University of Nebraska Books

A very interesting book about the life and hardships of settlers on the Kansas prairie. It brought back memories of the stories I had on my ancestors. Excellent reading.

From the cover: Dealing primarily with the origin, growth, and final abandonment of the Cheyenne-Deadwood stage, this book also includes pertinent information about the life, customs, and manners of early Wyoming and Dakota pioneers who lived in the neighborhood of the stage routes or who participated in their development.

Black Elk Lives: Conversations With The Black Elk Family is an intimate set of interviews with the family and descendants of Nicholas Black Elk collected and edited by Hilda Niehardt and Lori Utecht. The intent of the collection is to present more of the perspectives and outlooks of the family members. Even more important, Black Elk Lives is a celebration of the strength and resilience of the human spirit, and the questioned survival of a way of life and thought that is Lakota in origin. Beginning with a transcription of a 1969 talk at Pine Ridge Boarding School by Benjamin Black Elk, the son and interpreter of Nicholas Black Elk as well as father and grandfather of other contributors, Black Elk Lives contains chapters on family memories, the changing roles of men and women, reclaiming the legacy (of Black Elk), the use and misuse of Lakota religion, fighting in Vietnam (Clifton DeSersa interview), working, Lakota legends, stories and games, grandfather's healing, and caring for grandfather (Black Elk).

Each chapter is actual interview dialogue, which allows the Black Elks to speak in their own chosen words. Because of this, and because of the relationship between the Black Elks and the interviewer(s), the reader has a sense of being told from the heart the feelings and experiences of these representatives of the Black Elk family. Sometimes the outlook is distinctly bleak and sad. Sometimes it seems hopeful. Other times, the speaker is making corrections, often to the assumptions or misunderstandings of the interpretations of "Black Elk Speaks" and other matters of Lakota vision.

Black Elk Lives is invaluable because of just that opportunity to inform the nonnative population. An example of this is at the end of the chapter titled "The Use and Misuse of Lakota Religion." Aaron DeSersa Jr. says:"It's just like my great-grandpa's book: People are walking on this road and some go off the road. As I've said, my great-grandpa's vision wasn't a spiritual vision. It was the future of our people, the Lakota people. Some people can't look at it that way - they want it to be spiritual and have a deep meaning. But what it is, when you look at it and interpret it, is what our people are going through in this life and in the future, and how they're going to be put back on that good road - bringing back the old ways and ceremonies and understanding them(p.103)."

The chapters of interviews and dialogue are enriched by several pages of black and white photos of the family members in several different decades. The cover jacket photograph of Nicholas Black Elk on Cuny Table (1931) is magnificent and unforgettable. Another helpful detail is the Black Elk family tree described on page 151. It is good to see the generations descent into the present. Perhaps there was not space for the birth dates of the present generation . It is still helpful to see the names of all the family members and to trace their lineage.

Black Elk Lives is a vibrant expression of the inheritors of the vision of "Black Elk Speaks". Now it is to unfold what will happen if people listen. Black Elk Lives will help to ensure that not only will they listen, perhaps also they will begin to hear and understand.

Nancy Lorraine, Reviewer

An excellently researched and written book. One would think that there isn't much new to be said about Jackie Robinson, who is among the two or three most written-about men in the history of baseball, but Lamb tells a story that has previously received little attention, mainly because the mainstream news media didn't think it was worth covering.

Lamb points out that black newspapers covered Robinson from the moment he began spring training with the Montreal Royals in 1946, and he uses many of those papers as his sources. In retelling the story of Branch Rickey's historic decision to sign Robinson and break baseball's color line, he refuses to treat Rickey as a lone, saintly hero; he points out that, for decades before Rickey joined the fray, black newspapers, socialists, and Communists had been agitating for the inclusion of blacks in organized baseball. Lamb shows that Lester Rodney, sportswriter for The Daily Worker, was also instrumental in the struggle to bring integration to the game. His is a name that seems to have been dropped from the record when other authors retell Robinson's story.

The most powerful aspect of the book is the way Lamb portrays the gagging outrageousness of the racial prejudice and discrimination Robinson faced in the Jim Crow-era American south. The vicious, buck-naked bigotry he and other blacks encountered ought to make every white American ashamed.

One of the American West's best authors, born way back in 1901, A. B. Guthrie became a rancher, a newspaperman, a teacher, a naturalist, an author who would win the Pulitzer Prize for THE WAY WEST, then a screenwriter nominated for an Academy Award.

Guthrie says he went into college as a conservative Methodist, became president of his fraternity, thought he had a good grip on permanent reality:

"An instructor of forgotten name asked students to list their prejudices. I couldn't think of any and wrote down 'none.' No prejudices, but we didn't want a Jew in the fraternity and were careful about that. There was only one Negro on campus, a fine boy too, as all admitted, but he was a Negro...No prejudices. Just a normal capacity for realism."

But his sense of reality changed: "Gone by the time I graduated was the last shred of belief in supernatural religion. In its place was a vehement rejection that, if less vocal now, yields not an inch to argument. Gone was the complacency about our social order. I became a liberal, if that word has any meaning any more..."

Guthrie recounts his reading back then, a long list of authors that he says left him cold in 1963 when he was writing this:

"A penalty of authorship is the restriction of range as a reader...fewer and fewer books enthrall him. For myself, I'll never again read a line of Sinclair Lewis. Reaching back once, I discovered I couldn't go on with Tess of the D'Urbervilles, under whose cloud I had lived so long. Dreiser, for all of his power, is too awkward to take. Afraid of disappointment, I haven't reread Frank Norris, much as I used to like him. Shaw is too wordy. Swinburne is too easily expert, Mencken too showy, Wolfe is too much woe-is-me. Of the authors who used to engage me, I find Joseph Conrad and his smoky prose perhaps the most rewarding now."

Guthrie tells some good stories, the ones about Kentucky especially interested me (he lived next door to Dr. Thomas Clark) but that section may not interest others.

More generally interesting are his encounters with Bernard DeVoto, Robert Frost, and other authors and academics. Howard Hawks, who worked on the movie of THE BIG SKY, recommended him for the job of adapting Jack Schaefer's SHANE:

"In 1951 I went to Hollywood, there to write a screen-play based on a thin western novel called Shane. I had never considered Hollywood or imagined I would be summoned. I had never written a screenplay. I had never even seen one on paper."

"When my agency called, I was incredulous. Yes, the agency assured me, George Stevens of Paramount was to be the producer-director, and he was an uncommon man, one that I'd enjoy working with. I had never heard of him. I said I wanted to read the book."

"Although Jack Schaefer, the author, betrayed some ignorance about the West that I knew--he came to know a lot more--his prose had drive, and it introduced into the myth of the West a couple of elements which, if not unique, were fresh and engaging nonetheless. One was that the story came from the observations and through the senses of a small boy. The other was that a triangle was kept innocent by the admiration of each character for the others. You would hardly have thought that situation had much appeal to the industry."

"Misgivings drove me to accept the assignment, though the salary of $1500 a week was no deterrent."

Guthrie recounts his meeting with Stevens on the day of his arrival. Stevens agreed that there would be no right and no wrong in the novel, that all sides would have their case. There were to be departures from the standard western of the day, "but in the main, we accepted the western myth, as we had to if we were going to stay with the book."

Guthrie was a naturalist, and it went against his grain to be otherwise. His autobiography is an overlooked gem and might be better known if the author had not lived and worked another twenty-some years, dying in 1991. David Peterson's splendid afterward fills in the later history of this man (in the trade paperback edition), but it left me longing for a fuller, more comprehensive biography of A. B. Guthrie.

In Blues for a black cat, Boris Vian's literary genius shines with rare intensity impossible to find in modern works. While I read a few of Vian's works in the past, revisiting this book was the perfect escape from the mundane world of today's literature. Without getting into any plot or revealing too much about this compilation of short stories, Blues for a black cat, is an insane, entertaining, humorous, profound, powerful avant-garde literary rarity. Vian's style remains unique decades after the original publication, and while seemingly incoherent on the surface, it is intentionally so. Vian plays with words and objects, breathing life into them, making them take on a life vastly different from what we are used to, changing directions and staying on track at the same time, and inserting a deep incision in to our consciousness. Through humor, Vian touches upon uneasy topics -- shallow interpersonal communications, lack of spirituality, empty lives... and above all, our humanity. Humanity, with its faults, seems to be a common thread throughout Vian's works (at least those I had the chance to read). The list of subjects in this book will be too long, but one story will forever remain, in my opinion, one of the best short stories written about WWII (or any war for that matter) -- Pins and Needles.
As Vian himself says: "Routine dulls impressions." Readers be assured, there is nothing dull about his writing. His prose is full of gems, his ramblings are amusing, his literary rebellion is unrepeated by the generations of writers that came after him. While not pure surrealism, his approach to reality, to make the most mundane breathe with a new life, is fascinating.
Julia Older's excellent translation finally brings this important piece to the English speaking audiences.
Blues for a black cat would be a great sample of Vian's work for those not familiar with this author.

A very interesting in-depth book about The Sphinx. It opens up one's eyes to the mysteries of this very famous myth, image, and archetype. I am almost finished reading it and have to say that it's a heady read of sorts, I have to absorb each chapter little by little.

Comments on "Buck Barry, Texas Ranger" edited by J. Greer.
Like John Salmon "RIP" Ford and Sam Houston, Buck Barry was one of the great men who "made" Texas. Ranger, farmer and sheriff, he fought Indians and outlaws before, while and after the American Civil War. He was a lieutenant colonel in the Mexican War and he led the "Texas Frontier" Regiment on the border of the Llano Estacado during the Civil War. Never his men met a Yankee unit, but they had to deal with Comanche ad Kiowas raids on the Texas Northern counties. Thanks to the editor James K. Greer, Buck Barry's private papers and reminiscences are a fascinating epic never dull to read and a welcome and useful contribution to the history of Texas and of the Confederate States.
Serge P. Noirsain, Belgian Historian. Author of "La flotte européenne de la Confédération sudiste" and "La Confédération sudiste, Mythes et Réalités".

This 95-page publication is an informative and fascinating catalogue book published in conjunction with a Smithsonian exhibition at the National Museum of History and Technology in 1980-81. Its subject is ranchlife in Paradise Valley, Nevada, north of Winnemucca and near the Oregon border. First settled by California farmer/ranchers in the 1860s, the region's development was influenced by the Spanish colonial agricultural practices of California, and its "cowboys" have traditionally been known as "buckaroos," an anglicized rendering of the Spanish "vaquero."

Contents of the book are based on field research by the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress. It covers history of the region and then focuses on cowboy life and culture, including clothing, bunkhouses, and branding irons. The book contains many black and white photographs, both vintage and contemporary. Several are two-page spreads. There is also a list of 244 artifacts from the exhibition, with photos of many of them....

As of this writing...this wonderful book is out of print. If you can find a copy, it's well worth having.

My grade school was getting rid of some of its overstock by giving away some of its books. Dorothy M. Johnson's Buffalo Woman was one I happened to take. I am eternally glad I did. She does a wonderful job of pulling the reader into the story. When reading this book, you will begin to feel like you know the characters personally. The fact that they are Native Americans living about two hundred years in the past doesn't matter. Johnson's writing enables the reader to identify with them anyhow. I highly recommend this one, especially to those with an interest in Native American culture.