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Scoreboard, Baby on NPR’s Only A Game sports show

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Football season is almost upon us. Tomorrow Lincoln will be one giant tail gate with fans in red running the city with high excitement for the Huskers to play the season opener. In the spirit of college football season, the University of Nebraska Press is looking into a more scandalous side of the pigskin sport.  Scoreboard, Baby: A story of College Football, Crime and Complicity by Ken Armstrong and Nick Perry is a true story about the University of Washington’s 2000 football season. It puts together interviews, articles and thousands of documentation on the season that brought them a victory … Continue reading Scoreboard, Baby on NPR’s Only A Game sports show

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Stolen Horses reviewed on NPR’s All Things Considered

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Stolen Horses, by Dan O’Brien, is an old-fashioned Western novel in some ways. The fictional setting – McDermot, Nebraska – is a place where cowboys still live on the ranch homesteads settled by great-great-grandparents, where everyone knows the local history, where many people are resistant to change. But in other ways, it’s a modern story, one that touches on healthcare inequity, corruption, the growing gulf between the rich and poor, and what happens when change finally does come to a place as remote and untouched as McDermot. NPR’s Alan Cheuse reviewed Stolen Horses on All Things Considered last night. A … Continue reading Stolen Horses reviewed on NPR’s All Things Considered

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Off the Shelf: The John Lardner Reader edited and with an introduction by John Schulian

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John Lardner Reader cover image Read the beginning of the Introduction from The John Lardner Reader: A Press Box Legend's Classic Sportswriting, edited and with an introduction by John Schulian:

"Since TV and talk radio started throwing crazy money at them, more and more otherwise admirable sportswriters have been only too happy to install whoopee cushions where their regard for the language used to be. It’s a natural reaction, I suppose, like realizing that the only way to be heard in a noisy bar is to shout louder than everybody else. But sly humor and high style have taken a drubbing everywhere sports are written. Worse yet, John Lardner has been forgotten. That’s as wrong as wearing white socks at a funeral.

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Praise for Robert Camuto’s Palmento (and Corkscrewed, too!)

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Eric Asimov writes about wine for the New York Times – wine trends, wine regions, individual wines, wine culture, etc.  Wine blog The Daily Sip posted this Q&A with Asimov yesterday, in which Asimov writes about his wine writing philosophy (I especially liked this quote: I don't think it's so important that people know a lot about wine as it is they drink wine if they like it. I don't think anyone is under any obligation to know about wine. I don't think of myself as an educator, but more as an inspirer.) Asimov also discussed some wine writers he … Continue reading Praise for Robert Camuto’s Palmento (and Corkscrewed, too!)

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Off the Shelf: The Hard Way Home by Steve Kahn

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Hard Way Home cover image Read the beginning of "One Last Cast" from The Hard Way Home: Alaska Stories of Adventure, Friendship, and the Hunt by Steve Kahn:

"I remember gazing into a mountain stream near Turnagain Pass. Minute air bubbles formed along the backs of polished granite boulders hunched at the bottom, then rose in a swirl of motion to the surface. My little hands held tight their first fishing pole: a willow branch rigged with a piece of string from the glove box, a safety pin, and a half-ripe cranberry. I was four years old, maybe five. My folks tell me I was more interested in fishing than a potty stop.

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Off the Shelf: Cover Me by Sonya Huber

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Cover Me cover image Read the beginning of Chapter 1, "Waiting for the Placebo Effect" from Cover Me: A Health Insurance Memoir by Sonya Huber:

"My sinuses throbbed and pressed against the bones of my face like overcooked bratwurst. I pulled open the glass door of the community co-op in Columbus, Ohio. I wanted to fill my skull with brightly colored vitamin cocaine and blot out the suicide gray midwestern sky.

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Author recognized in The Best American Essays collection

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Great news for the Press: an excerpt of Black Elephants by Karol Nielsen (due out in Fall 2011) has been selected as a notable essay by The Best American Essays 2010!  The Best American Series is a collection of the best literature in North America, edited by a respected author in their particular field, and published on a yearly basis.   Black Elephants is Nielsen’s story of romance and reality, war and peace.  As a young journalist, her quest for adventure and a story led her to backpack through South America, where she fell in love with an Israeli soldier.  Nielsen … Continue reading Author recognized in The Best American Essays collection

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Author, Teammates to be inducted into Basketball Hall of Fame

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Author Oscar Robertson will be making another trip to the Basketball Hall of Fame, this time to be inducted with his Olympic teammates.  In a recent New York Times article, Robertson writes about the 1960 Olympic gold medal winning basketball team that he co-captained, a team he calls “the original Dream Team.”  He credits coach Pete Newel (subject of A Good Man: The Pete Newell Story by Bruce Jenkins) for helping the team of college athletes beat the establishment, the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), and for the first time change how American basketball was represented abroad.  The team will be inducted … Continue reading Author, Teammates to be inducted into Basketball Hall of Fame

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Off the Shelf: Breaking into the Backcountry by Steve Edwards

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Breaking into the Backcountry cover image Read the beginning of Chapter 1, "Getting There" from Breaking into the Backcountry by Steve Edwards:

"By midafternoon we’ve crossed Iowa on I-80 and started north to South Dakota on I-29. It’s the same route we took on a family vacation to the Badlands when I was fourteen, only on that trip we stopped and spent a night in Mitchell, home of the Corn Palace. Today we hit Mitchell and keep on rolling. All afternoon and into the evening the scenery is the same: the highway’s broken white center line, semitrailers streaming west in plumes of exhaust, the flatness of the plains. Checking our mileage, I’m amazed by how far we’ve come and how far we still have to go. Riddle, Oregon, where my father and I will meet the homestead’s owners at a gas station and follow them into the homestead, is 2,316 miles from my little hometown in Indiana. I can no more fathom this distance than I can fathom the distance from Earth to the moon. And though I have poured over the manual Bradley sent me and spent the last few months reading everything I can get my hands on about the Pacific Northwest, I still don’t totally know what to expect. The moon might actually be more familiar a place to me than the Rogue River canyon.

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World War II sale

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World War II ended in August 1945, but its impacts are not forgotten 65 years later.  To remember the sacrifices of the soldier and the citizen, the Press is having a World War II sale.  Now through August 31st, you can save 25 percent on books that show the truly global influence of World War II.   To hear directly from one soldier, read In the Neighborhood of Zero: A World War II Memoir by William V. Spanos.  Taken prisoner during the Battle of the Bulge, then marched and transported by freight train to Dresden, Spanos recalls the experience of being a … Continue reading World War II sale