Here's another excerpt from our featured gift book ideas. Read from Breathing in the Fullness of Time by William Kloefkorn. Visit our holiday sale page for a special discount code.

"Desire. Without it, you might as well pack up and go home. Fran Welch, Coach Welch, had said this when the season began, then repeated it at frequent but irregular intervals as the season moved along. By now, I had decided I no longer wanted to play college football. So I turned in my gear and went home, but not before Coach Welch gave me an asschewing I'll not live long enough to forget. Before the chewing began, though, he wanted to know why in the name of Christ I was quitting.

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Here's an excerpt from a featured gift book idea, Lights on a Ground of Darkness: An Evocation of a Place and Time by Ted Kooser. If you'd like to purchase Lights on a Ground of Darkness, check out our holiday sale for a special discount code.

"Summer, 1949. Above the Mississippi, the noon sun bleaches the blue from a cloudless midsummer sky. So high in their flight that they might be no more than tiny motes afloat on the surface of the eye, a few cliff swallows dive and roll. At the base of the shadowy bluffs a highway weaves through the valley, its surface shimmering like a field of wheat; to the south, a semi loaded with squealing hogs shifts down for the slow crawl up out of the bottoms and into the bright, flat cornfields of eastern Iowa. The bitter odor of exhaust clings like spider webs to the long grass lining the shoulders of the road. Toward the top of the grade the sound of the engine levels out into a brash and steady saxophone note that rattles back through the cut, and then, with a fading whine, the truck is gone, leaving the hot road shining empty down the length of the valley.

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Today we're highlighting one of the books featured in our cooking sale. Read from "As the Corkscrew Turns" in Corkscrewed: Adventures in the New French Wine Country byRobert V. Camuto:

"It was a perfect day to lose faith in wine. By midmorning on June 21, 2005, the heat and humidity were conspiring to make it another in a series of stifling hot days in Bordeaux. I’d set out from Saint-Émilion in my tiny Citroën rental car—windows rolled down to make up for the lack of air conditioning—en route to Vinexpo, the world’s largest wine convention held once every two years in the sprawling convention site north of the city.

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Read the beginning of Chapter 1, "The Bull" from Double-Edged Sword: The Many Lives of Hemingway's Friend, the American Matador Sidney Franklin byBart Paul:

"He was born Sidney Frumpkin on July 11, 1903, one of nine surviving children to Abram and Lubba Frumpkin of Minsk and Kazan, respectively. His parents, both Orthodox Jews, emigrated from Imperial Russia in 1888. After eight years in this country and the birth of his first few children, Abram joined the New York City Police Department, eventually working out of Brooklyn’s Seventy-Eighth Precinct. The borough of Brooklyn was completing the transition from a semirural community of farms, shade trees and backyard gardens to a noisy city, becoming further transformed by the new immigrants from eastern and southern Europe. The city had been an independent municipality until just five years before Sidney’s birth, when it was incorporated into New York City. The Brooklyn Eagle, the paper that would eventually chronicle the rise of its hometown matador, was for a time edited in the late 1840s by Walt Whitman, another homeboy whose private life was also best kept from the public eye.

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Read the beginning of Chapter 1, "First to Fly" from Into That Silent Sea: Trailblazers of the Space Era, 1961-1965 by Francis French and Colin Burgess with a foreword by Paul Haney:

"When venturing into the unknown, the first step taken is often the biggest and the boldest. A young Russian pilot named Yuri Gagarin took humankind’s first step into space. He died in his mid-thirties, so his image is fixed: a youthful icon symbolizing the first human journey above our planet. As President Lyndon B. Johnson wrote, “Yuri Gagarin’s courageous and pioneering flight into space opened new horizons and set a brilliant example for the spacemen of the two countries.”

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Read from the Foreword of The Exquisite Corpse: Chance and Collaboration in Surrealism's Parlor Gameedited by Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren, Davis Schneiderman, and Tom Denlinger:

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Read from "Creighton Years" in Searching for My Destiny by George Blue Spruce Jr. as told to Deanne Durrett:

"Many years before my high school graduation and the Elks banquet, my parents had vowed that their children would go to college. They acted on faith that there would be a way for me to achieve a college degree and began making definite plans for my education during my junior year of high school. Knowing of my strong desire to become a dentist, the Christian Brothers at St. Michael’s spoke to my parents and recommended Creighton University, a Roman Catholic university with a dental school. In the Brothers’ opinion, there were no better educators than the Jesuit priests. Daddy had great respect for the Christian Brothers, and once they had made their recommendation no other colleges were considered. I was going to Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska.

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Read the "Wheaties" entry from Football: An Encyclopedia of Popular Culture by Edward J. Rielly:

"Wheaties, the Breakfast of Champions, was created by accident in 1921 when a health clinician in Minneapolis happened to drop some wheat-bran gruel on a stove. The heat converted the gruel into wheat flakes that, the clinician noted, tasted quite good. The head miller at Washburn Crosby Company (later General Mills) agreed, and a new cereal was born. Initially called Washburn’s Gold Medal Whole Wheat Flakes, when the cereal was ready to be marketed in 1924 it was renamed Wheaties so that the food itself rather than its name would be the mouthful.

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Read from "At Last: Nebraska 24-Miami 17-January 1, 1995" in Forever Red: Confessions of a Cornhusker Football Fan by Steve Smith:

"But in a stirring string of events, Nebraska found itself at the Miami 15, and seconds later, Frazier put the ball in fullback Cory Schlesinger’s hands. No. 40 slipped past the line, leaped over a Hurricane at the 5, and remarkably, bounded into the end zone. Then Frazier fired a bullet to Eric Alford for 2 points, and the game was tied. At some point during all of this, I turned to Michael. He was looking at me, holding up four fingers. Then he asked: “Do you believe?”

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Read from Chapter 1, "Aboard the Glacier" in Ambassadors from Earth: Pioneering Explorations with Unmanned Spacecraft by Jay Gallentine:

"Larry Cahill sardined himself into the communication shack with James Van Allen, who had headphones popped over his ears. It was quite hot and late at night. Both were thankful that they could be near the top of the ship, because that was farthest from the blistering engine room.

“Well, I wonder if that could really be it,” Van Allen said to nobody in particular. There was this inexplicably goofy beep-beeping sound in the headset. Something didn’t add up here. He glanced around. On the assembled faces were looks of confusion, like something didn’t fit. Like a game of Clue—everybody knew it couldn’t be Colonel Mustard with the rope, but all the evidence said otherwise.

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