University of Nebraska Press

Off the Shelf: Double-Edged Sword by Bart Paul

Read the beginning of Chapter 1, "The Bull" from Double-Edged Sword: The Many Lives of Hemingway's Friend, the American Matador Sidney Franklin byBart Paul:

"He was born Sidney Frumpkin on July 11, 1903, one of nine surviving children to Abram and Lubba Frumpkin of Minsk and Kazan, respectively. His parents, both Orthodox Jews, emigrated from Imperial Russia in 1888. After eight years in this country and the birth of his first few children, Abram joined the New York City Police Department, eventually working out of Brooklyn’s Seventy-Eighth Precinct. The borough of Brooklyn was completing the transition from a semirural community of farms, shade trees and backyard gardens to a noisy city, becoming further transformed by the new immigrants from eastern and southern Europe. The city had been an independent municipality until just five years before Sidney’s birth, when it was incorporated into New York City. The Brooklyn Eagle, the paper that would eventually chronicle the rise of its hometown matador, was for a time edited in the late 1840s by Walt Whitman, another homeboy whose private life was also best kept from the public eye.

Off the Shelf: Into That Silent Sea by Francis French and Colin Burgess

Read the beginning of Chapter 1, "First to Fly" from Into That Silent Sea: Trailblazers of the Space Era, 1961-1965 by Francis French and Colin Burgess with a foreword by Paul Haney:

"When venturing into the unknown, the first step taken is often the biggest and the boldest. A young Russian pilot named Yuri Gagarin took humankind’s first step into space. He died in his mid-thirties, so his image is fixed: a youthful icon symbolizing the first human journey above our planet. As President Lyndon B. Johnson wrote, “Yuri Gagarin’s courageous and pioneering flight into space opened new horizons and set a brilliant example for the spacemen of the two countries.”

Off the Shelf: The Exquisite Corpse edited by Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren, Davis Schneiderman, and Tom Denlinger

Read from the Foreword of The Exquisite Corpse: Chance and Collaboration in Surrealism's Parlor Gameedited by Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren, Davis Schneiderman, and Tom Denlinger:

 

"I. Fold, crease, filter

 

Database aesthetics, collaborative filtering, musical riddles, and beat sequence philosophies don’t exactly spring to mind when you think of the concept of the Exquisite Corpse. But if there’s one thing that I want to you to think about when you read this anthology, it’s that collage-based art—whether sound, film, multimedia, or computer code—has become the basic reference frame for most of generation info. We live in a world of relentlessly expanding networks—cellular, wireless, fiber optic routed . . . you name it. This world is becoming more interconnected than ever before, and it’s going to get deeper, weirder, and a lot more interesting than even the data-stream-driven moment of this writing (NYC, at the beginning of the twenty-first century).

Off the Shelf: Searching for My Destiny by George Blue Spruce Jr.

Read from "Creighton Years" in Searching for My Destiny by George Blue Spruce Jr. as told to Deanne Durrett:

"Many years before my high school graduation and the Elks banquet, my parents had vowed that their children would go to college. They acted on faith that there would be a way for me to achieve a college degree and began making definite plans for my education during my junior year of high school. Knowing of my strong desire to become a dentist, the Christian Brothers at St. Michael’s spoke to my parents and recommended Creighton University, a Roman Catholic university with a dental school. In the Brothers’ opinion, there were no better educators than the Jesuit priests. Daddy had great respect for the Christian Brothers, and once they had made their recommendation no other colleges were considered. I was going to Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska.

Off the Shelf: Football by Edward J. Rielly

Read the "Wheaties" entry from Football: An Encyclopedia of Popular Culture by Edward J. Rielly:

"Wheaties, the Breakfast of Champions, was created by accident in 1921 when a health clinician in Minneapolis happened to drop some wheat-bran gruel on a stove. The heat converted the gruel into wheat flakes that, the clinician noted, tasted quite good. The head miller at Washburn Crosby Company (later General Mills) agreed, and a new cereal was born. Initially called Washburn’s Gold Medal Whole Wheat Flakes, when the cereal was ready to be marketed in 1924 it was renamed Wheaties so that the food itself rather than its name would be the mouthful.

Off the Shelf: Forever Red by Steve Smith

Read from "At Last: Nebraska 24-Miami 17-January 1, 1995" in Forever Red: Confessions of a Cornhusker Football Fan by Steve Smith:

"But in a stirring string of events, Nebraska found itself at the Miami 15, and seconds later, Frazier put the ball in fullback Cory Schlesinger’s hands. No. 40 slipped past the line, leaped over a Hurricane at the 5, and remarkably, bounded into the end zone. Then Frazier fired a bullet to Eric Alford for 2 points, and the game was tied. At some point during all of this, I turned to Michael. He was looking at me, holding up four fingers. Then he asked: “Do you believe?”

Off the Shelf: Ambassadors from Earth by Jay Gallentine

Read from Chapter 1, "Aboard the Glacier" in Ambassadors from Earth: Pioneering Explorations with Unmanned Spacecraft by Jay Gallentine:

"Larry Cahill sardined himself into the communication shack with James Van Allen, who had headphones popped over his ears. It was quite hot and late at night. Both were thankful that they could be near the top of the ship, because that was farthest from the blistering engine room.

“Well, I wonder if that could really be it,” Van Allen said to nobody in particular. There was this inexplicably goofy beep-beeping sound in the headset. Something didn’t add up here. He glanced around. On the assembled faces were looks of confusion, like something didn’t fit. Like a game of Clue—everybody knew it couldn’t be Colonel Mustard with the rope, but all the evidence said otherwise.

Off the Shelf: Dream of Reason by Rosa Chacel

Read from Dream of Reason byRosa Chacel, translated by Carol Maier:

"In the spring of 1932 about two years had passed since I returned from Europe. My absence had lasted almost as long as my entire life—when I left Buenos Aires I was only a few months old. Even so, even though that period was not clear in my mind, the idea that I had been here was always with me. The idea? Why not the memory? A memory is passed on, inherited, adopted. Yes, I always remembered having been here and always felt certain I would return. I knew I’d return to the city and the house where I’d been born, knew what the furniture was like in that house, and everything I did when I was very young—the trips and studies—was something I started so as to have it done with before I returned. Then once I was here, it was a question of recovering things, not of becoming acquainted with them.

Off the Shelf: Seldom Seen by Patrick Dobson

Read from the first chapter, "A Leap into the Prairie Sea" from Seldom Seen: A Journey into the Great Plains by Patrick Dobson:

"In the spring of 1994, it came time to swim.

For weeks, the smell of redemption floated through windows on sweet western winds. Without my noticing it, every breeze became laced with fragrances of mown hay, cow dung, and dew on willows; perfumes of grass and rain and plowed ground. The ocean-like expanses of prairie promised baptism—a transformed life. When I slept, thunder rumbled through dreams the color of maturing wheat. I only needed a push, however slight, to jump into the grassy sea. 

Off the Shelf: Frantic Francis by Brett Perkins

Read from the first chapter, "Something Stirring on the Prairie" in Frantic Francis: How One Coach's Madness Changed Football byBrett Perkins:

"Because Francis Schmidt operated somewhere between oddness and madness, it has always been difficult to determine which stories about him are true and which are myths. Everything he did had a manic quality, making even the outlandish tales hard to dismiss. But the truth is fascinating enough. He worked eighteen hours a day, devoting most of his waking thought to football, and even a few hours of sleep failed to interrupt his passion. He kept a pad and pencil hanging from his bedpost so he could jot down ideas that came to him in the night. Besides coaching his own team during the football season, Schmidt attended as many football games as possible, whether they were at a university, a teachers’college, or an all-black high school. He filled notebooks with endless notes on what he saw, always looking for variations of plays or formations that might be new to him. There weren’t many. The diagramming—or creating—of football plays was his most famous obsession. Schmidt worked at creating plays the way a chain smokerworks a cigarette. Using Xs and Os to represent players and arrows and dashes to represent movement, Schmidt was a mad scientist seeking a cure for touchdown deficiency. His mind seemed unable to disengage from this pursuit, and he frustrated all who knew him by mentally disappearing during conversations, parties, and bridge games.There had to be a million possible plays, and Schmidt seemed determined to discover and document every one in a notebook, on a napkin, or on random scraps of paper. This prodigious output was always his blessing as well as his curse.