Nebraska Books

Congratulations for the job well done! We're very proud of you. A great author(basing from the reviews of readers around the globe)and a great professor. We will always remember you. From your students in St. Joseph's College Quezon City, Philippines Ed 202-Summer'99

This is one of the best books I have ever read. I felt like I was pulled into this book and placed right before the characters. Conde is a wonderful writer who takes the reader on an exciting and thrilling journey. Potential readers, don't be put off because this book is not an easy read. It is well worth your time and you'll be surprised at how very interesting it is.

Zane Grey's first novels concerned his ancestors, the Zane family, and the Ohio frontier of the late 18th century. They are fairly authentic, historically, and heroic and romantic as well.

Very well written, important review of an uninvestigated time in American history.

This book may be a little pricey, but it reveals much about Mari Sandoz, one of the foremost Nebraska authors of the 20th century. Sandoz's correspondence gives insight into her politics, publishing, friendships, and more. Spanning the years from 1928 through 1966, the letters in this book provide the reader with information about her thoughts and concerns that cannot be found elsewhere. This book was edited by Helen Winter Stauffer, Sandoz's biographer-- author of Mari Sandoz: Story Catcher of the Plains.

I first read "Letters of a Woman Homesteader" by Elinore Stewart. I enjoyed it so much I bought this one too. It is the same kind of writing . Just a continuation of the previous book. Excellent writing of a truly gifted writer and woman from the turn of the century, 1900 on. She has a way of bringing you into her time as though you were on the journey with her. You can visualize all that she talks about. She has a way about her that you don't see much anymore. A love of her fellow man.
The stories in this book are from an Elk hunt that she made with her husband and neigbors. It isn't really about hunting but what she endures on the trip. How everyone pitches in to help one another and help those they come across. When they come across homesteaders out in the middle of nowhere they always are welcomed in. She tells in her own way what the people she comes across are like and how they behave. the letters are quite heartwarming and fun to read. I enjoyed every word. I highly recommend this book to those interested in Wyoming life at the turn of the century. Or just interested in how the people interacted with each other back then.
I'll be getting another of Elinore Stewarts books soon.

I admit I am biased since I am reading this in an Email group called "18th Century Worlds", which perhaps give me more insight and perception into the world of Mary Wollstonecraft. But my Penguin edition of the book is very good, including as it does both Mary's "Short Residence" and the biography of her by her widowed husband William Godwin. Richard Holmes' introduction is a delight, situating the book in its context and also making the life of Mary accessible, and the relationships between Mary and the people of her day and age very interesting.

So back to the text of Mary's letters. If you have ever wondered what it was like to be an active, passionate, capable and brave woman at the latter end of the 18th century, when the French Revolution and the tides of Romanticism were sweeping over Europe, and challenging Enlightenment thought-- or even if you've never given a damn-- this is an attention-grabbing and engrossing account. Provided you can get over its prose, or approach it open-mindedly (which many easily bored illiterati might not be able to), you will be struck by its poetic qualities, and by Wollstonecraft's candid emotional intensity.

In the early 1790s, a poltically radical Englishwoman woman took a business trip to Scandinavia on behalf of her common-law husband, an American businessman involved in smuggling. She took with her only her young daughter, still a child, and her French maid. "Residence in Sweden" is an account of her journey written in the form of letters to the man she left behind (though this doesn't show up in the text itself, the informative introduction gives the background). Partway into her trip, she leaves her child and the nurse behind and continues on her own to regions remote and picturesque, and foreign not only to most English women of the period, but to the majority of English men as well.

Wollstonecraft goes on philosopical rambles, as the images of social life and the landscape around her remind her of her experiences in revolutionary France. The text raise many questions important to the Enlightenment philosophes, about the role of women, man's place in nature, human habits and manners. Never are we allowed to forget that we are reading the words of a flesh and blood woman who feels deeply. Many of her recollections are painful, and sometimes she is depressed. But there is always something arrestingly beautiful in what she describes, some touch of the author's vivacity and the newness and intensity of her travels, to steer one away from the melancholy, or at least to make it something more sublime.

I'm taking this one with me to college, and I foresee many re-readings. Holmes calls it Mary's best literary work: it has none of the bombast of her "Vindication of the Rights of Woman" but instead is something even more thoughtful and readable.

For companion reading I highly recommend Claire Tomalin's "Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft".

NEVER AGAIN! I haven't been so moved about fascism and Nazism since visiting the national holocaust museum in Washington DC several years ago. This little book tells the story of one town in Poland and how it was impacted by World War 2. One of the things that makes this book so compelling is that it is about the town that Fresno's very own Ellie Bluestein's family came from.

We learn about life before and after the Nazis invade Strzegowo by hearing from the survivors. Their stories give a glimpse into what life was like and how the Jewish community reacted as life was forever changed for everyone in that town. Today, there are no Jews in Strzegowo. All but a handful were killed by Hitler's "final solution" and those who survived did not return. It is hard to imagine the atrocities committed by the German fascists but this book takes you one step at a time through that period of history.

All of the Jews were sens to the death camps were not sent at once. There was a long process that included making them virtual slaves for the ethnic German population in Strzegowo, establishing ghettos where they were forced to live, and executions for offences like possessing a loaf of bread. The brutalization continued for years until most of the population was shipped by train to Auschwitz. There, one of the young men was forced to work piling bodies into the ovens. The experience was worse than death itself and he decided to voluntarily join the line to the gas chambers. These images are hard to imagine but impossible to forget.

Gene Bluestein has produced a testimonial that I will always remember.

Review by:

Mike Rhodes Editor Labor/Community Alliance Newsletter P.O. Box 5077 Fresno Ca 93755...

I felt sheer rage in trying to read Loiterature. It's a wonderful title for a wonderful project: examining the literature of digression, of loitering, of digressive and discursive paths through the world and the word. I love some of the literature Ross Chambers (the "Marvin Felheim Distinguished University Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan"-even his title is a long and winding road) examines in Loiterature (University of Nebraska Press). I love Tristram Shandy, I love Bulgakov's Heart of a Dog (Bulgakov perfectly captured the slinking, conniving, petty criminal, canine character in his brillant comic fable), although Professor Chambers leaves out the great classic of eddying, loitering, idleness: Ivan Goncharov's Oblomov. Still, I liked-at first, anyway-the fact that Professor Chambers opens a section of Loiterature called "Learning From Dogs" with what seems at first like a hilarious parody of an academic deconstructing Barbara Bush's Millie's Book-the work she supposedly co-wrote with her spaniel. "One's doubts about Millie's `authorship' grow more strongly when one looks more closely at the front matter," Professor Chambers (parodically? solemnly?) informs us before concluding (I believe in all seriousness) that Millie's Book is evidence of the imperialist thought-control project of the hegemony. Teaching people to read (the profits from Millie's Book go to the Foundation for Family Literacy) is a way of inculcating "a suitable sense of one's inadequacy with respect to the hegemonic model."

Here is where the sheer rage comes in. At the fact that this "Marvin Felheim Distinguished University Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan" (no trace of the hegemony in the way he presents himself, huh?) seems to take this sentiment so seriously that he can actually proceed to somehow link the depiction of Millie the poodle to the slogan over the gates at Auschwitz: "Arbeit Macht Frei." "It's a bit hard," the Marvin Felheim Distinguished etc. tells us, hard "on Barbara Bush and the Foundation of Family Literacy, I know, to draw a parallel between Millie's Book and the gates of Auschwitz ..."

No, it's not merely hard; it's ridiculous if not meant as self-parody. If it's meant seriously, it makes the Distinguished etc., into just what he, in his habitual overkill, calls poor Millie "a complete, unmitigated, totally uncritical dope."

But I am grateful to Loiterature for the title, for the conception of a literature of loitering-and for the sheer rage its silly, jargon-clotted execution inspires.

Lower Moments in Higher Education tells selected stories of the author's experiences throughout his higher education career. The true stories provide a framework which tactfully leads to the question of ethics related to the story. I liked the way each story had a message. This book is a must read for the novice and seasoned alike. The book would also be a great required reading for higher education students as well as sitting executives