Category: Excerpts

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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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Off the Shelf: Emus Loose in Egnar by Judy Muller

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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

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

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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.

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

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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.

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Mimi Schwartz Essay

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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

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

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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.

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

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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.

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Off the Shelf: Realizing Tomorrow by Chris Dubbs and Emeline Paat-Dahlstrom

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Dubbs Read the beginning of the Prologue from Realizing Tomorrow: The Path to Private Spaceflight by Chris Dubbs and Emeline Paat-Dahlstrom:

"The Holland America cruise ship SS Statendam stood at berth in New York Harbor on 4 December 1972 preparing for a curious mission related to the American space program. Tom Buckley, reporter for the New York Times, boarded the ship, unsure what to expect. There was a buzz that this trip would be something special, with big-name headliners: Wernher von Braun, head of the American space program; Apollo astronaut Edgar Mitchell, who eleven months earlier had walked on the moon; and writer Arthur C. Clarke, whose novel 2001: A Space Odyssey had been made into a movie in 1968.

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Off the Shelf: Mondo and Other Stories by J. M. G. Le Clézio

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LeClezio Read the beginning of the title story, "Mondo", from Mondo and Other Stories by J. M. G. Le Clézio, translated by Alison Anderson:

"No one really knew where Mondo came from. He just showed up one day, by chance, here in our town, and no one really noticed, and then we got used to him. He was ten years old or so, with a round, tranquil face and fine, slightly slanted black eyes. But it was, above all, his hair that we noticed, ash brown hair that changed color with the light and seemed almost gray at nightfall.

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