It's 1899. John Venner, born Giovanni Vener, has just been committed to the Vernon County Insane Asylum. When one of the nurses hands him a pen and a pad, his suppressed need to write surfaces and he scribbles about his experience the night before. By the third day he is making diary entries addressed to Maddie, the love of his life who had died just a few months earlier. John looks back at a life that was good to him, but one that never allowed him the leisure time to create, to fulfill his desire to put in writing his insights and thoughts. But now all responsibility had been taken away and he can reflect on his life - his life as a budding artist, immigrant, farmer, husband and father, and community leader.John tells us of his journey to America, his struggles to obtain and maintain his farms, re-experiencing his past, and talking sweet thoughts to Maddie, his wife. He tells Maddie (and us) why he emigrated from Campodolcino in northern Italy to Bad Ax, Wisconsin. He relives with her many moments from their courtship and their struggles to eke a living out of the bluffs and coulees in Genoa, a small Wisconsin town located on the banks of the Mississippi river. Many entries are bold and naked love songs to Maddie. He also tells her of his days struggling with reality since her death.Giovanni is left an original copy of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass and develops a love hate relationship with Whitman and his poems. Homer appears in a dream and challenges him to write the great modern epic that will straighten out the errors that he, Virgil, Milton and Dante made. They celebrated war & quest, chauvinism, evil & despair, and fear. Homer challenges John to set it right - to tell the story of family, gentleness, creativity, charity, and peace. John believes he is too old for that, so he concentrates on making diary entries that depict his life with Maddie as fruitful immigrants each day making life a little better for themselves, their neighbors and the world. By reading his diary entries, we find out how and why he emigrated from the area know as "fields of sweetness" in Valle Spluga to the rolling hills of western Wisconsin that proved a challenge every day to farm. The book includes a history of John's town, "Genoa, A Spray Drift of Empathy Part II" that tells the story of Genoa, Wisconsin, from the early part of the twentieth century until today. The story focuses mainly on the mid-twentieth century and expansively discusses what daily life was like for a resident in 1951. As seen through the eyes of a child, the life of a citizen of Genoa was filled with hard work, church, family, and close-knit community. [Genoa, Part I is in volume 1 of this series]Included is an essay, "Thwarting the Deadly Trinity - The Sword, the Famine, and the Pestilence," that investigates the possibility of ridding the world of war. The author defines the three main plagues upon the human race to be war, starvation, and pestilence. The author puts forth a theory of the basis for waging war, and then concludes with ideas of how the future of the world will benefit from the end of wars. The first part of the manuscript has personifications of death, starvation, war, and pestilence speaking to each other as they explain their continued existence. The manuscript then moves to feature individuals representing different ideas and viewpoints such as a historian, a politician, a farmer, etc. gathered around a table to discuss the existence and eradication of these plagues. The reader is invited to "listen in" to their discussion in 1870, and then that group joins current day counterparts to continue the discussion. The author also includes the genealogical story of John's Maddie, Mary Madeline Starlochi - tracing the actual ancestral history of our heroine back eleven generations to Guglielmo Chiaverini was born in 1566.