Read "Twenty-Four-Hour Happy Hour" from The Madness of March: Bonding and Betting with the Boys in Las Vegas by Alan Jay Zaremba:

"It is the morning of the first day of the tournament. I wake early, shower, dress, and prepare for the madness that I know awaits me. Before I leave my hotel room I gather what I’ll need as I travel through the day. I collect casino betting line sheets, a section of the New York Daily News that includes a description of each of the sixty-four teams in the tournament, some pens, and two small yellow notepads. It’s 6:30 when I exit the room and walk toward the bank of elevators.

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In honor of Women's History Month and our Women's History Month sale, today's excerpt comes from a book published in 2008, Mayor Helen Boosalis: My Mother's Life in Politics by Beth Boosalis Davis:

"An unfamiliar voice at the other end of the phone asked, "Is this Mary Beth?" Immediately the question engaged my Nebraska self—Nebraska, where I was known for eighteen years as Mary Beth before going off to college, where I was M.B., and eventually dropping Mary altogether by the time I married. Mary Beth had always sounded southern to me anyway, though I liked being named after my grandmothers, Mary and Bertha (Beth and Bertha are the same in Greek: Panayiota).

This disembodied phone voice was calling me by my familial, familiar, Nebraska name—and not my grown-up name, Beth. Who was it? "You don't know me. My name is Neil Oxman and I'm working with your mother's campaign."

"Oh hi," I managed to interrupt the increasingly emphatic, eastern-accented caller.

"Look, you don't know me. I don't know you. But everyone I've talked to here in Nebraska agrees that you need to come home. Your mom needs your help and people say you'll know what to do. Besides, you're the only child, so it's up to you."

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Now available in a paperback edition, read from the Preface of Houses of Study: A Jewish Woman among Books by Ilana M. Blumberg:

"The story I tell in the pages to come begins in 1988, when I landed in Israel, eighteen years old and female. My crosscultural education began with a lesson in language. The term ‘‘yeshiva’’ (seminary), I quickly learned, did not apply to girls or women. In America, our teachers had talked about our year of study in ‘‘yeshiva’’ without distinguishing between male and female students and institutions. But when I got to Israel, conversations in Hebrew came to a standstill when Jews, both religious and secular, asked me why I’d come to Israel and I explained that I’d come to learn in ‘‘yeshiva.’’ I’d used the wrong term, they explained. Girls and young women went to mikhlala (women’s college), not yeshiva.

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As we gear up for March and basketball tournament season, this is the first of several mini-excerpts we'll offer from The Madness of March: Bonding and Betting with the Boys in Las Vegas by Alan Jay Zaremba. Read from the prologue:

"The first weekend of the NCAA basketball tournament brings a dedicated legion of basketball bettors to Las Vegas. From early Thursday morning until Sunday evening, men—and the crowd is overwhelmingly male—sit in rowdy smoky casinos watching up to forty-eight college basketball games. Who are these people? They pay to fly out to Las Vegas, spend money on lodging, sit for four days straight watching basketball games, and often lose hundreds of dollars on near misses and if onlys, and yet as they taxi to the airport on Sunday evening they are planning their betting strategy for the following year with undiminished passion.

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Read from Chapter One of Yellowstone Autumn: A Season of Discovery in a Wondrous Land by W. D. Wetherell:

"Yellowstone is purest America, Wonderland, the country's least-known best-known place. Millions go there, but very few see it; the normal park stay is less than twenty-four hours, and only 2 percent of visitors ever leave the park roads. People know about the geysers, remember their parents' stories about feeding the bears, have heard horror stories about the crowds, and most seem content to leave it at that; in the contemporary American imagination it's become a place that was long since tamed, Jellystone National Park, with photogenic bison, adorable rangers, and Old Faithful.

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Read from the editor's introduction of The Real Lincoln: A Portrait by Jesse W. Weik, edited by Michael Burlingame:

"When published in 1922, Jesse W. Weik's The Real Lincoln impressed one reviewer as "a singularly rounded, yet unstudied, unretouched portrait of Lincoln as a private man, not that vague abstraction, a public character." Weik's pages, she added, convey "the profound vitality of the man himself" and are "of far more absorbing interest than the smooth surfaces of such a book as Charnwood's Lincoln." Readers of Weik's study of Lincoln seem to "just glimpse him disappearing around the corner of yesterday, to catch an echo of his grave, jesting tones," to feel "the pressure of the atmosphere which enveloped him, the deprivations which left their marks upon him." The Real Lincoln, she said, should be regarded as "a complement or appendix" to William H. Herndon's 1889 biography of Lincoln, which Weik co-authored.¹

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Read Chapter 4 from Searching for Tamsen Donner by Gabrielle Burton:

"1841 was the first year that families went on the Oregon Trail. Before that, when men went off alone into the wilderness, it was only adventure, but when men, women, and children went, they were making a civilization. After that first covered wagon went West in 1841, a few more families went every year, but 1846, the year the Donners went, was "the year of the families," with twelve hundred men, women, and children going in wagons to Oregon, fifteen hundred to California.

1977 turned out to be "the year of the family" for me.

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Read from Mary A. DeCredico's introduction to Tad Lincoln's Father by Julia Taft Bayne:

"Abraham Lincoln remains one of this nation's most beloved and revered presidents. His elevation to iconic status came quickly after he was killed prematurely by John Wilkes Booth in April 1865. The man known variously as the Great Emancipator, the Savior of the Union, and Father Abraham did not live to see the end of the war that preserved the nation he held so dear.

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Read from the opening essay, "Twentieth-Century Gospel: As the People Moved They Sang a New Song" in If You Don't Go, Don't Hinder Me: The African American Sacred SongTradition by Bernice Johnson Reagon:

"I joined my first and only gospel choir when I joined the church at eleven years of age. It was the first gospel choir at Mt. Early Baptist, a small rural church in Dougherty County pastored by my father, Rev. Jessie Johnson. My sister Fannie, who played the piano, organized the choir. It was 1954—gospelwas everywhere. Most of the Baptist and Pentecostal churches inside the city of Albany, the county seat of Dougherty, already had gospel choirs. However, the country churches were sometimes a decade behind the city churches."

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Read from the introduction of Narrative Beginnings: Theories and Practices edited by Brian Richardson: "The beginning is a foundational element of any narrative, fictional or nonfictional, public or private, official or subversive. The full importance of beginnings, however, has long been neglected or misunderstood and is only recently becoming known. Currently, only a handful of studies address this surprisingly rich and elusive subject. Others, many of them represented in this volume, are now starting to give beginnings the historical, theoretical, and ideological analysis they require. This critical and theoretical neglect is particularly surprising given the power beginnings possess for the … Continue reading Off the Shelf: Narrative Beginnings edited by Brian Richardson