University of Nebraska Press

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

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

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 take stock of my father’s affairs, I found, tucked away in his bureau drawers and in the many compartments of the Danish modern credenza in the dining room that had become his home office after illness forced him to retire, the unsorted memorabilia of our family. Slotted into the red wells, the rustcolored file folders that for years had traveled with him on the long subway ride between our apartment on the Upper West Side and his office on Wall Street, I found (as I expected) a cluster of pale manila folders, containing the dated remains of cases from his practice as a lawyer in Manhattan. But I also found baffling items from a Jewish legacy I knew almost nothing about: a formal family portrait glued to crumbling brown cardboard, with a fully bearded, fedora-topped patriarch seated in the front row next to my grandfather; a receipt for the upkeep of a cemetery grave in Queens; directions to an unveiling; copies of handwritten letters that appeared to be in Hebrew; an embroidered blue-velvet tallis bag (complete with tefillin); a folder mysteriously labeled “property in Israel” (including a map); and tightly curled locks of dark-blonde hair packed into a cardboard box that once held fancy French soap.

My sister readily relinquished her claim to this puzzling cache of random Judaica that had accumulated untouched for decades in the cluttered rooms of the rent-controlled apartment where my father had spent the last seven years of his life, mourning my mother as he vanished into the debilitations of Parkinson’s disease and finally the fog of dementia. My sister, who was passionate about jazz, instead took home the contents of the Louis Armstrong file, one of my father’s two claims to minor celebrity. In the 1940s he had been Lucille Armstrong’s adviser and confidant when she was looking for a divorce from her famously wandering husband.

Without knowing why, I saved it all."

Nancy K. Miller is distinguished professor of English and comparative literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is the author or editor of more than a dozen books, most recently But Enough About Me: Why We Read Other People’s Lives and Bequest and Betrayal: Memoirs of a Parent’s Death.

To read a longer excerpt or to purchase What They Saved, visit http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/product/What-They-Saved,674867.aspx.

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

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 foyer. Mal stood outside the glass door at the end of the hall. He waved and motioned me outside.

Since my moving out the year before I’d rarely seen him or Mother, and neither had ever visited my apartment, or for that matter shown any interest in what or how I was doing, so his showing up was more than just an oddity. It was early afternoon and the temperature in the high nineties. He paced the sidewalk beside their lime-green minibus. Tied under a nylon tarp atop the Volkswagen were bags and boxes packed with household goods. I knew the gypsy ritual from the dozen moves we’d made over the years. He didn’t have to state the obvious, but he did.

“We’re moving. I start a new job on Monday,” he said.

Mother sat in front with George, two years old and squirming about on her lap. I asked where they were moving.

“Las Vegas. We stopped to see if you wanted to come along.”

I looked inside. An array of boxes, suitcases, along with Mickey, David, Deborah, and Scooter, the dachshund, pretty well filled up the rear. What remained for me was a two-footsquare space on the floor. Deborah rocked back and forth in the seat, and already the boys were sweating and anxious. Soon enough they would be riotous. Even without them along it would unbearable inside in the un-air-conditioned VW. I felt sorriest for the dog.

“No room,” I said.

Mal said, “We thought you could take Mickey and David in your Renault.”

“Mickey and David?” I looked at Mother.

She seemed not to care one way or the other. I noticed a front corner of the tarp was held down by a knot that was sure to slip. The tarp would flap until it broke open, and everything on top would spill somewhere on the highway on their godforsaken drive.

Mal said, “And we can pack some of this in your car and . . .”

“We need to retie that,” I said, pointing to the tarp.

“I didn’t have help.” He smiled, the gold crown on his left premolar showing.

“I told you I heard something up there, Mal,” Mother said.

I loosened the rope, then he and I lifted off the boxes and suitcases and set them on the concrete. We pulled on opposite sides of the tarp until it was taut, then replaced the load and folded the ends and corners snugly over the package. I ran the rope through the stays and secured it with a triple clove hitch, after which I tugged on the edges from several angles until convinced it would hold.

“You aren’t going to go, are you?” Mal said.

Mom said, “He’s in college. Thinks he’s too good.”

“Now, Mother,” Mal said. He’d addressed her as “Mother” since Mickey was born.

“That’s right, Mom,” I said. “I’m in college.”

Mother, Mal, and I had a long trail of bad history behind us; still, I shook his hand and wished them good luck. Then I stuck my head inside the driver’s window and said good-bye to Mom and the kids. She wouldn’t look at me.

As Mal pulled the minibus away from the curb, the full pathos of their lives struck me for the first time—two weak people who loved but loved inadequately, whose lives would always seem unfulfilled, but who would pretend otherwise. They faced a journey across two deserts in the heat of summer to another strange city where they would eke out a living, Mal broadcasting news from a soundproof room for a pittance, Mom serving food at a restaurant for union wages and tips. I’d been angry at them for a long while. A portion of it dissipated, and something inside me shifted. I felt as if I’d been cut free of a dragline.

I returned to my apartment. Instead of napping, I opened The Pastures of Heaven and read the first three stories." 

H. Lee Barnes is a professor of English at the College of Southern Nevada. He is the author of several collections of short stories, including Minimal Damage, and a novel, The Lucky.

To read a longer excerpt or to purchase When We Walked Above the Clouds, visit  http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/product/When-We-Walked-Above-the-Clouds,674873.aspx.

Judy Muller on ABC

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, week after week, for the corniest of reasons: that our freedoms depend on it.

To watch Judy’s interview, click here.

Off the Shelf: Emus Loose in Egnar by Judy Muller

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: don’t give it away. Most of the weeklies have discovered that people are still willing to pay not only for something they can hold in their hands, something they can clip and file in the family scrapbook, but also for content on the Web, especially if they cannot get that news anywhere else.

And so far, anyway, they can’t.

When I started this journey, a veteran journalist from a major daily paper said, “Better hurry, or there won’t be anyone out there left to interview.” But I found the opposite to be true. There are some eight thousand weeklies in the United States, and most of them are doing quite well, thank you very much, thanks to an endless source of material (i.e. life in a small town) that local readers crave, not to mention advertising that local merchants are willing to buy to reach their “target” audience (i.e. their neighbors).

When I toss out some of the circulation and profit figures for weeklies as a rejoinder to the mainstream media naysayers, they invariably counter with, “Well, they’re bound to die out eventually, once the older generation retires,” as though small-town journalism is a quaint piece of Americana destined to fade away.

Not so."

Judy Muller is an associate professor at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California and is the author of Now This: Radio, Television, and the Real World. She is also an NPR commentator and has worked as a correspondent for ABC, CBS, and PBS, winning numerous Emmy awards and, in 2010, the prestigious Peabody Award. She began her career at a weekly newspaper in Freehold, New Jersey. She now resides in Los Angeles, California, and Norwood, Colorado. She prefers Norwood.

 

To read a longer excerpt or to purchase Emus Loose in Egnar, visit http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/product/Emus-Loose-in-Egnar,674809.aspx.

Author Susan Supernaw on Book-TV July 4th

If you need a break from outdoor festivities this July 4^th, 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 to be a woman, a Native American, and a citizen of the world.

For more information, visit Book-TV’s website.