Rick Morain is the former publisher and owner of the Jefferson Herald, for which he writes a regular column. This essay first appeared on Substack, in two parts.

The American writer James Agee, together with photographer Walker Evans, in 1941 released Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a book documenting the lives of impoverished Southern sharecroppers during the Depression.

The title is an apt referent for the subjects of this column: men and women whom I admire for what they have done for other human beings, this year and/or in past years. They aren’t all necessarily famous, but they deserve to be. Others certainly earn my admiration as well, but putting together my year-end list, it’s hard for me not include ten of them up front.

The envelopes please, in no particular order:

Douglas Burns is a fourth-generation Iowa journalist. He is the co-founder of the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation and a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative, where this article first appeared on The Iowa Mercury newsletter. His family operated the Carroll Times Herald for 93 years in Carroll, Iowa where Burns resides.

With a rare sense of place, a know-it-when-you-see-it Iowa-ness, Art Cullen’s roaring new book is nothing short of an unsparing mirror for 3.3 million of us in the state. With still-night whispers of truth and bar-fight ferocity, this western Iowa newspaperman reveals the masquerade-ball leadership that’s turned so many of Iowa’s once-warm communities into furnaces of justified grievance and misdirected outrage.

Readers will absorb the very landscape of this state with more informed eyes after completing Cullen’s Dear Marty, We Crapped In Our Nest: Notes From The Edge Of The World.