Read from "Long Live the Red Terror!" by Fan Shen, from American Lives: A Reader edited by Alicia Christensen:

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Read from the Introduction of Rooney: A Sporting Life by Rob Ruck, Maggie Jones Patterson, and Michael P. Weber:

"As writers in the press box composed their epitaphs for the Pittsburgh Steelers, Art Rooney stood and headed to the elevator. Pittsburgh had won its first division title in forty years that season, but Rooney’s Steelers were losing 7–6, and only 22 seconds remained in their playoff game against the Oakland Raiders. Facing fourth-and-ten from their own 40 yard line, they needed to gain 25 yards to get within field goal range. Pirates announcer Bob Prince held the elevator door for Art, two priests, and a friend. Art said nothing as the elevator slowly descended. “I figured we had lost,” he later explained, “and I wanted to get to the locker room early so I could personally thank the players for the fine job they’d done all season.”

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Read from Chapter 1, "In Front of Speed's" in Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus: A Daughter's Civil Rights Journey by Ana Maria Spagna:

"The paint-peeling sign above the door is barely legible: Speed’s Grocery. I stand on the sidewalk sweaty with nerves. This can’t be the place, I think. This is nothing like I pictured. Behind heavy iron bars, darkened windows sport stickers for cigarette brands: Newport, Camel, Winston. Men with graying beards and ball caps pulled low lean against the storefront, paper bags in hand, while I loiter across the narrow tree-lined street, rereading the plywood sign. Beer Milk Ice it reads, and below that, Meats Bread Grocery Lotto. Beside each line of words coils a hand-painted rattler, the mascot of Florida A&M University, only two blocks east. But there are no students here, no one younger, by the looks of it, than forty. There are also no women. I’ve been in crowds like that before, plenty of times, but this time it’s different. There are no white people in front of Speed’s, and I have never, in thirty-eight years, been the only white person anywhere.

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Read from Chapter 1, "The Fewest Idiots", in Barolo by Matthew Gavin Frank:

"My heart jumps like a toad in a potato sack when the arriving passengers pour into the gate. My neck rockets backward, and the airport ceiling shadows fly like Raffaella’s hair. The loudspeaker crackles—Italian first, then English—to placate the delayed. The crew will clean the plane, and then we will board. I watch the yawning arrivals shuffle past my chair, decide which are Italian and which are American by the way they hold their mouths. Some mouths simply look as if they’ve been exposed to better tastes than others.

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Read from the Prologue of Never Land: Adventures, Wonder, and One World Record in a Very Small Plane by W. Scott Olsen:

"Here is what I believe.

We have a desire for infinity.

Nature, the axiom goes, abhors a vacuum. Nature will fill any vacuum, by any means, as quickly as possible. Nature rushes to fill the empty space, compelled to find a way, any way at all, to leap toward distance. This is why I believe there is nothing in the long line of human inventions as deeply rooted in our souls as the airship. It doesn’t matter if the airship is a balloon, a kite, a glider, a zeppelin, a little Cessna 152, or the x-15. No building, no monument, no bridge, no wheel or aqueduct, no lightbulb or computer system comes even close to the spirit, the hope, the necessity, and the reach of flying. Up has always been a better direction than down. Heaven is always someplace above where we are now. To look up into a clear or cloud-filled sky and to ask “How do I get there?” is one of our ancient questions.

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Read the beginning of Chapter 1, "Awaiting Orders" from Black Officer in a Buffalo Soldier Regiment: The Military Career of Charles Young by Brian G. Shellum:

"When Charles Young graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1889, he hoped he had ended a difficult chapter in his life. His five-year struggle to earn his coveted diploma and receive a commission as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army was full of challenge and triumph. He repeated his plebe year after failing mathematics and graduated two months after his classmates because he had to make up for a deficiency in engineering. While West Point was a struggle for any young man, Young had to face this ordeal in a racially charged atmosphere where most of his classmates ignored him or refused to have anything to do with him. Yet he persevered and graduated.

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Read from Chapter One, "Pronghorns on the Powder" from In Trace of TR: A Montana Hunter's Journey by Dan Aadland:

"“Hold on, horses,” she cried, but, of course, they couldn’t hear her and in any case they lacked the tools to comply. I had been aiming the Dodge down the two-track, squinting through a windshield not yet wet enough to let the wipers mop up streaks of Powder River dust, the big gooseneck trailer bouncing behind us. We were doing our best to keep up with our hosts’ pickup, trying to beat the rain that would turn this Jeep trail into the sort of gumbo that converts a macho four-wheel-drive vehicle into nothing more effective than a child’s tricycle.

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Read the beginning of "Chiromancer" from From the Hilltop by Toni Jensen:

"The redhead in the poodle skirt grabbed me up from where I hid between two giant palm fronds, dragged me to the stage, told me I was the rockabilly Indian, here to save them all. I told her I wasn’t him, was just myself. That there would be no saving, that the band wasn’t that bad, anyway.

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Read from Lamb Bright Saviors by Robert Vivian:

"When you come to a small town for the first time, far away from any other place, you have to be careful to keep the joy in till you find somewhere safe where you can let it out in secret, like maybe in a diner with an old man sitting alone and staring out the window. Every diner has one old man sitting at a booth next to the window, with what happened to him long ago buried so deep inside him it ends up in the lines of his wrinkled face.

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Read an excerpt from "Changing My Name" from Driving with Dvorak: Essays on Memory and Identity by Fleda Brown:

"It is the beginning of the year at Leverett School. I know my name is next in the roll call because the teacher hesitates. I am tense, embarrassed, my name exactly matching my awkward self. I am not a Marianna or a Jane, no matter how hard I try. “Fled (as in ‘escaped’)-uh?” the teacher’s voice rises to a question mark. She has assumed a vowel between two consonants is generally short. Or she says “Frieda,” seeing not the actual letters but what she expects to see. In the sixth grade I decide to use Sue, my middle name. All of us are transmogrified that year, growing new bodies, trying the same thing with our names. When I am thirteen, I go by Sue all summer at the lake, the same summer I go without my glasses to win the love of a boy named Lee with large, soft lips, who spends the summer with his parents at KenThelm, a resort down the lake. I feel my way through a fuzz of trees all through July and August. I paddle down the lake, trusting my instincts to get me around the point, past the shallows. The last day, before we leave, the reason for my deprivation tells me he is in love with Judy Carr, whose family owns the cottage next to ours, because she is such “a sharp dresser.” Indeed, she is. I cannot argue.

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