Old Songs in a New Cafe: Selected Essays Book

I am of mixed mind in deciding how to rate this book. The stories are mostly good and well written. They offer an interesting look at the Iowa Waller knew as a boy and the Iowa of the late 1980s when most of these essays were written. His love for his home state and the outdoors comes shining through. But there are also things that bother me. These are, in fact, old songs. Each essay was previously published, mostly in the Des Moines Register. Their publication in this book is clearly the author and publisher trying to cash in on the huge popularity of Waller's The Bridges of Madison County. But there's nothing particularly wrong with that. It's that the essays always seem self-serving. Waller shows himself as an accomplished musician, a poet, a photographer, the kid who beat the local pool champ, who became a master of the basketball jump shot but walked away from the college career because it no longer interested him, who played the "Wabash Cannonball" for a Charles Kuralt "On the Road" piece that led to a gig playing for Bobby Kennedy on his whistlestop tour in 1968, who became the dean of a college business school, which seems the most improbable of all. If nothing else, the man has led a charmed life. There's also his oft-mentioned love for his wife Georgia Ann and his thankfulness for her putting up with his many flights of fancy over their decades together. All of which had me thinking, "Here's a guy who sounds a whole lot better on paper than I'll bet he is in person." So I Googled him. Sure enough, with all that money, he and his wife moved to Texas, he began an affair with their gardener, dumped Georgia and married the new woman. It makes me look at these essays with a more jaundiced eye and perhaps from enjoying them as much as I might have.