Brooding Upon the Waters

<p>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.</p><p><em>Brooding Upon the Waters</em> 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.</p><p>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 <em>Little House on the Prairie </em>books.</p><p><em>Brooding Upon the Waters</em> 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.<em> Brooding Upon the Waters</em> recounts not only a mental health crisis but also a crisis of the American Dream in the Upper Midwest America's lost landscape.</p>