Tag Archives: Travel writing

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Native Soulmate named reviewers choice

November’s Small Press Bookwatch named Native Soulmate: A Season in Search of a Love Homegrown a Reviewer’s Choice, calling it a “charming and original read, very much recommended.” The Des Moines Register agrees, praising Zachary Michael Jack’s latest book of creative nonfiction as “a deeply personal and heartfelt journey.”

From the cover:

“At the height of a Heartland summer a seventh generation Midwesterner unlucky in love sets forth from a faraway farm on a quest to road-test what he calls his Beach Boys hypothesis: What if we really do live in a world where native boy meets native girl…What if the cutest boys and girls in the world really do live right under our noses? So begins a Cinderella season in search of a love homegrown. Pursuing the dream wherever it may lead, the author delivers speeches in far-flung farm burgs and readings in well-to-do college towns while setting up listening posts in public libraries and chautauquas in cattle barns. Part 1500-mile travelogue and part real-life love story, Native Soulmate offers not just an account of a magical trek and its uncanny, sweetcorn settings, but a moving argument for how voting with your feet and leading with your heart really can matter.”

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Jack’s Croy Collection Picked By Foreword Reviews

Zachary Michael Jack’s collection of the best Middle American work of Homer Croy reintroduces readers to the underappreciated yet best-selling literary journalist, nonfictionist, and memoirist.

Sample reviews and endorsements of Homer Croy Corn Country:

“Homer Croy was a blue-ribbon humorist, and Corn Country is a funny and engaging collection of his best work.” –Richard Rhodes, Pulitzer Prize-winner

“The corn reads great, now that Homer Croy is back in print!” –Timothy Walch, Director, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library & trustee of the State Historical Society of Iowa

“This inviting collection brings back into the spotlight one of the best humorists of the American Midwest with an appeal, like that of regional humorist Garrison Keillor, that stretches far beyond the Corn Belt.” –Foreword Magazine

“These pieces reveal Croy s core sensibility, his wild wit tempered by warmth of feeling… They confirm Croy as an important American and Midwestern literary figure.” –C. D. Albin, Southwest Missouri State University

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One part Mark Twain, and two parts Garrison Keillor, prize-winning humorist and essayist Homer Croy was a man of many distinctions: The first student of the first school of journalism in the United States, the first person to tour the world shooting motion pictures, and the first author of his day to write a best-selling novel that happened to be anonymous. Dale Carnegie dedicated his opus “How to Win Friends and Influence People” to him; Will Rogers, for whom Croy wrote more films than any other, made him honored guest at his Thanksgiving table. In between his pioneering studies in journalism at the University of Missouri and his mid-life, Missouri farm memoirs that sold in the hundreds of thousands, Croy flunked out of college, moved to the Big Apple, filmed his way around the world, tied the knot in the first marriage ever captured on a Universal newsreel, worked for Theodore Dreiser, earned a fortune, moved to Paris, tragically lost two children, wrote for Hollywood, earned an honorary doctorate, and, in the end, lost his fortune all while maintaining the down-home humor and heart that earned him a reputation among peers as the towering cornstalk of midcentury, midwestern memoir.