Nebraska Books

In `Sacajawea's People' Mann writes with the accuracy and flavor of Ambrose, and a touch of western narrative resembling Stegner. A must read for anybody remotely interested in the tale of the Corps of Discovery, and the fallout that ensued from that momentous journey. Perfectly timed with the bicentennial of the expedition.

As a dedicated Sacred Harp Singer,I have just one thing to say
about Ms.Eastburn's book,this is a very well written book that can be read on many levels.It is a travelogue about Sacred Harp Singings,it is a
cookbook filled with a sampling of some of the dishes that you may find on
a table at a dinner on the grounds,it is also the evolution of a Singer from just a journalist.This book would make an excellent companion to the
excellent Documentary; "Awake My Soul".

This is the final book in the Holme trilogy, a saga about a Viking thrall and his family. The book starts out with the aftermath of the destruction of the Christian church by Holme. He leads other thralls in an uprising for freedom, which ends in disaster. Once again, Holme is in trouble and must flee again. Holme goes to see the sympathetic king, and becomes his personal blacksmith. Holme's wife Ausi and daughter Tora move onto the king's settlement as well.

The family who originally owned Holme and Ausi is down to its last two surviving members - the old chieftains wife and their son. The old woman still wants vengence, meaning she wants to own Tora and Ausi once more. She's too afraid to want to own Holme again...he's far too dangerous. However, the son Svien has other ideas. He loves Tora and wants her to be his bride of her own free will. Svien works things out with Holme and things go well with Svien and Tora.

The clash between Christians and the worshippers of the old wooden gods comes to a head, and the battle between thralls and freemen continues. This is a very untraditional tale for the genre, written throughout with virtually no dialogue. Fridegard is a first-class storyteller, and infuses beautiful descriptions of wildlife and settings like a true master. The trilogy is a truly brilliant work of artistic literature.

These are Owen Wister's first western stories, written for Harpers Monthly in 1894-95, and published together under the title "Red Men and White" in 1896. Lovers of his novel "The Virginian" will recognize some of his themes in this collection and an early version of The Virginian himself in the character of Specimen Jones, who appears in three of the stories, first as a drifter and prospector, then as a soldier in the U.S. Army.

The Easterner who narrates much of "The Virginian" appears here, too, in a long story that takes him on a journey across Arizona in the rough, disreputable days before statehood. Wister's concern for the American character, which he finds much eroded among civilians in the West, crops up in this story, "A Pilgrim on the Gila." By contrast, we see his sympathy for young men on the wrong side of the law, only after it has been first lampooned in the satiric "The Serenade at Siskiyou," where the genteel ladies of the town attempt to lighten the hearts of two prisoners held for murder.

That story also explores the tensions between men and women in a frontier world where gender roles are rigidly different. This and one other story concern themselves with the occurrence of lynching alleged lawbreakers. Both of these themes emerge again dramatically in "The Virginian."

Many stories reflect Wister's respect for the disciplined men of the American Army on the frontier. Meanwhile, Indians figure in two stories: "Little Big Horn Medicine" and "The General's Bluff." The title story, "Salvation Gap," is a mining camp melodrama, involving the murder of a woman and the hanging of her lover. "La Tinaja Bonita" is a long story in a similar vein, involving a man's long journey across an arid Arizona desert, driven by jealous love and ending in death. Finally, "The Second Missouri Compromise" tells a humorous story of unreconstructed Southern politicians at odds with the Territorial Governor and his Treasurer, both northerners, in Boise, Idaho.

Wister was already a good storyteller in these early pieces, capturing in vivid detail the western terrain and the mostly squalid life of frontier towns and mining camps. While fascinated by the West, he does not romanticize it. He observes the excesses of unbridled independence there, while lamenting the absence of good sense and ethics among Easterners, especially politicians in Washington. He sees glimpses of character in a few men, mostly in uniform, and they will come together finally in the shining example of The Virginian some half dozen years later.

This is the best novel that I have read from XXth century Spanish literature. Through a deep emotional and profound language, Esther Tusquets introduces us into the world of this female narrator whose name is not spelled out in the entire novel. At the same time, El mismo mar de todos los veranos explores female subjectivity in an unprecedented way, and it is the first Spanish novel ever to portray lesbianism in its literature. Through this creative language full of metaphors, imagery, symbolism, and stories, the narrator introduces us into her world and into her mind, in fact, throughout the whole novel, it is the mind and experience of this anonymous narrator that the reader explores. El mismo mar de todos los veranos at the same time presents a critical portrayal of marriage, family, and heterosexuality, showing that women's experience is very limited; the narrator has always felt unsatisfied and a deep sense of failure when it comes to the traditional roles that are assigned to women (wife, lover, daughter, mother), leaving her with nothing else but language, words, metaphors, imagery and a deep desire to tell past stories. It is this intimate language that shows how female experience and homosexuality (in this particular case lesbianism) can only exist in isolation, and it is precisely in this state of isolation that past and present will coexist. What personally passionates me about this novel is that it portrays our precarious and insignificant existence as human beings; when we have lost the love of our lives, when all our dreams and expectations have never come true, or when they at least are not what we would have expected them to be or what we believed they should have been, when all the tenderness and love have gone away, we are only left with a deep sensation of sadness and emptiness, and the only things that we have left are language, words, metaphors, symbolism, and the desire to relive and retell a painful past.
An excellent masterpiece to be read by every contemporary reader.

Mari Sandoz portrays america after the frontier. In these books she tells tales of life as America grew up. Most stories are about the children of the pioneers, people who grew up with stories of indians and wild days but had adventures of their own, which Mari wonderfully captures in these books. Anyone who liked her other books like Old Jules or Cheyenne Autumn should read these stories, which give a picture of what nebraska area was like in the 1890-1930 era. Mari Sandoz writes wonderfully as usual.

At long last, a dispassionate, balanced biography of Antonio López de Santa Anna is available that is informed by the last thirty years of historiographical advances in nineteenth century Mexican history. Santa Anna of Mexico, written by Will Fowler, one of the leading Anglophone interpreters of nineteenth century Mexico, provides the reader with a new perspective that chips away at the barnacles of the Black Legend that for over 150 years have encrusted the "leader all Mexicans (and Texans) love to hate."

Faced with internal division as a result of provinces not yet fully integrated and external adversaries that lusted after territory and markets, Mexico's journey toward forging nation would be prolonged, painful and problematic. In Fowler's hands, Santa Anna emerges as a man of his time when Mexico was making this painful journey of trying to define herself as a nation and create a hegemonic state that could govern and at the same time defend its territorial integrity. Consequently, it was a time of experimentation or as Fowler states a time for varying proposals. During this "Age of Proposals", (for a detailed look at this era, see Fowler's Mexico in the Age of Proposals) Santa Anna was one of many struggling to find ways of assimilating heterogeneous cultures and integrating legitimate claims from Mexico's far-flung provinces under a suitable governing framework before they could construct a hegemonic state, construct (imagine) a unified social identity and truly forge a nation-state.

According to Fowler, Santa Anna was "not the power-crazed megalomaniac his critics made him out to be" and did not aspire to having absolute power. Instead, he was consistent in his popular nationalism with an anti-politics and anti-party stance, in which he tried to play the role of an arbitrator between the ever-disputing political elite. Santa Anna also emerges as a patriotic, courageous, albeit impetuous military man who loved his country and whose "personal corruption and alleged lack of principle differed little from that of many other successful generals and politicians."

A professor of Texas history once lectured that one cannot understand Texas history without understanding Mexican history. For those Texas historians who want to understand the events of the 1834 closure of congress, a congress that only had six days left in its legislative calendar, Fowler states that "[a]lthough Santa Anna was the elected president (1833-1836), he did not actually serve as president for more than a few months, making a mockery of the accusations that he was a tyrant or that he was personally responsible for the eventual change to centralism." What Santa Anna did do after the closure of congress was take emergency powers to dismantle the radical anti-clerical reforms that were adversely agitating the republic. But, Vicente Guerrero had already set a precedence of taking emergency powers during his presidency. Historians of Texas should heed that advice and enrich their understanding of the events of 1832-1836 by incorporating this excellent study as well as other recent works written by Mexican scholars into their studies instead of resorting to the dictator-tyrant typology that up to the present so many have done.

Fowler's judgment in the end is that Santa Anna "does not deserve to carry the full blame for everything that went wrong in Mexico following independence. His story, with all the contradictions, confusion, and pain that it entailed was one that reflected the traumas Mexico had to endure during the early national period to become a modern nation-state."

Combining a seventeen-year long research into the politics of independent Mexico and primary materials from municipal, state, regional and national (including the heretofore difficult to access military) archives, Fowler presents an excellent, scholarly yet accessible one-volume study of this much disparaged Mexican. This book is one of the essential studies to understanding what eminent Mexican historian, Josefina Vásquez, has termed, "los años olividados."

There have been a great many fine books published in the last year on Lewis and Clark. One of the very best of those books is Dayton Duncan's Scenes Of Visionary Enchantment: Reflections On Lewis And Clark and richly deserves ongoing recommendation beyond the famous expedition's anniversary date. Presenting Duncan's retracing of the Corps of Discovery's route from St. Louis to the Pacific and back - four different times in the past twenty years, his travelogue commentary provides keen insights on people and places seen along the way, emphasizing why Lewis and Clark's discoveries remain so important today.

Wilkerson's Scribe of the Great Plains tells the wonderful story of Mari Sandoz, writer of the definitive work on Crazy Horse. It is a work enriched with detail of Sandoz' life as a child growing up on the plains of Nebraska. Although a part of the Great Heartlander series of books written for schoolchildren, the book maintains interest for readers of all ages. It is written with excellent detail of prairie life and genuinely captures the day-to-day life of a young person living in the west.

I was surprised at how much I enjoyed this book - both for its artwork and for the descriptive text and content. The fact that it is in black and white does not detract in any way, shape or form from the enjoyment of browsing through its pages. It has become one of my favorite books that I recommend to others with a diversity of interests - mental states, the architecture and design of asylums and sanitariums, the questionable diagnoses and treatments of mental illness through the ages, the abuse and exploitation of vulnerability, authentic facial expressions of great terror, pain and suffering, and the misguided views and prejudice of various historical periods. It even makes a fine coffee table book for those of us that are a little out of the ordinary.