Brooding Upon the Waters

When thirty years of untreated bipolar disorder left his father fighting for hislife, Howard Schaap began to wonder how this man had fallen so far?fromMinnesota's Young Farmer of the Year to financial failure in the farm crisis toa bed in the neurology wing of Mayo Clinic.

BroodingUpon the Waters is Howard Schaap's memoir?at once deeply compassionate and searingly honest?of hisfather's anguished journey. In his search for answers, Howard looks first tothe landscape itself, where hard-luck fishing trips to the mud lakes of thetallgrass prairie mirrored his father's dark moods and darkening theology.

But thereis also local history, where his father's fall from grace, his manic decisions,and his political swing?not simply from moderate Republican to ferventpopulist, but ?from someone broad-minded and warm-hearted to someone narrow andbitter??have a precedent in American letters and history: Midwest settlerCharles Ingalls, ?Pa? in the famous Little House on the Prairie books.

Brooding Upon the Waters recreates the stark beauty and haunting isolation of growing up on a failingfamily farm in the 1980s and 1990s. Along the way, Howard Schaap grapples withhow these forces?as disparate as distorted theology and short-sighted financialgreed?complicate his own struggle to remain loyal to the place he has alwayscalled home. Brooding Upon the Waters recounts not only a mental healthcrisis but also a crisis of the American Dream in the Upper Midwest, America'slost landscape.