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Off the Shelf: The Rhythm Boys of Omaha Central by Steve Marantz

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Marantz Read the Prologue from The Rhythm Boys of Omaha Central: High School Basketball at the '68 Racial Divide by Steve Marantz:

"In March 1968, two high school basketball teams played for the Nebraska state championship, a contest with decades of wholesome tradition. But this game was different.

A few days earlier former Alabama governor George C. Wallace had come to Omaha to campaign for president. He brought the Deep South—“segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” and the jackboots of Selma—and set it down two blocks from Omaha Central High School. His searing rhetoric scalded the sensibilities of many, including eighteen-year-old Dwaine Dillard, Central’s African American basketball superstar.

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UNP author in two blogs and award finalist announced

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Sonya Huber, author of Cover Me: A Health Insurance Memoir, was a guest writer on the blog Largerhearted Boy on Jan. 14. The blog is currently featuring a series called Book Notes, where authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates to their book. Cover Me is about Huber’s personal experiences navigating the nation’s health-care system and brings an awful and necessary dose of reality to the political debates and propaganda surrounding health-care reform. For Huber, her music selections hightlight each chapter in a different light. Everything from "Pink Houses" by John Mellencamp to “Sabotage” by The Beastsie Boys … Continue reading UNP author in two blogs and award finalist announced

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Lincoln author on local radio

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Local author Bill Kloefkorn will be on The Joy Factor radio show on KZUM tomorrow, Wednesday, Jan. 19 at 6 p.m. to discuss his new poetry collection, Swallowing the Soap, published in October by the University of Nebraska Press. If you are in the Lincoln area, tune to 89.3 FM. The host of the show is Sheila Stratton. For more information visit The Joy Factor’s Facebook page.   William Kloefkorn is Nebraska’s state poet and emeritus professor of English at Nebraska Wesleyan University in Lincoln. He has published many books with the University of Nebraska Press, including a four-part memoir … Continue reading Lincoln author on local radio

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Off the Shelf: Bird at the Buzzer by Jeff Goldberg

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Goldberg Read the beginning of Chapter 1, "Tip-Off" from Bird at the Buzzer: UConn, Notre Dame, and a Women's Basketball Classic by Jeff Goldberg, Foreword by Doris Burke:

"Storrs, March 6, 2001

Sue Bird awoke this snowy Tuesday morning after a night unlike any other in her three years at the University of Connecticut. During the night, while a powerful snowstorm blanketed the state of Connecticut, Bird had lain under her blankets hooked up to a portable stimulus machine, electronic impulses coursing into her balky lower back in an attempt to prevent it from going into spasm any further.

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Advice on writing memoirs

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Tracy Seeley, author of the forthcoming My Ruby Slippers, wrote a guest post on the Writer’s Digest blog. In the post, she discusses three privacy issues that come up when a writer decides to tell her personal story. To read all of her advice, check out the blog. My Ruby Slippers is Seeley’s memoir of her personal search for home. In her childhood, her father’s dreams kept them moving constantly. By the time she was nine, she had lived in seven towns and thirteen different houses. My Ruby Slippers describes Seeley's search for the true meaning of home.  Lewis Buzbee, … Continue reading Advice on writing memoirs

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Holiday News

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Welcome back! While we were out on break, quite a lot happened. Here’s a quick round up of the news that you may have missed over the holidays:   In Scoreboard, Baby, Ken Armstrong and Nick Perry undercover the true and shocking story about the University of Washington’s 2000 football season and what some players got away with off the field. Krystina Lucido from PressBox reviewed Scoreboard, Baby saying that it  “is not only a closer look into a system that has failed victims who have suffered at the hands of star athletes, but is a call to the court … Continue reading Holiday News

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Off the Shelf: My Ruby Slippers by Tracy Seeley

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Seeley Read the beginning of Chapter 2, "The Good Land" from My Ruby Slippers: The Road Back to Kansas by Tracy Seeley:

"I shiver in the backseat in the corner against the door. I hold my cheek against the cold metal until it hurts. I hold myself very still. I am five, and we are moving away. My father drives. My mother sits next to him and says nothing. I will not look at them. Instead, I stare out the window and hear the car tires slub, slub, slub on the
red brick streets. My chest hurts. The narrow dark windows of my school slide by—window, window, window, window. I can’t see in. But I know that Mrs. Little’s kindergarten is going on without me. The children are using quiet voices, cutting paper and coloring, reading and writing in the big yellow workbooks with smooth, dry pages and an elephant on the front. They are listening to stories and taking a quiet nap on cool mats with the lights turned out. I had waited a whole year for school, while my older sister fell in love with Mrs. Little and sat in a circle on the braided rug and came home singing new songs. All of that has been mine for less than half a year. I can hardly breathe. My throat aches. I do not speak or cry. We turn a corner and the brick streets end. We are moving away.

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Off the Shelf: Beyond DiMaggio: Italian Americans in Baseball by Lawrence Baldassaro

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Baldassaro Read the beginning of Chapter 1, "Ed Abbaticchio: Forgotten Pioneer" from Beyond DiMaggio: Italian Americans in Baseball by Lawrence Baldassaro, Foreword by Dom DiMaggio:

"In one of the first stories on Joe DiMaggio to appear in a national publication, Quentin Reynolds, associate editor of Collier’s magazine, recounted the following exchange among baseball writers covering spring training in 1936: “‘He says you pronounce it Dee-Mah-gee-o,’ one of the sports writers said gloomily. ‘That’s a very tough name to pronounce and also tough to spell,’ another added. ‘DiMaggio sounds like something you put on a steak,’ one writer said in disgust.”1

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Off the Shelf: Christine by Laura Curtis Bullard

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Bullard Read the beginning of the Introduction from Christine: Or Woman's Trials and Triumphs by Laura Curtis Bullard, edited and with an introduction by Denise M. Kohn:

"When Laura Curtis Bullard wrote Christine: Or Woman’s Trials and Triumphs she created one of antebellum America’s most radical heroines: a woman’s rights leader. Through the creation of her unconventional title character, Curtis Bullard gave voice to her own support for female suffrage, careers, and economic independence, which was termed the “woman’s rights” movement in the mid-nineteenth century and was considered scandalous, even sinful, by many Americans.1 Curtis Bullard was twenty-five when Christine, her second novel, was published in 1856, and she was the editor of a newspaper for women, the Ladies’ Visitor. She continued her career after she was married and became a mother, and in 1870 she succeeded Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony as editor of the suffrage newspaper the Revolution, publishing essays about the social problems caused by women’s inequality that she had earlier dramatized in Christine.

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