Anecdotes of Our Culture

This collection of seventy four stories, sometimes sad and sometimes warm, recount fictional episodes of people in a brief moment of time, a summer, a week or an afternoon, usually to ascribe a feature of morality, a shocking consequence, or a way of culture. I've written them over fifteen years for a family newsletter so naturally some of them focus on my relatives, my home town, my state of Iowa, or the Midwest although one story describes life on an alien planet, a couple describe sailing ship culture in the eighteenth century while another describes the building of a spacecraft in the twenty fourth. Basically I wrote for my own pleasure, putting characters though hell or happiness depending how I felt the day I wrote them. Some of them are actually almost true, believe it or not, but with names changed and personal details excluded. These stories are too short to develop a host of interacting characters over a period of time, or a complex plot, as in a novel but they excel at providing snippets of information or a solution to a character's dilemma as a quick read while you're waiting for an airplane to depart or a dentist to drill on your teeth.I dedicate the book to my friends and my family who unknowingly and generously provided seeds of thought that make up these stories. If they only knew!I'd like to acknowledge my daughter, Nancy Bohning Terrell for her considerable effort in the design, and for putting this book together. The Internet, too, is worth acknowledging for its wealth of information including music. People sometimes say you can't rely on information from the net, but I find it's great as long as you consider the source and apply rules you apply to other media. Oliver Bohning