Category: Excerpts

ExcerptsLeave a comment

Off the Shelf: Searching for Tamsen Donner by Gabrielle Burton

univnebpress

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.

Continue reading “Off the Shelf: Searching for Tamsen Donner by Gabrielle Burton”

ExcerptsLeave a comment

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

univnebpress

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.

Continue reading “Off the Shelf: This Is Not the Ivy League by Mary Clearman Blew”

ExcerptsLeave a comment

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

univnebpress

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

ExcerptsLeave a comment

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

univnebpress

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

ExcerptsLeave a comment

Off the Shelf: Emus Loose in Egnar by Judy Muller

univnebpress

Read the beginning of Chapter One, "Everything Old is New Again" from Emus Loose in Egnar: Big Stories from Small Towns by Judy Muller: "With all the hand-wringing about the “death of journalism,” it is more than a little ironic that small-town papers have been thriving by practicing what the mainstream media are now preaching. “Hyper-localism,” “Citizen Journalism,” “Advocacy Journalism”—these are some of the latest buzzwords of the profession. But the concepts, without the fancy names, have been around for ages in small-town newspapers. And the weeklies have learned a lesson from watching the financial stress of their city cousins: … Continue reading Off the Shelf: Emus Loose in Egnar by Judy Muller

Excerpts1 Comment

Off the Shelf: Wins, Losses, and Empty Seats by David George Surdam

univnebpress

Surdam Read the beginning of the Prologue, "Clash of Titans" from Wins, Losses, and Empty Seats: How Baseball Outlasted the Great Depression by David George Surdam:

"Two of baseball’s most famous teams arrived at Yankee Stadium on September 9, 1928 for a four-game series that began with a doubleheader. The Philadelphia Athletics, managed by Connie Mack, held a one-half game lead over the New York Yankees.

Continue reading “Off the Shelf: Wins, Losses, and Empty Seats by David George Surdam”

ExcerptsLeave a comment

Off the Shelf: Or Perish in the Attempt by David J. Peck

univnebpress

Peck Read the beginning of Chapter 1, "Politics and Passion: The Exploration of the American Wilderness" from Or Perish in the Attempt: The Hardship and Medicine of the Lewis and Clark Expedition by David J. Peck:

"A love for the wilderness and outdoor adventure are born into the heart and mind of nearly every American, or, at the least, learned early in life. It is nurtured and grows in some more than in others, but it is difficult to grow up in the United States without a strong love of the vast open expanses with which we North Americans are blessed. Coupled with our love of the wilderness comes a fascination with the people who blazed the trails into the wild. That sense of awe and admiration for these pathfinders is cultivated and personified by American icons of the wilderness, men such as Jim Bridger, Kit Carson, Joe Walker, John Muir, Richard Byrd, and the most famous of all, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark.

Continue reading “Off the Shelf: Or Perish in the Attempt by David J. Peck”

ExcerptsLeave a comment

Mimi Schwartz Essay

univnebpress

Mimi Schwartz is an author of two books with the University of Nebraska Press. Good Neighbors, Bad Times is the story of Schwartz’s twelve-year, three-continent quest to uncover her Jewish past. In Thoughts from a Queen-Sized Bed, Schwartz writes with a keen and amused eye about growing up in an immigrant Jewish family, coming of age in New York in the 1950s, marrying her high school beau, and arriving at feminist consciousness in the 1970s. Tikkun, a magazine that promotes peace, healing, and transformation throughout the world, recently published an essay by Schwartz. The piece is a compilation of Schwartz’s … Continue reading Mimi Schwartz Essay

ExcerptsLeave a comment

Off the Shelf: Ten Years on the Rock Pile by Lee Vincent

univnebpress

Vincent Read the beginning of "A Slife of Life on the Mountain" from Ten Years on the Rock Pile: A Collection of Stories, Some Hilarious, Some Tragic, about Life at the Summit of Mount Washington by Lee Vincent, Foreword by Guy Gosselin:

"For a long time nothing has been written about Mount Washington and the immediate area, and to me this has been sort of a tragedy in that there has been so much taking place on the mountain in the past ten years and nothing has really been said. It is with this idea in mind that I have written these short stories pertaining to the mountain, trying to include the humor, tragedy, and everyday lifestyle of those men that inhabit the summit of Mount Washington year-round.

Continue reading “Off the Shelf: Ten Years on the Rock Pile by Lee Vincent”

ExcerptsLeave a comment

Off the Shelf: Let There Be Pebble by Zachary Michael Jack

univnebpress

Jack Read the beginning of Chapter 1 from Let There Be Pebble: A Middle-Handicapper's Year in America's Garden of Golf by Zachary Michael Jack:

"When I announced to my coworkers I would be taking a “professional leave” from teaching to spend a U.S. Open year on the storied fairways of Pebble Beach, they looked at me as if I’d taken leave of something else: my senses. They’re intellectuals, teachers all, and not one of them an avid golfer.

Continue reading “Off the Shelf: Let There Be Pebble by Zachary Michael Jack”