Category: Excerpts

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Off the Shelf: In Search of Powder by Jeremy Evans

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Evans Read the beginning of Chapter 1, "Shangri-la" from one of our featured gift books, In Search of Powder: A Story of America's Disappearing Ski Bum by Jeremy Evans, Foreword by Glen Plake:

"Shangri-la, as described by James Hilton in Lost Horizon, is a place where the mind, body, and soul is at peace, where sparkling emerald grasses spray across a mountain valley broken by tumbling waterfalls, where the people who inhabit this utopia are as virtuous as the essence of its existence. For decades this refuge, rumored to be in a secret region of Tibet, has baffled those who have sought its coordinates, but the fortunate who have found it never needed a map to locate it. In 1973, an impressionable college student named Johnny Davis, escaping a disjointed childhood in Kona, Hawaii, stumbled upon his Shangri-la.

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Off the Shelf: Beneficial Bombing by Mark Clodfelter

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Clodfelter Read the beginning of Chapter 1, "Genesis in the Great War" from Beneficial Bombing: The Progressive Foundations of American Air Power, 1917-1945 by Mark Clodfelter:

 "29 May 1910

On a warm Sunday morning, U.S. Military Academy cadets assembled at Trophy Point to witness a spectacular event. Aviation pioneer Glenn Curtiss had announced that he would pilot his thirty-foot-long biplane from Albany to New York and claim the New York World's prize of ten thousand dollars for making the first flight between the two cities. The initial leg of his journey had gone well: Curtiss had taken off shortly after 7:00 a.m., had stopped for fuel at Camelot, and had taken off again at 9:30. Yet as he approached Storm King Mountain a few minutes later at an altitude of one thousand feet, violent air currents above the Hudson River plummeted his frail craft to within fifty feet of the water. He struggled with the flight controls to prevent a further loss of altitude and, as he did so, flew past West Point. His dive hid the airplane from the cadets’ view and caused them to run to Cullum Hall, perched high on a bluff overlooking the Hudson. From there they could clearly see the tiny craft, the first flying machine that most of them had ever witnessed. Oblivious to the pilot’s difficulty, the cadets tossed their caps into the air and shouted their favorite football cheer, with a slight modification: “Rah, rah, ray!
Rah, rah, ray! West Point, West Point, Armay! Curtiss! Curtiss! Curtiss!”1

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Off the Shelf: Palmento by Robert V. Camuto

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Palmento Read the beginning of Chapter 1, "Benvenuti in Sicilia" from one of our featured holiday gift books, Palmento: A Sicilian Wine Odyssey by Robert V. Camuto:

"I had arrived in Sicily only a few hours earlier, and on the drive to dinner I would break more laws than I had violated during any prior twenty minutes of my life. Indeed, I could always say that I was an innocent straniero merely following a lawless guide in Valeria, the waif with the brick-sized monogrammed Dolce & Gabbana belt buckle and the ever-singing telefonino, who greeted me at Azienda Agricola COS, which I’d chosen as my first stop in Sicily for all noble reasons. I was here because—more than two and a half decades after its founding by a group of university friends—COS had become a thriving symbol of the new Sicily. Its wines were fashionably sipped in cosmopolitan capitals the world over, and COS was considered on the cutting edge of the growing and wholesome natural wine movement. Indigenous grape varietals were farmed biodynamically (using herbal tea treatments and a few practices that resembled alchemy tied to the phases of the moon) and wines were produced with naturally occurring yeasts found in grapes and with minimal added sulfur (sulfites). More than that—burnishing COS’s authenticity credentials—the winery had been fermenting some of its wines not in wood barrels or steel or cement vats but in clay amphorae, a process reminiscent of the Greeks who had first settled Sicily; and therefore it elevated my role here to something like an epicurean archaeologist.

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Off the Shelf: The Year 3000 by Paolo Mantegazza

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Mantegazza Read the beginning of Chapter 1 from The Year 3000: A Dream by Paolo Mantegazza, edited and with an introduction by Nicoletta Pireddu, translated by David Jacobson:

"Paolo and Maria left Rome, capital of the United States of Europe, in the largest of their aerotachs, the one intended for long trips.

This is an electrically run airship. By releasing a spring, they convert the two comfortable armchairs in the middle of the ship into quite comfortable beds. Opposite the chair-beds are a compass, a small table, and a quadrant bearing the three words motion, heat, light.

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Off the Shelf: Soccer Stories by Donn Risolo

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Risolo Read "1881: Women’s Soccer Is Born; "What next?"" from Chapter 1, "Everyone, Everywhere" of Soccer Stories: Anecdotes, Oddities, Lore, and Amazing Feats by Donn Risolo:

"Today, women have their own World Cup, under-20, and under-17 world championships, and Olympic soccer tournament, plus continental championships. There was a time, though, when the (male) soccer establishment considered organized women’s soccer something of an outrage.

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Off the Shelf: Death as a Side Effect by Ana María Shua

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ShuaRead the beginning of Chapter 2 from Death as a Side Effect by Ana María Shua, Translated by Andrea G. Labinger:

"The telephone woke me like a scream. It was my father. It was nighttime. I called a taxi. There are several dangerous blocks between his house and mine, but in an armored car, I felt safe. Taxis are little fortresses on wheels, one of the few trustworthy institutions we’ve got left.

Until a few years ago, you could still walk in the city. When we started seeing each other, I allowed myself to dream that one day we would walk along the street together, that one day you wouldn’t mind being seen in public with me. I even imagined holding your hand on some solitary stroll, caressing your short, delicate fingers, the sensitive oval of your fingernails. You didn’t like your hands; you thought they were too small: you used to spread out your fi ngers, displaying them for me, comparing them with the size of your palms, criticizing their shortness. You didn’t like them, but to me, your childlike hands on my chest were so beautiful—deceitful, touching, and perfect: yours.

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Federal Writers’ Project in the news — and subject of new UNP book

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Lincoln seems to finally be settling into the autumn season with bright leaves blowing across streets and people dressing in cozy sweaters. For this week, Wyoming Folklore is hot off the press. This book is based on writings collected via the Federal Writer's Project, which was issued by Franklin Roosevelt in an attempt to employ out-of-work teachers, writers, and scholars. They fanned out across the country to collect and document local lore. This book reveals the remarkable results of the FWP in Wyoming at a time when it was still possible to interview Civil War veterans and former slaves, homesteaders … Continue reading Federal Writers’ Project in the news — and subject of new UNP book

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Off the Shelf: Wyoming Folklore collected by the Federal Writers’ Project

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Wyoming Folklore Read the beginning of "Cowboy Days with the Old Union Cattle Company: Life Notes of Thomas Richardson" from Wyoming Folklore: Reminiscences, Folktales, Beliefs, Customs, and Folk Speech collected by the Federal Writers' Project, edited by James R. Dow, Roger L. Welsch, and Susan D. Dow:

"In 1884 my father decided that he had had enough of the Niobrara [River] (in northwestern Nebraska). Mostly, we had known hard times, strife, and disappointment there. In June we loaded up two covered wagons and started out on a long trek to find a new location.

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Off the Shelf: The Crimes of Paris by Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler

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Hoobler cover image Read "Theft" from The Crimes of Paris: A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection by Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler:

"It was a Monday and the Louvre was closed. As was standard practice at the museum on that day of the week, only maintenance workers, cleaning staff, curators, and a few other employees roamed the cavernous halls of the building that was once the home of France’s kings but since the revolution had been devoted to housing the nation’s art treasures.

Acquired through conquest, wealth, good taste, and plunder, those holdings were splendid and vast—so much so that the Louvre could lay claim to being the greatest repository of art in the world. With some fifty acres of gallery space, the collection was too immense for visitors to view in a day or even, some thought, in a lifetime.1 Most guidebooks, therefore, advised tourists not to miss the Salon Carré (Square room). In that single room could be seen two paintings by Leonardo da Vinci, three by Titian, two by raphael, two by Correggio, one by Giorgione, three by Veronese, one by Tintoretto, and—representing non-Italians—one each by Rubens, Rembrandt, and Velázquez.

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Off the Shelf: The Nebraska Dispatches by Christopher Cartmill

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Nebraska Dispatches cover image Read "Dispatch: A Story of My Parents" from The Nebraska Dispatches by Christopher Cartmill:

"I remember when I was a kid thinking that the house we lived in was on top of an enormous hill. At the time we lived in a part of Kansas where there are no hills. That’s what memory does.

While other kids’ houses smelled of beef barley soup, our house glowed with the scent of whiskey and Miss Dior. My father was a handsome self-made man from the southern great plains who had been something of a ne’er-do-well in school—caring more for golf than education. That is, until he married my mother. She was a part-time model and self-made woman of great energy and beauty and education. Her passions were for the theater, for teaching, and for my father.

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