Nebraska Books

Doctor Danker was one of my favorite history professors and a man who loved the story of the westward movement with a passion and with a down-to-earth human persepective. Though he passed on nearly a year ago, I still can see him in my mind's eye lecturing about the move west while standing before us in his somewhat rumpled brown suit, bathed in the fall afternoon sun with his head thrown back, his graying shock of hair standing up a bit and his eyes closed as he told us a story. He was wonderful at discovering and using journals to illustrate the lives and times. In my senior year he set me to reading the journals of the Agent for the Pawnee Reservation on the Loup Fork in Nebraska. He was a Nebraska native and had a special affinity for the stories from that state. I have an old copy of this book and it is a treasure to me not only for it's fascinating content and it's own story, but because of the memory of Dr. Danker it brings to me.

Here is a high spirited diary account of a young woman who travels across the country with her parents and young siblings. Her wonderful sence of humor and adventure are entertaining and well accounted in her pranks and hijinks. This diary provides excellent commentary on life on the road, the importance of family, and falling in love during the mid-nineteenth century. A very easy read, but you'll want to note enteries on clothing, cooking, visiting, and daily living. How sad we are not able to learn how her life continues after her diary stops....

Joy Melcher, Civil War Lady Magazine, Pipestone, MN

After knowing OF Mourning Dove for over 20 years in my school life.It was not till the internet,that I fully got to know MORE about her.Library books,were only so limited.But thanx to the internet,doing research on herwas well worth it.Her books"Morning Dove" a Salishan Biography,and "Cogewea" are both very well written.So as not to have favorites,I love both of her works.I highly reccomend them.You will gain a better appreciate the Native American Culture after reading about her,her life and her struggles.

I found this book to be a good source of information about Native American life at the turn of the century. Every aspect of life was covered, at times through stories about the author's life and at other times through her descriptions and explanations. The book is not written in chronological order, so it was confusing to follow in certain sections. Overall, Mourning Dove's experience of living both the traditional nomadic and then the settled Indian life is a fascinating one, well worth reading about by anyone interested in these subjects. As a feminist, I also found her description of the role of women in her culture to be revelatory.

Cristina Peri Rossi has the knack of taking the absurd and building a surrealistic absurdity on it using clean, rational, direct langauge. A man suddenly unable to decide whether to go forward or backward, a cruise without a destination, a librarian working on documenting useless efforts, a person unable to cope with the decisions necessary to get out of bed. ... Simple, familiar actions turned topsy-turvy in a world uncomfortably our own. Recommended.

"The Museum of Useless Efforts" is a marvelous collection of short stories by Cristina Peri Rossi, a writer from Uruguay who has lived in exile in Spain. The stories have been translated into English by Tobias Hecht. There are 30 short pieces in this collection; a good number of them are in the 3 to 6 page length range.

Many of Peri Rossi's stories are surreal or absurd. Some have subtle comic touches. Although her work invites comparison to other such Latin American writers as Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortazar, Peri Rossi is a remarkable talent in her own right. Her stories, as translated by Hecht, have both a stark, crystalline purity and a painful beauty.

"Museum" includes stories about violence, death, alienation, dislocation, and frustrated desire. The stories often feature unnamed characters in unnamed locales. Some of the most intriguing pieces in the "Museum" include "Tarzan's Roar," a deconstruction of a Hollywood icon; "The Lizard Christmas," which ironically comments on Christian tradition; and "the Effect of Light on Fish," which moves gracefully from an innocuous beginning to a disturbing climax. Overall, a frequently stunning collection by a very talented writer.

hi everyone, please buy, read and cherish this book! you would not believe how much work went into this - I know because I'm the author's daughter. BUY BUY BUY! :) thanks

This is a remarkable look at the untamed American West of 1834-1837 through the eyes of a young naturalist. Despite its age, this account is quite readable. The smaller segments describing Townsend's visits to Hawaii, Tahiti and Chile are also enjoyable.

Since this is a diary, it does have some flat spots (not every day can be an adventure), but mostly Townsend fills his descriptions with details and color that bring his encounters alive. You can sense Townsend maturing as the journey goes on. One suggestion to the editors: If a new edition is produced, it would be nice to include a map of Townsend's travels, because in some places it's hard to tell where he is.

A tip to the reader: Skip the introduction, since it's mostly just a summary of what you'll be reading. It does, however, contain a description of what happened to Townsend after the book, so go back and read that once you finish.

Almost a century and a half ago, Yosemite and Yellowstone gave birth to the National Park idea. Even in the 21st century the concept's definition is not concrete. Alfred Runte's important contribution to environmental history tells the story of the national park idea since its inception and its continued reinterpretation.

According to Runte, cultural nationalism sparked the National Park idea, not environmentalism. Americans enjoyed finding natural wonders that rivaled or even surpassed Europe's scenic beauty. At first national parks served as symbols of national pride and, in time, as areas of public recreation (14). As National Parks thoroughly discusses, economics, not altruism, have played a huge role in the designation and management of national parks. "Worthless" land - land which could not be utilized in the form of mining, farming or another pursuit - determined which landmarks the nation protected as well as how it would protect them (49). In principle, the nation believed in the contradictory statement, worthless land builds cultural nationalism. The early preservationist movement rested on what scenery lacked rather than what it contained (58).

Wilderness preservation was not the primary justification for national parks until the 1930s. Until then preservationists supported actions contrary to their primary aims. Preservationists encouraged tourism both to show a recognized use for the land as well as demonstrate that tourism might generate more revenue from the land than could be earned by exploiting its natural resources. Preservationists allied themselves with railroads and concessionaires that pushed for designation of parks to increase passenger traffic to each natural preserve and, in turn, income. The damming of the Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite taught preservationists to rely as much on economic rationales for protection as on the standard emotional ones (83). Preservationists actually encouraged the development of more roads and trails in National Parks, fearing alternate uses such as reservoirs.

Runte opens his narrative by describing the sad state of Niagara Falls, which even as early as 1860 became commercialized with gatehouses and fences rimming the cascades as numerous curio hawkers annoyed each visitor. Niagara Falls became one of the first warnings against the negative outcome of encroachment upon national wonders and strong evidence in convincing Congress to designate Yellowstone a national park (9). The early intrusion of capitalists at Niagara Falls proved a harbinger of things to come. Contradictory to Niagara's warnings against decimation of natural beauty, national parks, by their mere designation, became attractions corporations pounced on to extract tourist dollars with little thought to consequences.

Runte's exhibits his smooth writing style. He expertly transitions from one chapter to the next. He organizes his narrative topically and generally follows a chronological order but backtracks on occasion, which sometimes proves confusing. The book misrepresents fact on a few occasions. For example, it insinuates that Zion National Park became a park in 1919 without national monument status first, when in reality Zion had been Mukuntaweap National Monument since 1909.

Runte's volume is by no means exhaustive, but distinguishes itself as an excellent survey of National Park history. Runte focuses on the national park idea, but never concretely defines it at no fault of his own because the national park idea is constantly being reshaped. The volume expertly illustrates the contradictions in the national park idea and the exploitation the idea has generated.

This book provides a good history of the national parks. The first chapters on the history of the national park idea and the national park system are particularly interesting and well-written. Runte emphasizes "cultural nationalism" as an explanation for the park idea, the notion that American cultural identity could rest on our relationship with wilderness and scenery, and thus best be established in opposition to Europe, where culture is tied to human history.

Runte makes those claims well, but the first edition attracted the most attention for its "worthless lands" thesis, and this edition begins with a response to his critics. This is a very measured response, emphasizing clarification more than argumentation, but Runte stands his ground on the issues. His main claim is that a necessary condition for creation of a park before the 1930s was that the land be worthless or un-economic for primary products such as agriculture, grazing, mining or timber; many of the parks were recognized as valuable for tourism, which is why they were made parks. Properly circumscribed, the thesis gets the first decades right, though it starts to break down at about the time the Everglades NP was established. By the time of the New Deal and Civilian Conservation Corps, the worthless lands thesis is clearly no longer correct.

Like other histories of the national parks that I've read, this book emphasizes the trophy parks - - those with monumental scenery such as Yellowstone and Yosemite. Runte nods in the direction of the national recreation areas (like Lake Mead) and urban parks (like Golden Gate) more than most other authors, but he really only mentions them in passing. Many other parks, even beautiful ones, get ignored if they are not famous (Voyageurs, Big Bend, and Theodore Roosevelt, to name three). And what's up with Steamtown USA or Homestead National Monument of American, for crying out loud?

Like everyone else he ignores whole categories of national parks, some of which are visited more than the trophy parks - the historic sites in Washington, Philadelphia, New York and Boston; the battlefield parks; and the Blue Ridge Parkway, among others. Each of those units get 5-15 million visitors a year, while Yosemite and Yellowstone get about 4 million. Even so, I haven't yet found the history of the park system that gives these non-monumental parks justice.

Leaving these other parks out matters a *lot* for Runte's thesis. Golden Gate NRA sits on prime real estate in America's most crowded city, and is hardly "worthless" land. The historic sites on the eastern seaboard lie in the most valuable parts of Boston, New York and Philadelphia - not to mention the National Mall and other sites in Washington DC. Fredericksburg/Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Manassas, Murfreesboro, Chickamauga/Chattanooga and other battlefields are subject to strong development pressures and surrounded by suburban growth. Cuyahoga, Santa Monica Mountains, Cape Cod, and other parks would make attractive up-scale suburbs and second homes if they were not protected.

Clearly the "cultural" and "recreational" parks differ from the scenic and monumental parks, and they differ in precisely the ways most damaging to Runte's worthless lands thesis. Though Runte has given us a classic history of the parks as we have traditionally thought of them, we need a new approach to the history of the national park system as a whole. The literature has emphasized scenery, wildlife, geology and science but not culture and history. Though Runte begins with American cultural nationalism, he does not fit the cultural and historical parks into his vision of the system as a whole.

This book gives insight into what made Nebraska football unique and successful, as well as showing what changed the last few years.

A good review of the Devaney, Osborne and Solich years. Provides a fair amount of insight as to what was happening within the athletic department under Steve Pederson, the firing of Frank Solich and it takes some shots at Bill Callahan. Currently the only Nebraska book of it's type, so it may be worth the price for that alone.

The biggest problem I had with the book is that it contains a little too much from Doak Ostergard's perspective. There are references to Pederson's handling of the athletic department from other than Ostergard, but it could have had more.

Ron Hansen has written of of the most evocative short stories I have ever read. The whole book is wonderful but "Wickedness" is so good it would be worth buying just to have that story alone.

I can only think of Barbara Kingsolver as someone whose imagery can compare to Ron Hansen's. I just love the literary images he comes up with. Nebraska is a collection of short stories, all very different from each other. My favorites:

"Wickedness": winters in Nebraska can be brutal, but January of 1888 will go down in history. The weather was pure wickedness. The story is a collage of small stories. It opens on a train, where a young teacher, on her way to Nebraska, shares the ride with a poor carpenter who lost his limbs and ears to frostbite. It continues with a variety of sad and happy endings. My favorite was the one about the pony in charge of delivering a message to parents who did not know where their child was.

"True Romance": another great story, very allegorical, about a mysterious evil force that kills cows in a particularly gruesome way. Don't want to spoil the ending, but I certainly did not see it coming.

"Red-Letter Days": an old man, avid golfer, recovering alcoholic, retired lawyer, keeps a diary. If you thought that diaries were only for teenage girls, think again. So sweet, so moving the feelings that he can pour on those pages.

Robert Wooster has picked an excellent subject (Nelson Miles) to show the transition of the US Army from the Civil War to WWI. General Miles was a man who seemed to be in the thick of things at just about every stage of the way. What was of particular interest for me in this book was the changes in the military brought upon by the end of the Civil War. Brevet officers full of past glory were suddenly fighting for junior officer posts and finding advancement almost non-existant. Through his stubborn perseverance, Miles slowly but surely rose in the ranks. Along the way he was involved directly or indirectly with the Civil War, the Great Sioux War, the capture of Chief Joseph, the capture of Geronimo, the Battle of Wounded Knee, and the Spanish American War. At times he seemed lucky, conniving, able, and inept. "General Miles and the Twilight of the Frontier Army" is a book that deals equally with both of its' title subjects. Wooster brings us both the glory of history and the drudgery of its' shadows. It leaves one with a rather melancholy feeling as a way of life drew to a close along with its' century.

When I read this book, I really wanted to focus just on Miles and his contributions to the Indian Frontier since he virtually closed it out. I learned far more about Miles, a highly skilled and brave field commander who rose all the way to command of the Army by the Spanish American War, than I expected. I was aware of his tremendous ego but I learned more about his political intrigues, compulsion for rank, rivalries with other officers and attraction to crowds and newspapermen. Wooster takes you rather quickly through Miles' youth and astounding CW achievements and spends a good portion on Miles and the Indian Frontier. He outlines quite in impressive detail Miles constant maneuvering for command and reforms, his controversies with Generals and Presidents including Teddy Roosevelt. Miles was involved in the Sioux campaigns, Sitting Bull, Grey Beard, Cheyenne, Nez Perce and Geronimo and the Spanish American War. After reading the book you will have a mixed feel for Miles. Did he want to be in the midst of the action just to participate in an intense challenge or was it always to as a platform to achieve rank? His politics later in life were anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant but he later worked to get the Indians a better deal and he preferred the emancipation of the Philippines after the Spanish American War. He is an important read, he was even in over all command but not the field officer at Wounded Knee. Miles saw many of the most famous Chiefs at their peak and literally escorted them to their final homes, the reservations. Wooster writes an incredibly objective book on a person who contributed tremendously to our history from 1860 to 1910.

The six essays Willa Cather gathered into this small book in 1936 give the reader a good idea of her philosophy of literature and also provide anecdotes about several literary figures she admired or met during her career. She writes about Flaubert (or, more precisely, Cather's friendship with his niece), Mrs. James T. Fields (the widow of the co-owner of the famed publisher Ticknor and Fields), Sarah Orne Jewett, Thomas Mann, and Katherine Mansfield. An additional piece, entitled "The Novel Demeuble" (which might be translated as "The Novel Unplugged") objects to the excesses in the fiction written by her contemporaries.

The title of the collection refers to Cather's lament that most of these writers would no longer be of interest to those then under forty years of age, and there is certainly an "old-fashioned," even prudish, stance throughout. She dismisses the realists for their "cataloguing of a great number of material objects, in explaining mechanical processes, the methods of operating manufactories and trades, and in minutely and unsparingly describing physical sensations. . . . Have such things any proper place in imaginative art?" Although she mentions only Balzac, she clearly has in mind such American writers as Dreiser, Lewis, and Upton Sinclair. And she has no brook for Lawrence, whose characters are "dehumanized by a laboratory study of the behavior of the bodily organs under sensory stimuli." Cather didn't always feel this way; thirty-five years earlier she wrote glowingly of Frank Norris (in an essay not included here), praising the descriptions of workaday environment in "McTeague" as "convincing proof of power, imagination and literary skill." Apparently, Cather eventually believed that the scales tipped too far toward realism--or her tastes simply changed.

The most interesting, and breeziest, piece concerns Madame Grout, who was Flaubert's niece and lifelong correspondent (the "Caro" in his "Letters to My Niece Caroline"); Cather manages simultaneously to provide a touching account of this aging lady and to instill an increased appreciation of Flaubert's achievement. Probably the key to understanding Cather's work is her ode to Jewett, to whom she was much indebted and whose work she championed to the reading public throughout her life. The weakest essay, it must be noted, is Cather's review of Thomas Mann's "Joseph" novels. She did not live to see the fourth book published, so the essay was premature, and her judgment that these books were Mann's greatest is hard to support. (Dare I say that it would be far more fascinating to know what she thought of "Death in Venice"?) Even here, however, she captures Mann's essence--his "rich deliberateness which is never without intensity and deep vibration." All the essays, then, will provide Cather fans with a glimpse of the art underlying the fiction she herself published in the late 1920s and the 1930s--from "Death Comes for the Archbishop" to "Lucy Gayheart."

William Gass recently observed that participants in contemporary writing workshops are not interested in literature. They are interested in writing, in "expressing a self as shallow as a saucer." Willa Cather was interested in literature, in art, in permanence, and the essays in Not Under Forty memorably illustrate her beliefs. Her seriousness and integrity are very much needed in an era when acclaimed young novelists use their acknowledgements to thank Mom for reading their manuscripts and correcting their punctuation.

Nebraska's best known writers pulled up stakes and headed elsewhere -- Willa Cather to Greenwich Village and Wright Morris to California. A prolific writer who stayed close to home was Mari Sandoz, born of a Swiss-German homesteader in the northwest Nebraska Panhandle in 1896. Her biography of her father, "Old Jules," made her suddenly famous in 1935 when she was nearly 40 years old.

Sandoz knew the frontier from firsthand experience, and although her tyrranical father prevented her from earning more than an 8th grade education, she became a tireless researcher of the turbulent period of confrontation between whites and Indians. Inheriting a deep respect for Native Americans from her father, she represents them sympathetically in her best known histories, "Crazy Horse" (1942) and "Cheyenne Autumn" (1953). She also wrote novels and many short stories, some works published after her death in 1966.

"Old Jules Country" is a selection of nonfiction writings from several of her books, plus a few shorter essays. Readers today may have trouble with her historical work, as Sandoz writes from the point of view of the people she's writing about. So to a modern reader, the frame of reference is not always clear. Although her work is based on extensive research, the style reads more like historical fiction. For some, this will make the material more accessible; for those looking for historical accuracy it will add an element of ambiguity.

Still, with patience, a reader can begin to glean a great deal about Indians during the years of the frontier and quickly discover the limitations of stereotypes and cliches that dominate our meager understanding of "how the West was won." The essay "The Lost Sitting Bull," for instance, explores some of the political differences among the tribes in their dealings with the government and the military, and for the general reader it opens a wide window into a largely forgotten history.

More accessible are her personal memories of her father, as told in "Old Jules," and of growing up in the Nebraska sandhills along the Niobrara River. "The Homestead in Perspective" presents a personalized picture of staking a claim in the prairie sod and the odds against making a go of it. The essays "Snakes" and "Coyotes and Eagles" reveal more of the day-to-day realities of frontier life. For readers of modern memoirs, these essays will seem more familiar in their structuring of incident, choice of detail, and personal disclosure.

I recommend this book to anyone with some knowledge of the high plains frontier, its settlement, and its history. It is a good introduction to the nonfiction of Mari Sandoz, and a reader will be drawn to read more from the individual books excerpted here. For more about homesteading in Nebraska, an excellent social history is Everett Dick's "Sod-House Frontier."

Maria Sandoz is one of the most underrated American writers of her time. Her account of Old Jules is a vivid portait into the obscure history of the plains, and the people who lived and died there.