University of Nebraska Books

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...

Thoroughly enjoyed this book and fully appreciate why it received this year's American Indian Prose Award.

Cobb has approached what is clearly, to her, a personally significant topic in a manner that is sensitive far beyond her personal views. The history of the United States' treatment of American Indians is complex and troubled. Cobb, relying on both archival research and personal interviews with women who attended the Bloomfield Academy when the school was under federal administration, has provided a fresh and compellingly complicating perspective on Indian boarding schools, a specific facet of this history. Most significantly in her work, she has highlighted, through these women's own voices, the contemporaneous perspective of natives directly impacted by the United States' varying policies. What emerges is a well-documented story of Native self-direction, self-identification, and, above all, survival and hope for the future. Her final chapter, especially, poignantly brings this point home. Rather than overtly ideologize her topic, Cobb has allowed the story primarily to tell itself.

This book is a genuine contribution to contemporary research of Native history.

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

This carefully researched history of Yucatan's 19th Century Caste War is a long overdue addition to our understanding of one of the most fascinating chapters in the turbulent history of Mexico. Don Dumond draws from a wealth of primary source documents in this comprehensive overview of the 54 year life-and-death struggle that began in 1847 as a regional rebellion of Maya campesinos living on Yucatan's eastern wilderness frontier. Events rapidly spun out of control, when early Maya success on the battlefield unleased the pent-up energy of long-simmering grievances and hatred directed towards the Spanish-speaking elite, a group the Maya still thought of as foreigners three centuries after the Spanish conquest of Yucatan. As the rebellion caught fire, more Maya communities rose up, sensing the power of the moment, transforming the uprising into a peninsula-wide race war that came close to driving the Ladino population from the land.

Dumond presents a detached and balanced description of the major players and events of the rebellion, leaving the more colorful details of the battles and the stories of heroism and personal survival to Nelson Reed, whose excellent and very readable "Caste War of Yucatan" provides the stuff of a good war story. The appeal of The Cross and the Machete, is more to the student of Mexican history or the serious history buff. Here, Dumond removes the "climax" of the 1848 Maya offensive from its unlikely pedestal, where the Maya farmer-soldiers are closing in on the final Ladino enclave around the capital, Merida, only to abandon the field of battle at the first sign of the winged insects, whose presence in the skies call them to their sacred obligation to plant corn. Rather than "divine providence" saving the Yucatecan Ladinos, touted by many writers, Dumond argues that the Maya offensive petered out at the outskirts of Merida because the campesino army had not only overextended itself, but it had failed to inspire the long-dominated Maya of the Ladino northwest to join the revolt. In this story, the less exciting historical interpretation triumpths over the myth.

The Maya offensive and Ladino recovery of 1847 through 1850 are only the beginning to what turns into a protracted struggle for survival for the rebels and their descendants, who retreat into the wilderness of the eastern and southern forests, coalescing into a number of independent Maya communities in a permanent state of war against Ladino Yucatan, and much of the time, against each other. The most important of these rebel groups, who became known as the Cruzob, found strength and inspiration from a set of "speaking crosses," which appeared in1851 in a dell containing a small spring, deep in the eastern forest. Manipulated by a small group of rebel leaders, the crosses provided guidance and hope for the rebels in their darkest days, attracting large numbers of rebel families, who created a new Maya society there, and whose aggressive military carried out spectacular raids into Yucatan, and fought to a standstill the Yucatecan and Mexican armies sent against it. A well-equipped Mexican army finally put the rebellion to an end in 1901, by which time, disease, discord and desertions had decimated the ranks of the rebels.

"The Machete and the Cross" gives a great deal of attention to the Cruzob, and other rebel groups known as "Pacificos" who had signed vague peace treaties with Mexico, but lived in mostly independent and self-contained communities far from the reach of the Ladinos. Within the ranks of the Cruzob, Dumond brings to light previously unreported factions that operated somewhat outside of the tight control of the centralized leadership. We learn, for the first time, that the Cruzob town of Tulum, on the far north coast, actually became the most important center of the cross cult after the palace revolt that cut down the ruthless Cruzob leader, Venancio Puc and his Interpreter of the Cross in the capital of Noh Cah Santa Cruz in 1864.

Finally, the role of the munitions suppliers in British Honduras, and the delicate political position the colony found itself in as a result of its policies are explored at length in this well-crafted history.

This is a book that must be read by anyone interested in the Holocaust and Jewish life. It is unlike any Holocaust autobiography in that it involves Jewish life in South America. Even after living through the tragedies of the Holocaust Salomon Encourages joy and happiness. As a College student, and as Salomon's grandson this book touched my life in a very special way.

A well written diary from the Trans-Mississippi theater of operations. This is one of the few Civil War diaries from that area. It is written by a recent German immigrant to Nebraska and covers the period of his three year enlistment, 1862 - 1865. The story covers relatively little actual fighting. When Mr. Scherneckau was wounded (in the leg) it is because he was accidentally shot by one of his fellow soldiers. Instead it covers life in the Army consisting mostly of futile marches, guard duty, converting from an infantry unit to cavalry, putting up with Army life, almost as though the country was at peace.

Mr. Scherneckau originally wrote the diary in German, his native tongue. It is clear that he was a well educated man, but little is known of his background and education.

The diary has been translated and brought up to date with modern English style and wording as well as ancillary materials such as newspaper accounts of the time. This makes it a lot easier to read than the approach taken by other editor/translators.

I love Sandoz's books about the Plains Indians, but was never sure until I read her biography, as to their historical accuracy. I now wonder why anyone else would bother to research the culture of the Lakota and Cheyenne or the Sioux Wars, or any of the historical subjects she wrote about. Not only did she get first hand accounts from survivors who are now long dead, she also delved into papers and reports which have long since disappeared, mostly due to neglect. She brought historical writing to a new level. Never being satisfied to surmize, she would spend years researching gaps in her information. I have read several histories of the Sioux wars since reading Sandoz's Crazy Horse, and though her name appears constantly in the footnotes, no one in their introduction seems to want to acknowledge her as the definitive source. Perhaps it is because her writing style was not the standard regurgitation of facts, but had a beauty of its own, perhaps, as she believed, it was because she was from the West, and had no actual college degree, or perhaps it is because she was a woman who added a woman's touch to subjects usually handled by men. I also noticed that the First Nations' Amazon site does not list even one of her books. This is very sad because she probably did more to make white people not only sympathise, but empathise with the Plains Indian, than any other person-Indian or white, before or since. My congratulations to Helen Winter Stauffer for writing a very thorough biography of a great bigrapher.