University of Nebraska Press

Hyde wins Bancroft Prize

Congratulations to UNP author Anne F. Hyde for being awarded the 2012 Bancroft Prize!

Hyde won the award for her book Empires, Nations, and Families: A History of the North American West, 1800-1860.

The Bancroft Prize is awarded annually by the trustees of Columbia University to three books published on the subjects of American history and diplomacy. It is among the most prestigious prizes in the field.

Empires, Nations, and Families is an exploration of the American West just after the Louisiana Purchase, tracing family stories from the Canadian North to the Spanish and Mexican borderlands and from the Pacific Coast to the Missouri and Mississippi rivers.

View the official announcement here.

Congrats again, Anne!

Reviews and giveaway

In the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Birch Coulie by John Christgau was reviewed by Curt Brown.

Brown said, “Christgau's book is essential reading on the 150th anniversary of the largely forgotten, under-taught war that he describes as ‘a brutal collision of two worlds and cultures.’”

Brown also compared Christgau to one of the characters in the book, Boyd, by explaining that both are not “…overly sympathetic to either side, parlaying rich details and complex historical characters to capture a vibrant snapshot of Minnesota history.”

Read the full review here.

The Brave Ski Mom reviewed In Search of Powder by Jeremy Evans calling it a well-written story with the most interesting addressing immigrant labor at ski resorts and the evolution of skiing films.

And UNP is offering one free copy of the book to a luck reader! To enter, leave a comment below the review on the blog here.

The winner will be chosen at random on March 13. Good luck!

Off the Shelf: Mountains of Light: Seasons of Reflection in Yosemite by R. Mark Liebenow

Read the beginning of Mountains of Light: Seasons of Reflection in Yosemite by R. Mark Liebenow:

"In the middle of the night something pushes on my toes. Half asleep, I think a nocturnal squirrel is rooting around at the bottom of my tent. There is scuffling and the animal bumps hard against the hollows of my feet. That’s no squirrel. It’s larger, perhaps a raccoon. Then I hear a low guttural snort and National Geographic images rush into my head-grizzlies mauling their helpless prey, wolves tearing elk apart with their long savage teeth.

With my heart pounding, I lie as still as a mummy.

When I hear the creature shuffle away, I risk sitting up, making as little noise as possible, and peek out the tent’s opening. I detect a sour musky scent but the darkness is so thick that at first I don’t see anything. Then the animal moves into the slight moonlight hovering between trees a dozen feet away and I’m able to make out a back that is big, black, and shaggy.

Bears unsettle me when they are this close. They are strong enough to rip the doors off cars when hungry, can flatten a tent in one leap, and have claws that can shred the bark of trees. My shelter’s thin nylon skin wouldn’t stop a chipmunk determined to get in. It’s January and this bear is supposed to be hibernating, not roaming around.

Pulling my head back in, I zip up the tent and force myself to lie down. I listen to the sounds of the wilderness for a long time, hear the twitching of branches and the rustling of dry leaves. I do not sleep well."

Mark Liebenow has won the Chautauqua Nonfiction Prize, among other awards. His work has been published in such journals as the Colorado Review, the Spoon River Poetry Review, and the Clackamas Literary Review.

 

To read a longer excerpt or to purchase Moutnains of Light, visit http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/product/Mountains-of-Light,674967.aspx.

Great Plains in spotlight

Today in the Omaha World-Herald, two new UNP books were reviewed.

Bound to Have Blood: Frontier Newspapers and the Plains Indian Wars by Hugh J. Reilly, and Eyewitness at Wounded Knee by Richard E. Jensen, R. Eli Paul and John E. Carter were called two historical studies that “…do an outstanding job of deepening the knowledge of Plains history.”

Bound to Have Blood takes readers back to the late nineteenth century to show how newspaper reporting influenced attitudes about the conflict between the United States and Native Americans.

Eyewitness at Wounded Knee brings together and assesses for the first time some 150 photographs that were made before and immediately after the massacre.

Click here to read the editorial about both books.

 

And out of 300 jacket and cover design entries at the AAUP Book, Jacket and Journal show, just 30 were chosen as the best examples from the pool.

UNP’s My Nebraska: The Good, the Bad and the Husker by Roger Welsch was among those selected.

The 2012 Book, Jacket, and Journal Show will premiere at the AAUP Annual Meeting in Chicago, June 18-20, 2012.

Congrats to designer, Nathan and the production coordinator Alison!

To see the full list of selected entries, click here.

Pipeline denied through Nebraska Sandhills



Today, President Obama denies the Transcanada pipeline permit through Nebraska Sandhills protecting Nebraska’s watershed. Read the full story.

UNP has two forthcoming titles you will want to check out, one that focuses on the Sandhills and one that is an exploration of America’s energy infrastructure. In David Owen’s book, Like No Other Place he focuses on the Nebraska Sandhills and the essence of its uniqueness and its people.

 

Green Illusions: The Dirty Secrets of Clean Energy and the Future of Environmentalism by Ozzie Zehner provides insight on why we should change our energy consumption habits and why alternative energy isn't the answer to our growing energy crisis and provides solutions for the future.

New Mexico book sale

Last Friday, the state of New Mexico celebrated its 100th birthday! To continue the celebration, UNP is offering books about New Mexico at discounted prices! Save 25 percent on titles, including the following:

Nobody's Horses: The Dramatic Rescue of the Wild Herd of White Sands by Don Höglund tells the dramatic story of wild horses struggling to live on the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.  A large-animal veterinarian, Höglund was called in to organize and lead a team of dedicated cowboys, soldiers, and other professionals in removing the surviving horses and their offspring to safety after years of suffering through periodic droughts, food shortages, and all the dangers accompanying life on a military weapons–testing site.

 

 

In Tales from the Journey of the Dead: Ten Thousand Years on an American Desert, Alan Boye describes traveling to two parallel chains of mountains, one hundred miles south of Albuquerque,  by foot. Boye visits battle sites from the Mexican-American War, the Civil War, the lonely canyon where the Apaches fought to keep their homeland, and the isolated site of the world’s first atomic explosion.

 

To get the promotion code and other sale selections, click here.

Offer ends Jan. 31, 2012.

Women winners

Congratulations to Susan Kushner Resnick for winning the Best Woman Writer award at the 2011 High Plains Book Awards on Oct. 15. The winners were announced at a banquet held at Montana State University in Billings.

Resnick’s book, Goodbye Wifes and Daughters, tells the 1943 story of an explosion in the Smith coal mine in Bearcreek, Montana, which killed all but three of the men in the mine at the time of the blast.  The book unfolds that tragic day and its aftermath through the eyes of the family members -- mostly wives and children -- of those miners.

Lisa Bonos of the Washington Post said, “Resnick does an admirable job of breathing life into the story of a small town's demise and its questioning of whether the disaster could have been avoided."

Click here for a complete list of the winners.

And congrats to another winner, Annette, who won a free copy of Joel Sartore’s Let’s Be Reasonable at the NLA Conference earlier this month at the Cornhusker Marroitt Hotel in Lincoln, Neb.

Reviews and mentions

Reviews and other mentions of our new fall books continue to roll in. Following is a sampling of some of the notice UNP books and authors have received recently.

Yesterday, Between Panic and Desire by Dinty W. Moore was reviewed in the Coal Hill Review by Sue Kreke Rumbaugh. Between Panic and Desire documents the disorienting experience of growing up in a postmodern world.

In Moore’s book, Rumbaugh says, “With subtle wit and outright humor, Dinty W. Moore takes the reader on a journey like no other in his latest memoir.”

Click here to read the full review.

Earlier this week, The Spokesman-Review called Drylands: A Rural American Saga by Steve Turner and photographer Lionel Delevingne “a stunning new coffee table book" which  "celebrates an under-celebrated corner of our region: the drylands country of Adams County.”

Read the whole review here.

On Oct. 1, UNP author Terese Svoboda interviewed fellow UNP author (and former editor) Ladette Randolph for The Nervous Breakdown. The two discuss life in the NFL  (Nebraskan, Female, and Literary), which MLN (Male, Literary, and New Yorker) they would trade places with, and much more.

Click here to read their conversation.

Last month High Country News profiled author and professor Mary Clearman Blew. Andrea Clark Mason wrote about Blew’s family history and writing career. Blew has published many books, including Jackalope Dreams with UNP, and her most recent memoir, This is Not the Ivy League, has received attention in Blew's native Montana and elsewhere (even the New York Times).

Read the full profile here.

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.

Off the Shelf: Or Perish in the Attempt by David J. Peck

Read the beginning of Chapter 1, "Politics and Passion: The Exploration of the American Wilderness" from Or Perish in the Attempt: The Hardship and Medicine of the Lewis and Clark Expedition by David J. Peck:

"A love for the wilderness and outdoor adventure are born into the heart and mind of nearly every American, or, at the least, learned early in life. It is nurtured and grows in some more than in others, but it is difficult to grow up in the United States without a strong love of the vast open expanses with which we North Americans are blessed. Coupled with our love of the wilderness comes a fascination with the people who blazed the trails into the wild. That sense of awe and admiration for these pathfinders is cultivated and personified by American icons of the wilderness, men such as Jim Bridger, Kit Carson, Joe Walker, John Muir, Richard Byrd, and the most famous of all, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark.