University of Nebraska Press

Off the Shelf: Brassies, Mashies, and Bootleg Scotch by Bill Kilpatrick

Read the beginning of "The Founding Father, Part I" from Brassies, Mashies, and Bootleg Scotch: Growing Up on America's First Heroic Golf Course by Bill Kilpatrick:

"I called him dad, Daddy when I was younger, and more often than not as the years went by I called him Pop. He called me Willie. I referred to him as my father, my dad, and the Old Man. His name was William, known as Bill, and he remains indelible in my consciousness.

Off the Shelf: Black Elephants by Karol Nielsen

Read the beginning of chapter 1, "The New Zealand Sheep Farmer and the Recruit" from Black Elephants: A Memoir by Karol Nielsen:

"The minivan bumped along hills that hugged Lake Titicaca. Haze made the water look silver. I sat behind Dirk, a German traveler with a ponytail. It hung to the middle of his back, streaked bronze from the South American sun. He wore dusty jeans and a tank top that skimmed his torso. Dirk was one of those hard-core travelers, the kind I’d met along the way, who took regular trips through Latin America, Africa, and the Far East. They seemed so worldly, and despite the army tanks, tear gas, and guns I’d seen during my year as a writer for an English-language newspaper in Argentina, I still felt sheltered. I was only beginning to understand the underbelly of the world, something the serious travelers seemed to have understood from birth.

Wendy Call Interviewed on PRI's The World

Wendy Call, author of No Word for Welcome: The Mexican Village Faces the Global Economy, recently discussed her new book with Lisa Mullins on PRI's The World radio program. Listen to Wendy explain what drew her to the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, an area of the country that Mexicans call "little waist".

Listen to an additional interview with Wendy as she talks about her visits to the Isthmus of Tehuantepec and the effect of economic globalization on the area: http://uprisingradio.org/home/?p=21550

SABR Drawing Winner

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 sources were diversified and the league thrived. Surdam analyzes how the economic structure and operations side of Major League Baseball endured the Depression and was forever changed by the societal forces of the time.

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

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.

Off the Shelf: Searching for Tamsen Donner by Gabrielle 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.