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SABR Drawing Winner

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Congratulations to Richard Hausman of Alameda, California, the winner of our Register to Win drawing from the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) conference. Richard won the book Wins, Losses, and Empty Seats: How Baseball Outlasted the Great Depression by David George Surdam. In Wins, Losses, and Empty Seats, Surdam looks at how organized baseball managed to survive the Great Depression. In a time where extra spending money for tickets was scarce, Major League Baseball pursued other sources of money. By replacing coaches with player-managers and developing the Minor League farm system, night baseball, and radio broadcasts, the teams’ income … Continue reading SABR Drawing Winner

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Off the Shelf: Wright Morris Territory edited by David Madden with Alicia Christensen

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Morris Read the beginning of "A Man of Caliber" from Wright Morris Territory: A Treasury of Work edited by David Madden with Alicia Christensen:

This story, originally published in the Kenyon Review in 1949, is an early version of the novel The Works of Love.

"On summer nights, the window open, he could lie there and hear the hum of the wires, or the click when the semaphore changed from red to green. Then he would roll on his side, put up his head, and watch the Flyer go through. The streaming coaches made a band of yellow light on the plains. It would be a little while before the night was quiet again.

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Off the Shelf: Searching for Tamsen Donner by Gabrielle Burton

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Burton Read the beginning of Chapter 2 from Searching for Tamsen Donner by Gabrielle Burton:

"The year before I bought the motorcycle, summer 1972, I went to Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference in Middlebury, Vermont, nervously bearing a thin sheaf of poems. At age 33, I was away from home alone for the first time since I had married ten years before. My children were 9, 7, 5, 2, and 10 months. I weaned the baby from breastfeeding in order to go.

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Off the Shelf: This Is Not the Ivy League by Mary Clearman Blew

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Blew Read the beginning of Chapter 1 from This Is Not the Ivy League: A Memoir by Mary Clearman Blew:

"In the spring of 1944 my mother and father borrowed more money than they had ever seen and purchased the old home ranch on Spring Creek, in central Montana, that had been my great-grandfather’s 1882 homestead. My father would be thirty-one in a few weeks, my mother had just turned thirty. I was four years old, my sister a toddler of eighteen months. We had been living on an alkali ranch in the sagebrush, down on the Judith River, and the move meant hay meadows and fresh water and good grazing for the cattle on the slopes of the mountains that overlooked the creek drainage, together with all the family associations with place, which even in 1944 were becoming emblematic. My great-grandfather had been one of the earliest homesteaders in central Montana, and it seemed that every shale hill and coulee, bend of the creek or grove of cottonwood trees, had its name and its position in the landscape of the family narrative.

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Off the Shelf: What They Saved by Nancy K. Miller

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Read the beginning of Chapter 1, "The Heiress", from What They Saved: Pieces of a Jewish Past by Nancy K. Miller: "When my father died, I became a middle-aged Jewish orphan. It’s not that I wasn’t already Jewish, of course, or that I set out to say Kaddish for him—I had no idea how to do that, even if it had been a daughter’s place. But now that the last keeper of my Jewish past was dead and I was free to put it behind me, I started worrying about the future of my Jewish self. As I began to … Continue reading Off the Shelf: What They Saved by Nancy K. Miller

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Off the Shelf: When We Walked Above the Clouds by H. Lee Barnes

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Read the beginning of Chapter One from When We Walked Above the Clouds: A Memoir of Vietnam by H. Lee Barnes: "In midsummer of ’63 the outside buzzer to my apartment rang. I’d worked until late at the press preparing layouts for the camera. I lived alone and no one ever came to see me, so I figured it was someone wanting another apartment and mistakenly pushing the button to my buzzer. It had happened before. I lay back. The bell rang again, this time insistently. I awoke and half asleep slipped on jeans and shirt and tottered into the … Continue reading Off the Shelf: When We Walked Above the Clouds by H. Lee Barnes

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Judy Muller on ABC

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UNP author Judy Muller was recently interviewed on ABC News. In the interview, she discusses her new book, Emus Loose in Egnar. In this book, Muller, an award-winning journalist, takes her readers on a grassroots tour of rural American newspapers. These weeklies cover what larger papers don’t, and the eclectic mix of stories keeps these publications alive and well while many traditional media are slowly dying off. Filled with characters both quirky and courageous, the book is a heartening reminder that there is a different kind of “bottom line” in the hearts of journalists who keep churning out good stories, … Continue reading Judy Muller on ABC

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Off the Shelf: Emus Loose in Egnar by Judy Muller

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Read the beginning of Chapter One, "Everything Old is New Again" from Emus Loose in Egnar: Big Stories from Small Towns by Judy Muller: "With all the hand-wringing about the “death of journalism,” it is more than a little ironic that small-town papers have been thriving by practicing what the mainstream media are now preaching. “Hyper-localism,” “Citizen Journalism,” “Advocacy Journalism”—these are some of the latest buzzwords of the profession. But the concepts, without the fancy names, have been around for ages in small-town newspapers. And the weeklies have learned a lesson from watching the financial stress of their city cousins: … Continue reading Off the Shelf: Emus Loose in Egnar by Judy Muller

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Author Susan Supernaw on Book-TV July 4th

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If you need a break from outdoor festivities this July 4th, head inside, crank up the air conditioning, and tune into Book-TV on C-Span 2. At noon on Monday, UNP author Susan Supernaw will be talking about her book Muscogee Daughter. Muscogee Daughter is the personal story of Supernaw, a Muscogee (Creek) and Munsee Native American, and the many obstacles she had to overcome in order to reach her goals. Eventually, she won a college scholarship and was crowned Miss Oklahoma in 1971. This book chronicles her quest to discern her true identity among competing notions of what it is … Continue reading Author Susan Supernaw on Book-TV July 4th

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SMH Drawing Winner

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Congratulations to Gregory Ball of San Antonio, Texas, who is the winner of our Register to Win drawing from the Society of Military History Conference (SMH). Gregory won the book Beneficial Bombing by Mark Clodfelter. In Beneficial Bombing, Clodfelter describes how American airmen, horrified by World War I’s trench warfare, turned to the progressive ideas, with the heavy bomber as their solution to limiting the bloodshed. The book examines this progressive idealism, which led to the creation of the U.S. Air Force and its doctrine that precision bombing would end wars more quickly and with less suffering. Clodfelter presents the … Continue reading SMH Drawing Winner