would like to open with a quick plug for a remarkable new book, Arguments for Stillness, by Omaha native Erik Campbell.  I’ve known Erik for years, and in fact we have been neighbors in Lincoln, Washington, DC, and Chiang Mai, Thailand.  I am convinced he is following me around the globe, although he would protest that assertion.  Regardless, he has–at the ripe age of 33–achieved what few mortals do: the publication of a collection of his poems.  He has long been my favorite poet on the planet, and soon he will be yours, too.  Check him out. Last night … Continue reading Nebraskanomics

t the end of the 1942 season, baseball legend Stan “The Man” Musial had to work in the Pennsylvania zinc mills to augment his annual salary of $4,200. And he wasn’t playing ‘A’ league ball. His team was the St. Louis Cardinals, World Series champions. Then again, it was wartime. It was also a time when major league baseball was played by human beings who, despite being acknowledged superstars, still lived pretty much like you and me. The only similarity between Musial and a Cardinal player of today (besides the obvious ones—i.e. they are both carbon-based, bipedal life forms) is … Continue reading The Rogues of Summer

y an odd coincidence, I finished reading this book (finally!  when did I say I was going to post on this originally?) on the same week that one of my short stories, "Gabriel’s Trumpet", was published in The Lamp Post of the Southern California CS Lewis Society.  And it isn’t because the book is long that it took me forever to finish it.  It’s only 160 pages.  It’s just that, at first, it moved slowly.  And don’t get me wrong.  I love C.S. Lewis.  I picked this up because I love his work.  But, Ransom, our hero, is much like … Continue reading Out of the Silent Planet by CS Lewis

lgerians know from war.  It’s an undeniable fact that Algeria has experienced its share of civil war and unrest, which perhaps reached a zenith at the tail end of French colonization.  The film The Battle of Algiers is one of the most remarkable things I’ve ever watched…made by Algerian filmmakers within months of the end of the war with the French, it highlights the street tactics and ingenious guerilla warfare that locals engaged in to triumph over their colonizers.  It is black and white and shot in a city still torn up from homemade bombs, buildings riddled with bullets.  So … Continue reading As promised, War, What is it Good For?

My name is Art T. Burton, I wrote the new biography, Black Gun, Silver Star: The Life and Legend of Frontier Marshal Bass Reeves. This book was a culmination of ten years of intensive research which should help to broaden readers perspective on Wild West history. I look forward to answering questions from readers of my book or thoughts on the Indian Territory, blacks in the West, or the Wild West in general. I holstered my toy guns at the age of 12 and now in my mid 50s I am back in the saddle again, with a brand new … Continue reading Black Gun, Silver Star

he recent literary salon hosted by the University of Nebraska Press on Leslie Duram’s Good Growing: Why Organic Farming Works should have been attended by anyone who eats or who at least cares about what they eat. Those who did attend the April 20 salon at the Lincoln Woman’s Club were privy to an excellent discussion that left me wondering (and worried) about how we so willingly allow our very sustenance to fall into the hands of a few conglomerates that daily stir up an unholy alchemy of chicken nuggets and cheez puffs. Salon co-host Jim Bender, a Nebraska organic … Continue reading A Word, Before You Take That Next Bite

At Home on This Moveable Earth by William Kloefkorn “Kloefkorn’s sonorous prose and poetic sensibilities heighten the reader’s perception of life . . . the book’s structure is carefully wrought; he uses counterpoint, flashbacks, shifting points of view and variations on themes to shape his memoir. Kloefkorn is a consummate storyteller with a keen eye and a gift for language that is beautiful in its simplicity.” —Publishers Weekly Annex (May) “Kloefkorn . . . reveals his life one vignette at a time in this richly evocative third installment of his proposed four-part memoir. With deftly wrought imagery so powerful and … Continue reading

I, Nadia, Wife of a Terrorist by Baya Gacemi “Gacemi’s unique and invaluable portrayal of this personal side of terrorism is shocking, poignant, and impossible to forget.”—Booklist (May 1) “This first-person account of a young woman’s seduction by Islamist extremism also offers an intimate look at the Algerian civil war. . . . Gacemi’s book received a lot of attention in France. Since Americans are less knowledgeable about Algeria, it will probably get less here-which is unfortunate, since her account of how a whole community can be seduced by terrorists is frightening and invaluable.”—Publishers Weekly (4/10/06) “Nadia tells her story … Continue reading

kay, if you define science fiction as fiction that needs science as an integral part of its plot, then this isn’t sf.  But Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynn Jones and the movie based on the book by Hayao Miyazaki both captured something for me, and they are clearly speculative, so apology ended.  For one thing, the book and the movie could almost be separate topics.  Miyazaki takes the book as starting material and then, like the best adaptation movies, instead of being falsely "true to the book", he uses it to create his own vision.  Jones’s book is quite … Continue reading Howl’s Moving Castle