Take the Next Exit
Take the Next Exit is a unique guidebook: a collection of delightful photographs and travel pieces on the essential Iowa, not just the tourist attractions.
Leaving the interstates, this book goes into ordinary places like small-town cafes, hardware stores, and churches—the places of history and tradition that make Iowa different from other states and yet at the same time an American ideal. A picture essay by Hanno Hardt shows Iowans at county fairs and festivals. A reminiscence of hometown baseball diamonds by Doug Bauer describes a boy’s emotions during the long Iowa summer. Exploring rural cemeteries and front porches, readers learn not just what to see but where and how to look.
Taking the Next Exit shows how the landscape has been created and how it is changing. “Iowa’s Lost Lakes” describes north-central Iowa before the vast drainage projects that emptied its lakes and marshes and made it perhaps the most environmentally altered region in the United States. “Drive-Thru History” critiques the “theme towns” that try to entice the modern tourist. “Outstanding in the Fields” tells how and why farms are changing as a result of movements towards organic and sustainable agriculture, and how to spot such farms and obtain their healthy products.
Other pictures and articles seek out the surviving wild places in Iowa: the prairies and wetlands, the geologic high points, and even the modern reservoirs and grain fields that grow wild again in the fall with the influx of thousands of migrating geese and swans and pelicans.
Take the Next Exit is a sequel to Robert Sayre’s popular first book on the Iowa landscape, Take This Exit, which J.B. Jackson called “the book about rural America that we have been waiting for: one that tells us how the everyday landscape works.” A book for both Iowans and visitors, this book continues that tale while examining wholly new subjects.