Category: Excerpts

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Off the Shelf: Sandhill and Whooping Cranes by Paul A. Johnsgard

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Johnsgard Read the beginning of Chapter 1, "Lesser Sandhill Cranes", from Sandhill and Whooping Cranes: Ancient Voices over America's Wetlands by Paul A. Johnsgard:

"There is a wonderful old tradition in some parts of Scandinavia, in which the children hang their stockings outside their houses during those days in early spring when the European common cranes first return from their wintering areas in France and Spain. Sometimes the children place an ear of corn or some other gift for the cranes, whose welcome voices and overhead flocks are the surest sign of spring and renewed hope for the future after enduring a long, unbearably dark and frigid Scandinavian winter.

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Off the Shelf: The Golden West edited by Alicia Christensen

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Read the beginning of the Introduction from The Golden West: Fifty Years of Bison Books, Edited by Alicia Christensen, Introduction by David Wrobel: "This superb collection of some of the most enduring writings on the American West is a fitting marker of the fiftieth anniversary of the University of Nebraska Press’s Bison Books imprint. A half century of republication of classic western literature, history, and folklore is not to be taken lightly. Just as The Portable Faulkner (1946) played a vital role in resurrecting that author’s reputation in the late 1940s and establishing his now hallowed place in the American … Continue reading Off the Shelf: The Golden West edited by Alicia Christensen

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Off the Shelf: The Rhythm Boys of Omaha Central by Steve Marantz

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Marantz Read the Prologue from The Rhythm Boys of Omaha Central: High School Basketball at the '68 Racial Divide by Steve Marantz:

"In March 1968, two high school basketball teams played for the Nebraska state championship, a contest with decades of wholesome tradition. But this game was different.

A few days earlier former Alabama governor George C. Wallace had come to Omaha to campaign for president. He brought the Deep South—“segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” and the jackboots of Selma—and set it down two blocks from Omaha Central High School. His searing rhetoric scalded the sensibilities of many, including eighteen-year-old Dwaine Dillard, Central’s African American basketball superstar.

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Off the Shelf: Bird at the Buzzer by Jeff Goldberg

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Goldberg Read the beginning of Chapter 1, "Tip-Off" from Bird at the Buzzer: UConn, Notre Dame, and a Women's Basketball Classic by Jeff Goldberg, Foreword by Doris Burke:

"Storrs, March 6, 2001

Sue Bird awoke this snowy Tuesday morning after a night unlike any other in her three years at the University of Connecticut. During the night, while a powerful snowstorm blanketed the state of Connecticut, Bird had lain under her blankets hooked up to a portable stimulus machine, electronic impulses coursing into her balky lower back in an attempt to prevent it from going into spasm any further.

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Off the Shelf: My Ruby Slippers by Tracy Seeley

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Seeley Read the beginning of Chapter 2, "The Good Land" from My Ruby Slippers: The Road Back to Kansas by Tracy Seeley:

"I shiver in the backseat in the corner against the door. I hold my cheek against the cold metal until it hurts. I hold myself very still. I am five, and we are moving away. My father drives. My mother sits next to him and says nothing. I will not look at them. Instead, I stare out the window and hear the car tires slub, slub, slub on the
red brick streets. My chest hurts. The narrow dark windows of my school slide by—window, window, window, window. I can’t see in. But I know that Mrs. Little’s kindergarten is going on without me. The children are using quiet voices, cutting paper and coloring, reading and writing in the big yellow workbooks with smooth, dry pages and an elephant on the front. They are listening to stories and taking a quiet nap on cool mats with the lights turned out. I had waited a whole year for school, while my older sister fell in love with Mrs. Little and sat in a circle on the braided rug and came home singing new songs. All of that has been mine for less than half a year. I can hardly breathe. My throat aches. I do not speak or cry. We turn a corner and the brick streets end. We are moving away.

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Off the Shelf: Beyond DiMaggio: Italian Americans in Baseball by Lawrence Baldassaro

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Baldassaro Read the beginning of Chapter 1, "Ed Abbaticchio: Forgotten Pioneer" from Beyond DiMaggio: Italian Americans in Baseball by Lawrence Baldassaro, Foreword by Dom DiMaggio:

"In one of the first stories on Joe DiMaggio to appear in a national publication, Quentin Reynolds, associate editor of Collier’s magazine, recounted the following exchange among baseball writers covering spring training in 1936: “‘He says you pronounce it Dee-Mah-gee-o,’ one of the sports writers said gloomily. ‘That’s a very tough name to pronounce and also tough to spell,’ another added. ‘DiMaggio sounds like something you put on a steak,’ one writer said in disgust.”1

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Off the Shelf: Christine by Laura Curtis Bullard

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Bullard Read the beginning of the Introduction from Christine: Or Woman's Trials and Triumphs by Laura Curtis Bullard, edited and with an introduction by Denise M. Kohn:

"When Laura Curtis Bullard wrote Christine: Or Woman’s Trials and Triumphs she created one of antebellum America’s most radical heroines: a woman’s rights leader. Through the creation of her unconventional title character, Curtis Bullard gave voice to her own support for female suffrage, careers, and economic independence, which was termed the “woman’s rights” movement in the mid-nineteenth century and was considered scandalous, even sinful, by many Americans.1 Curtis Bullard was twenty-five when Christine, her second novel, was published in 1856, and she was the editor of a newspaper for women, the Ladies’ Visitor. She continued her career after she was married and became a mother, and in 1870 she succeeded Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony as editor of the suffrage newspaper the Revolution, publishing essays about the social problems caused by women’s inequality that she had earlier dramatized in Christine.

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Off the Shelf: Local Wonders by Ted Kooser

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Kooser Read an excerpt from the 2011 One Book One Nebraska selection, Local Wonders: Seasons in the Bohemian Alps by Ted Kooser:

"In the weeks just before Christmas, my father’s store was busiest, its narrow aisles crowded with shoppers, its carefully arranged displays rumpled and disarrayed, and its floors slippery with melting snow. On Saturdays and when school let out in the afternoons, my sister and I helped out. She worked on the sales floor, and I made bows for the women in the gift-wrap booth.

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Off the Shelf: Footprints in the Dust edited by Colin Burgess

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Burgess Read the beginning of Chapter 1, "The Whole World Was Watching" from another featured gift book, Footprints in the Dust: The Epic Voyages of Apollo, 1969-1975 edited by Colin Burgess, foreword by Richard F. Gordon:

"The world watched and listened, breathless and mesmerized.

“Houston, this is Neil. Radio check.”

Could this really be happening? It all just seemed so . . . what’s the word for it? Unreal. That’s it. Unreal. This stuff happened in comic books, not in real life.

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Off the Shelf: In Trace of TR by Dan Aadland

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Aadland Read the beginning of the Introduction from a freatured gift book idea, In Trace of TR: A Montana Hunter's Journey by Dan Aadland:

"Fifty years ago I sat on a wooden rail enclosing a large observation deck behind the visitor’s center at Mount Rushmore. Encircled by a crowd of chattering siblings, so many of them that my father required us to count off military style each time we reentered the car, I watched a bedecked Sioux pose for pictures with admiring tourists. He was having a fine time, a midsummer Santa Claus with headdress, surrounded by suitors—and so were the tourists.

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