Nebraska Books

Says the University of Nebraska Press:

When Vince Mendoza began to write his life story, he turned to his memory of visiting the deathbed of his great-grandmother, a Creek Indian who embodied the history and dauntless will of her people. The memory inspired both sorrow and boundless pride.

Son of Two Bloods, Mendoza's vibrant and candid account of his life, is full of such grief and rejoicing. Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1947, Mendoza was the child of a Creek mother and a Mexican father. In this book he vividly portrays his Mexican and Indian relatives and his confusing, often painful, childhood interactions with the dominant white society. He left childhood behind when he was sent to Vietnam. There he found hatred, terror, and camraderie in equal measures.

On returning from Vietnam Mendoza faced a professional, economic, and personal struggles but found consolidation in love, family, and friendship. His moving account of his first wife's courageous, losing battle with cancer ends with renewal as Mendoza remarries and decides to explore his past, and his people, in writing. "Endure, then weep," he writes at last, "endure, and be rewarded, endure and rejoice, endure and learn."

Son of Two Bloods is his first book

A must read for every bird lover, Johnsgard's concise and informative account of the year in the life of a Snow Goose was truly an enjoyable read. In total, the text runs just over 100 pages, and there are a number of black & white photos, many of which are not, however, of Snow Geese.

This book is wonderful. It lifted my soul exactly when I needed it. A Nebraska story of simple yet mature friendships, truthful places, and families who with all their shortcomings belong to each other. Buy this book, read it and reflect on how you can become one of the "Sons of the River" with with your family and friends by the grace of God.

Evo Morales is elected the first Ingigenous president of Bolivia and the Indigenous people's movement of Mexico is on the march. Around the world activists and movement intellectuals have been making history by moving Indigenous peoples' struggles to the forefront of grass-roots politics. Accompanying these developments has been a lively and challenging discussion about Sovereignty in relationship to the Nationstate, global capital, cultural production, feminism and sexuality, eco-politics and so on. English-speaking activists and movement intellectuals can now access the currents of those discussions thanks to this anthology. Bringing together writings from North America, New Zealand/Aotearoa, Puerto Rico. Samoa, etc, this book is an excellent crash course in the terms of the debates around Sovereignty. Given the recent currency Sovereignty has received thanks to struggles in Latin America as well as recent writings by philosophers like Virno, Negri and Balibar, here's a book that offers an approach to Sovereignty from the perspective of Indigenous activists and scholars themselves. This book couldn't have come at a better time!

Better to read this than to read ten manuals on the subject of writing.

Blanchot evokes the non-presence of death in writing, writing's necessary complicity with death. This death, however, is not the Hegelian death that would negate and finalize the subject (cf Arendt), fixing it in a form on which judgement could finally be passed. No, true to his essay on the absence of any right to death (which appears in _The Work of Fire_ and _The Station Hill Blanchot Reader_), this death never occurs. This death is never present, happens at no particular time, and happens to no one (see also _The Writing of the Disaster_). It cannot be said to happen or occur at all. It is never present, and being so, shares with writing the latter's most unearthly, strange quality - the absense of the writer and of that about which has been written.

In addition to being the most profound book on writing about which I can write with any knowledge, this is also Blanchot's most coherent and accessible set of essays. They possess something of a centrality of purpose and, together, make up something of a book, rather than the collections which make up the remainder of his critical and quasi-critical work. This may be a failing in the eyes of most Blanchotophiles, but it provides a bridge from the normal style of scholarly exposition to his more challenging investigations, and can be recommended as a first approach for the reader who is unfamiliar with his work. Nevertheless, some prior acquaintance with Rilke, Mallarme, Hoelderlin, and Kafka will be of immeasurable aid.

Most importantly, this one stands as its own example of writing that utterly lacks completion, that is haunted throughout with a palpable sensation of absence, a sensation that is at once as appealing as it is astonishing and unsettling.

As the author's brother my view might be considered biased. This book came at the end of Elaine Jahners career as a teacher and academician. She died of cancer just before the book was published. She devoted her life to the study of how narrative and cognitive syle shapes both events in community and our very ability to comprehend and act. This is one of those books that challenges the reader to discover it's many dimensions. I found Elaine Jahner's sentences work themselves into comprehension if you work with them. You, as a reader, will discover the same thing. If you do the work to follow her process and language, at the end of the paragraph and chapter you will sit back and know that you have been somehow changed and transformed by her insightful analysis. I would encourage people to undertake the challenge of this book. After you have finished and closed the book you will understand the American West at a deeper and different level than if you hadn't opened it's cover.

Zane Gray's books were the first westerns I ever read. I loved them then and I love them now. "The Spirit Of The Border" takes place in the Ohio River Valley. This is very close to home for me. Zane Gray mixes historical events into his stories. It is fast moving and one you don't want to put down until you complete that last page. If you have not read this, read it you will enjoy the adventure. By Ruth Thompson author of "The Bluegrass Dream" and "Natchez Above The River" Natchez Above The River: A Family's Survival In The Civil WarQualifying Laps: A Brewster County NovelTravelersSins of the Fathers: A Brewster County NovelWriting as a Small BusinessThe Bluegrass Dream: A Wilderness Adventure of Early Settlers

Drawing upon ancestors notes, Zane Gray reconstructs the agony of America's initial transmontane western movement of the frontier away from the original colonies into the OHIO Valley where Indians and Whites contest for souls and Wetzel, and Indian hunter, pursues his cause in a most dramatic fashion. The book is a riveting account of true adventure the veiled backdrop of which is the continued occupation of the teritory occupied by British and Americans. An excellent introduction to further study of the the then misunderstood goal of Manifest Destiny.

With several editions of this book available, this review refers to the original 1920 publication. The book is an enjoyable and delightful account of Jedediah Smith and the men in his immediate circle who, over a period of eight years, explored and trapped the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific during the years 1823-1831. Although I did come across a few historical inaccuracies, this can be attributed to the fact that some documentation, letters, journals, etc. did not surface till later dates. For instance, James Clyman was with Smith during many of these exploits, and his "Journal of a Mountain Man" wasn't published until 1928. Dale Morgan's "Jedediah Smith And The Opening Of The West" which was published in 1953, gives the reader a more in depth study (with more historical documentation available at the time) into the character, achievements and defeats of this remarkable man. Neihardt's writing style is to be commended though, as he is very descriptive and expressive.

A very short, readable, poignant book. It chronicles a lawsuit filed by the Ponca Indians against the federal government in Nebraska in the 1870's. Nearly all of the text is contemporary material. The outcome of the trial was a triumph for American justice. For those of us whose notions of the settlement of the west are formed mainly by images of Colonel Custer, old 50's movies with battles between calvary and Indians, and the like, the narratives in this true story are full of surprises.

Lyonel Trouillot's intense, fragmentary portrayal of a night of apocalyptic violence in Port-au-Prince is harrowing and lacking in catharsis for the reader, as the two main narrators, a bordello madame (who used to be a school teacher) and a taxi driver who survives in an open sewer (though requiring an amputation) do not even hope that the viciousness will stop with the triumph of the Prophet (an abstracted Jean-Bertrand Astride) and the fall of the dictatorship (abstracted from that of the Duvaliers, père et fils).

"Does fire burn away suffering?", the madame asks. It is a rhetorical question, the answer to which is negative -- and that knowledge is not going to stop the burning, literal and figurative.

Things do happen in the concentrated, intense novel -- mostly bad things. What Trouillot wrote about was not just a single night, but an all-too representative condensation of Haitian history. Translator Linda Coverdale's useful introduction provides a succinct overview of the bloodstained history of Haiti, though I think that this portrayal of people living for being in on the kill has much wider reference than Haiti (having recently been in the Balkans...)

The realites he wrote about are stomach-turning. I don't think he should have sugarcoated them, but wish that he had marked who was narrating each of the short (2-5 page) chapters.