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Off the Shelf: Brassies, Mashies, and Bootleg Scotch by Bill Kilpatrick

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Kilpatrick Read the beginning of "The Founding Father, Part I" from Brassies, Mashies, and Bootleg Scotch: Growing Up on America's First Heroic Golf Course by Bill Kilpatrick:

"I called him dad, Daddy when I was younger, and more often than not as the years went by I called him Pop. He called me Willie. I referred to him as my father, my dad, and the Old Man. His name was William, known as Bill, and he remains indelible in my consciousness.

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Off the Shelf: Black Elephants by Karol Nielsen

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Nielsen Read the beginning of chapter 1, "The New Zealand Sheep Farmer and the Recruit" from Black Elephants: A Memoir by Karol Nielsen:

"The minivan bumped along hills that hugged Lake Titicaca. Haze made the water look silver. I sat behind Dirk, a German traveler with a ponytail. It hung to the middle of his back, streaked bronze from the South American sun. He wore dusty jeans and a tank top that skimmed his torso. Dirk was one of those hard-core travelers, the kind I’d met along the way, who took regular trips through Latin America, Africa, and the Far East. They seemed so worldly, and despite the army tanks, tear gas, and guns I’d seen during my year as a writer for an English-language newspaper in Argentina, I still felt sheltered. I was only beginning to understand the underbelly of the world, something the serious travelers seemed to have understood from birth.

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Wendy Call Interviewed on PRI’s The World

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Wendy Call, author of No Word for Welcome: The Mexican Village Faces the Global Economy, recently discussed her new book with Lisa Mullins on PRI's The World radio program. Listen to Wendy explain what drew her to the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, an area of the country that Mexicans call "little waist". Listen to an additional interview with Wendy as she talks about her visits to the Isthmus of Tehuantepec and the effect of economic globalization on the area: http://uprisingradio.org/home/?p=21550 Continue reading Wendy Call Interviewed on PRI’s The World

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SABR Drawing Winner

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Congratulations to Richard Hausman of Alameda, California, the winner of our Register to Win drawing from the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) conference. Richard won the book Wins, Losses, and Empty Seats: How Baseball Outlasted the Great Depression by David George Surdam. In Wins, Losses, and Empty Seats, Surdam looks at how organized baseball managed to survive the Great Depression. In a time where extra spending money for tickets was scarce, Major League Baseball pursued other sources of money. By replacing coaches with player-managers and developing the Minor League farm system, night baseball, and radio broadcasts, the teams’ income … Continue reading SABR Drawing Winner

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Off the Shelf: Wright Morris Territory edited by David Madden with Alicia Christensen

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Morris Read the beginning of "A Man of Caliber" from Wright Morris Territory: A Treasury of Work edited by David Madden with Alicia Christensen:

This story, originally published in the Kenyon Review in 1949, is an early version of the novel The Works of Love.

"On summer nights, the window open, he could lie there and hear the hum of the wires, or the click when the semaphore changed from red to green. Then he would roll on his side, put up his head, and watch the Flyer go through. The streaming coaches made a band of yellow light on the plains. It would be a little while before the night was quiet again.

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Off the Shelf: Searching for Tamsen Donner by Gabrielle Burton

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Burton Read the beginning of Chapter 2 from Searching for Tamsen Donner by Gabrielle Burton:

"The year before I bought the motorcycle, summer 1972, I went to Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference in Middlebury, Vermont, nervously bearing a thin sheaf of poems. At age 33, I was away from home alone for the first time since I had married ten years before. My children were 9, 7, 5, 2, and 10 months. I weaned the baby from breastfeeding in order to go.

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Off the Shelf: This Is Not the Ivy League by Mary Clearman Blew

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Blew Read the beginning of Chapter 1 from This Is Not the Ivy League: A Memoir by Mary Clearman Blew:

"In the spring of 1944 my mother and father borrowed more money than they had ever seen and purchased the old home ranch on Spring Creek, in central Montana, that had been my great-grandfather’s 1882 homestead. My father would be thirty-one in a few weeks, my mother had just turned thirty. I was four years old, my sister a toddler of eighteen months. We had been living on an alkali ranch in the sagebrush, down on the Judith River, and the move meant hay meadows and fresh water and good grazing for the cattle on the slopes of the mountains that overlooked the creek drainage, together with all the family associations with place, which even in 1944 were becoming emblematic. My great-grandfather had been one of the earliest homesteaders in central Montana, and it seemed that every shale hill and coulee, bend of the creek or grove of cottonwood trees, had its name and its position in the landscape of the family narrative.

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Off the Shelf: What They Saved by Nancy K. Miller

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Read the beginning of Chapter 1, "The Heiress", from What They Saved: Pieces of a Jewish Past by Nancy K. Miller: "When my father died, I became a middle-aged Jewish orphan. It’s not that I wasn’t already Jewish, of course, or that I set out to say Kaddish for him—I had no idea how to do that, even if it had been a daughter’s place. But now that the last keeper of my Jewish past was dead and I was free to put it behind me, I started worrying about the future of my Jewish self. As I began to … Continue reading Off the Shelf: What They Saved by Nancy K. Miller

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Off the Shelf: When We Walked Above the Clouds by H. Lee Barnes

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Read the beginning of Chapter One from When We Walked Above the Clouds: A Memoir of Vietnam by H. Lee Barnes: "In midsummer of ’63 the outside buzzer to my apartment rang. I’d worked until late at the press preparing layouts for the camera. I lived alone and no one ever came to see me, so I figured it was someone wanting another apartment and mistakenly pushing the button to my buzzer. It had happened before. I lay back. The bell rang again, this time insistently. I awoke and half asleep slipped on jeans and shirt and tottered into the … Continue reading Off the Shelf: When We Walked Above the Clouds by H. Lee Barnes

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Judy Muller on ABC

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UNP author Judy Muller was recently interviewed on ABC News. In the interview, she discusses her new book, Emus Loose in Egnar. In this book, Muller, an award-winning journalist, takes her readers on a grassroots tour of rural American newspapers. These weeklies cover what larger papers don’t, and the eclectic mix of stories keeps these publications alive and well while many traditional media are slowly dying off. Filled with characters both quirky and courageous, the book is a heartening reminder that there is a different kind of “bottom line” in the hearts of journalists who keep churning out good stories, … Continue reading Judy Muller on ABC