here also the responsible practices of life take root."—from The Holy EarthBefore Wendell Berry and Aldo Leopold, there was the horticulturalist and botanist Liberty Hyde Bailey (1858–1954). For Wendell Berry, Bailey was a revelation, a symbol of the nature-minded agrarianism Berry himself popularized. For Aldo Leopold, Bailey offered a model of the scholar-essayist-naturalist. In his revolutionary work of eco-theology, The Holy Earth, Bailey challenged the anthropomorphism—the people-centeredness—of a vulnerable world. A trained scientist writing in the lyrical tradition of Emerson, Burroughs, and Muir, Bailey offered the twentieth century its first exquisitely interdisciplinary biocentric worldview; this Michigan farmer's son defined the intellectual and spiritual foundations of what would become the environmental movement.For nearly a half century, Bailey dominated matters agricultural, environmental, and scientific in the United States. He worked both to improve the lives of rural folk and to preserve the land from which they earned their livelihood. Along the way, he popularized nature study in U.S. classrooms, lobbied successfully for women's rights on and off the farm, and bulwarked Teddy Roosevelt's pioneering conservationism.Here for the first time is an anthology of Bailey's most important writings suitable for the general and scholarly reader alike. Carefully selected and annotated by Zachary Michael Jack, this book offers a comprehensive introduction to Bailey's celebrated and revolutionary thinking on the urgent environmental, agrarian, educational, and ecospiritual dilemmas of his day and our own. Culled from ten of Bailey's most influential works, these lyrical selections highlight Bailey's contributions to the nature-study and the Country Life movements. Published on the one-hundredth anniversary of Bailey's groundbreaking report on behalf of the Country Life Commission, Liberty Hyde Bailey: Essential Agrarian and Environmental Writings will inspire a new generation of nature writers, environmentalists, and those who share with Bailey a profound understanding of the elegance and power of the natural world and humanity's place within it.

It was "scary," Jack Nicklaus said of Pebble Beach, and gave him nightmares so acute he famously woke his wife on the eve of his 1972 U.S. Open victory totally spooked. "It's not a golf course," sportswriter Jim Murray wrote, "it's a hellship." Golf writer Dan Jenkins once joked that the famed venue of the Bing Crosby National Pro-Am should be dubbed "Double Bogey-by-the-Sea."  A one-time failed Division One golf walk-on, Zachary Michael Jack opts to stare down an early midlife crisis by chronicling a U.S. Open year spent at Pebble Beach, object of his ailing father's fantasies and site of the nation's number one public course and its fairy-tale host town, Carmel-by-the-Sea, California. There, along the blue Pacific, he traces the colorful, capricious, and comical world of golf on the Monterey Peninsula as never before via interviews with legends of the game Johnny Miller, Gary Player, and Tom Watson; with today's brightest stars—Padraig Harrington, Phil Mickelson, and Bubba Watson; and with some of its most famous celebrity linksters—actor Bill Murray, Olympic soccer star Brandi Chastain, and billionaire entrepreneur Charles Schwab. Conducting more than one hundred interviews, Jack ranges far and wide to get the scoop, talking golfing haunts with bestselling golf novelist Michael Murphy; teeing up with members of a Carmel-based worldwide golfing society devoted to mystical play; learning to play Pebble at the knee of one of the Top 50 Golf Teachers in America and with a Carmel-based journeyman pro described as "a golf savant"; and raising a cup with a lifelong Pebble Beach resident and caddy who, unbeknownst to the hackers he shepherds, is a Hall of Fame golfer. By turns hilarious, haunting, and historic, Let There Be Pebble reveals the utter uniqueness—the people, the rich history, the unforgettable setting and sporting culture—of this one-of-a-kind golfing cathedral.

In February 1913 young firebrand activist "General" Rosalie Gardiner Jones defied convention and the doubts of better-known suffragists such as Alice Paul, Jane Addams, and Carrie Chapman Catt to muster an unprecedented equal rights army. Jones and "Colonel" Ida Craft marched 250 miles at the head of their all-volunteer platoon, advancing from New York City to Washington, DC in the dead of winter, in what was believed to be the longest dedicated women's rights march in American history. Along the way their band of protestors overcame violence, intimidation, and bigotry, their every step documented by journalist-embeds who followed the self-styled army down far-flung rural roads and into busy urban centers bristling with admiration and enmity. At march's end in Washington, more than 100,000 spectators cheered and jeered Rosalie's army in a reception said to rival a president's inauguration.This first-ever book-length biography details Jones's indomitable and original brand of boots-on-the-ground activism, from the 1913 March on Washington that brought her international fame to later-life campaigns for progressive reform in the American West and on her native Long Island. Consistently at odds with conservatives and conformists, the fiercely independent Jones was a prototypical social justice warrior, one who never stopped marching to her own drummer. Long after retiring her equal rights army, Jones advocated nonviolence and fair trade, authored a book on economics and international peace, and ran for Congress, earning a law degree, a PhD, and a lifelong reputation as a tireless defender of the dispossessed

"Nature-study not only educates, but it educates nature-ward; and nature is ever our companion, whether we will or no. Even though we are determined to shut ourselves in an office, nature sends her messengers. The light, the dark, the moon, the cloud, the rain, the wind, the falling leaf, the fly, the bouquet, the bird, the cockroach-they are all ours. If one is to be happy, he must be in sympathy with common things. He must live in harmony with his environment. One cannot be happy yonder nor tomorrow: he is happy here and now, or never. Our stock of knowledge of common things should be great. Few of us can travel. We must know the things at home."—from "The Meaning of the Nature-study Movement""To feel that one is a useful and cooperating part in nature is to give one kinship, and to open the mind to the great resources and the high enthusiasms. Here arise the fundamental common relations. Here arise also the great emotions and conceptions of sublimity and grandeur, of majesty and awe, the uplift of vast desires—when one contemplates the earth and the universe and desires to take them into the soul and to express oneself in their terms; and here also the responsible practices of life take root."—from The Holy EarthBefore Wendell Berry and Aldo Leopold, there was the horticulturalist and botanist Liberty Hyde Bailey (1858–1954). For Wendell Berry, Bailey was a revelation, a symbol of the nature-minded agrarianism Berry himself popularized. For Aldo Leopold, Bailey offered a model of the scholar-essayist-naturalist. In his revolutionary work of eco-theology, The Holy Earth, Bailey challenged the anthropomorphism—the people-centeredness—of a vulnerable world. A trained scientist writing in the lyrical tradition of Emerson, Burroughs, and Muir, Bailey offered the twentieth century its first exquisitely interdisciplinary biocentric worldview; this Michigan farmer's son defined the intellectual and spiritual foundations of what would become the environmental movement.For nearly a half century, Bailey dominated matters agricultural, environmental, and scientific in the United States. He worked both to improve the lives of rural folk and to preserve the land from which they earned their livelihood. Along the way, he popularized nature study in U.S. classrooms, lobbied successfully for women's rights on and off the farm, and bulwarked Teddy Roosevelt's pioneering conservationism.Here for the first time is an anthology of Bailey's most important writings suitable for the general and scholarly reader alike. Carefully selected and annotated by Zachary Michael Jack, this book offers a comprehensive introduction to Bailey's celebrated and revolutionary thinking on the urgent environmental, agrarian, educational, and ecospiritual dilemmas of his day and our own. Culled from ten of Bailey's most influential works, these lyrical selections highlight Bailey's contributions to the nature-study and the Country Life movements. Published on the one-hundredth anniversary of Bailey's groundbreaking report on behalf of the Country Life Commission, Liberty Hyde Bailey: Essential Agrarian and Environmental Writings will inspire a new generation of nature writers, environmentalists, and those who share with Bailey a profound understanding of the elegance and power of the natural world and humanity's place within it.

What does it mean to deeply love a home place that haunts us still? From Mark Twain to Grant Wood to Garrison Keillor, regionalists from the Gilded Age to the Digital Age have explored the American Gothic and the homegrown fatalism that flourish in many of the nation's most far-flung and forgotten places. The Haunt of Home introduces us to a cast of real-life Midwestern characters grappling with the Gothic in their own lives, from promising young professionals debating the perennial "Should I stay or should I go" dilemma, to recent émigrés and entrepreneurs seeking personal reinvention, to faithful boosters determined to keep their communities alive despite the odds. In The Haunt of Home Zachary Michael Jack considers the many ways a region's abiding spirit shapes the ethos of a land and its people, offering portraits of others who, like himself, are determined to live out the unique promise and predicament of the Gothic.

The Strange Genius of Ignatius Donnelly sheds light on the inimitable life of a neglected figure in US political and literary history. The father of American Populism, lieutenant governor of Minnesota, People's Party candidate for vice president, popularizer of the Shakespeare authorship controversy, proponent of the Atlantis theory, and author of bestselling speculative fictions, Ignatius Donnelly (1831–1901) positively defies categorization. Called a crank and a pseudoscientist by some and a genius by others, Donnelly broke all the rules. When skeptics said he was too green for politics, he got elected Minnesota's youngest-ever lieutenant governor. When they said a politician who prized his Irish heritage could never ascend to national office in a state dominated by conservative Scandinavians, he proved his critics wrong again. As Zachary Michael Jack' shows, in the latter half of Donnelly's remarkable life, he generated more fame and infamy than he had as a combative congressman. In an uncanny reversal of the usual midcareer doldrums, Donnelly turned political defeat into an opportunity for personal and professional reinvention, remaking himself as a visionary author and a champion of people-first third-party politics. The man known by enemies and friends alike as the Sage of Nininger pushed through poverty and ignominious defeat to introduce the masses to surprising theories about ancient civilizations, world-ending comets, and cryptograms purported to reveal the true authorship of Shakespeare's plays. At root, The Strange Genius of Ignatius Donnelly reveals the story of a man unafraid to speak truth to power, consequences be damned.

Back in print for the first time in over a century, the real heart and soul of the eldest Henry Wallace is revealed in his open letters to America's farm families. These homespun, secular epistles show that Wallace never lost sight of his roots even as he hobnobbed with U.S. Presidents from Teddy Roosevelt to Woodrow Wilson, anchored the prestigious Country Life Commission, and edited the most famous agricultural magazine of its day, Wallaces' Farmer. Who better to yoke the sacred, agrarian arts of stewardship, husbandry, and parenting than writer-philosopher-farmer-conservationist-minister-educator-public benefactor extraordinaire Uncle Henry Wallace, the man who planted the seeds of honorable public service in his own world-famous son and grandson, Secretary of Agriculture Henry C. Wallace and Vice President and Presidential candidate Henry A. Wallace, respectively. Culled from more than a half dozen volumes of Wallace's writing for farm families, Uncle Henry Wallace: Letters to Farm Families captures the spirit of a man journalist Ray Stannard Baker called a sort of oracle for advice on everything from the best ways of feeding calves to bringing up boys.Compiled and introduced by fourth-generation Iowa farmer's son Zachary Michael Jack, himself the great-grandson of famed agricultural writer Walter Thomas Jack, these timeless, down-to-earth missives that are meant to be shared, then as now, between farm-loving grandparents and grandchildren, parents and children, and teachers and students of all ages.

From yesterday's gingham girls to today's Google-era Farmer Janes, The Midwest Farmer's Daughter explores the resurgent role played by female agriculturalists at a time when fully 30 percent of new farms in the US are woman-owned, but when, paradoxically, America's farm-reared daughters are conspicuously absent from popular film, television, and literature. In this first-of-its-kind treatment, Zachary Michael Jack follows the fascinating story of the girl who became a regional and national legend: from Donna Reed to Laura Ingalls Wilder, from Elly May Clampett to The Dukes of Hazzard's Catherine Bach, from Lawrence Welk's TV sweethearts to the tragic heroines of Jane Smiley's Thousand Acres. From Amish farm women bloggers, to Missouri homesteaders and seed-savers, to rural Nebraskan graphic novelists and, ultimately, to the seven generations of entrepreneurial Iowan farm women who have animated his own family since before the Civil War, Jack shines new documentary light on the symbol of American virtue, energy, and ingenuity that rural writer Martha Foote Crow once described as the ""great rural reserve of initiating force, sane judgment and spiritual drive.""Packed with dozens of interviews, The Midwest Farmer's Daughter covers the history and the renaissance of agrarian women on both sides of the fence. Giving equal consideration to both agriculture's time-tested rural and small-town Farm Bureaus, 4-H, and FFA training grounds as well as to the eco-innovations generated by the region's rising woman-powered ""agro-polises"" such as Chicago, the author crafts a lively, easy-to-read cultural and social history, exploring the pioneering role today's female agriculturalists play in the emergence of farmers' markets, urban farms, community-supported agriculture, and the new ""back-to-the-land"" and ""do-it-yourself"" movements. For all those whose lives have been graced by the enduring strength of American farm women, The Midwest Farmer's Daughter offers a groundbreaking examination of a dynamic American icon.

Heralding the seventy-fifth anniversary of the influential agrarian anthology ""I'll Take My Stand"", Zachary M. Jack has assembled North America's foremost contemporary writers on the present rural experience to provide their own twenty-first-century insights about life lived close to the land. In the grand tradition of farmer-writers Robert Frost, Henry David Thoreau, and Andrew Lytle, ""Black Earth and Ivory Tower: New American Essays from Farm and Classroom"" gathers the wisdoms of contributors including Victor David Hanson, Michael Martone, Linda Hasselstrom, John Hildebrand, and others. At a time when just two percent of the American population counts itself as farmers, these writers - all of whom have tilled the earth and climbed the ivory tower of academia - underscore the diversity of the American farm and its importance as a wellspring of learning. Gifted teachers called to farm-grounded lives as writers, visual artists, conservation farmers, environmentalists, economists, policymakers, extension agents, and activists offer hard-won inspiration from the field as well as the classroom. Seeking a balanced life that reconciles the hands, heart, and intellect, they travel rural paths to find the agrarian lifestyle at once enlightening and mystifying. Leavened with plainspoken earnestness, these commentaries on modern farming, the simple life movement, and the discontents of modern civilization attest to the endurance of agrarian values and provide a literate record of shifting national priorities. Collectively this testimony and analysis reveal an abiding sense that the United States stands at the same crossroad as it has since its founding: the intersection of Thomas Jefferson's agrarian republic and Alexander Hamilton's capitalistic democracy.

Special Effects: Short Takes on Stylish Prose tackles the dilemma dedicated writers have faced for generations: how to make words on the page as compelling as images on the screen. Perfect for film buffs and TV enthusiasts who want to improve their writing, this innovative handbook reveals how cinematics can transform syntactics. Packed with 40 proven strategies designed to make serious and scholarly texts "read" as seamlessly and enjoyably as great movies, and accompanied by nearly 100 writing prompts perfect for use in college courses, writers' workshops, and workplace conference rooms, this one-of-a-kind guide shows how to make the daring leaps action heroes and dauntless authors make routine.What do James Bond flicks and Dante's Divine Comedy say about the art of attention-getting beginnings? What does a thorough credit roll have in common with effective scholarly citation? How can film set gaffers and film noir writers show us how to "light" our prose? How are passive verbs like guys on the lam in old black-and-white spy thrillers? How do Black Panther films and Wonder Woman comics inspire us to flip our scripts, diversifying the characters, real and imagined, about whom we write? Special Effects addresses writing's most persistent craft questions by boldly going where no prose style guide has gone before: to a front row seat at the movie theater.