University of Nebraska Books

I do not feel this matches Marlowe's "Faustus," "Massacre At Paris," "Dido Queen of Carthage," or "Edward II." But it does have some memorable features. At first, Barabas is a sympathetic character, but like many of Marlowe's characters, he goes too far and becomes detestable. Barabas' daughter Abigail is a striking figure. She initially feels sorry for her father but later sees what he has become and falls victim to her father's wickedness. Her death as a Christain in 3.6 is memorable. Ithamore is convincing as a villain who knows no honor. Ferneze is fine as the hero who eventually restores order. It's not Marlowe's best play, but it is still worth some interest.

Ok, so perhaps not infinite, but lots. Marlowe's plays are all a bit strange in their own way. The Jew of Malta is sort of like a really raw take on the issues in the Merchant of Venice (i.e. no sweet love story here). But Marlowe's Barabas gets to enjoy being bad a lot more than Shylock does, and the character is amazingly capable of perhaps not earning the reader's sympathy but extracting her complicity instead. There's some great language in this play and some spectacular misanthropy. The revels editions are always a good bet; they have enough scholarly apparatus to be of significant help and are well-edited and well laid-out on the page. This one is very thin and portable, and so it can feel like a rip-off for 9 bucks. However, the quality of the critical help here is far greater than in the Everyman collected edition of Marlowe.

Mountain man Joe Meek participated in some of the most important events in the Old West. He also had an outgoing, cheerful personality, and loved to tell stories of his adventures. Many of these stories were collected first-hand by Frances Fuller Victor, a "popular" (meaning not professionally trained) historian, and from these stories she webbed together a "biographical novel" of Meek's life (probably more novel than biography) - THE RIVER OF THE WEST. Vestal, in this book, attempts a more authentic biography of Meek, and succeeds for the most part, but not totally.

Joe Meek was born in Virginia in 1810, ran away to Missouri, and in 1829 entered the Rocky Mountains as a fur trapper with William Sublette's party. For the next 11 years he trapped and explored the West, participating in the Pierre's Hole fight at the conclusion of the 1832 rendezvous, going to California with Joseph Walker in 1833-34, taking at least three Indian wives, and leading one of the first wagon trains into Oregon territory in 1840, where he eventually settled himself. He farmed in Oregon and became a town sheriff. He became interested in the political affairs of Oregon and after it became a state held a few minor offices. He helped organize the Republican party there and suffered greatly because of the prejudice shown his mixed-blood children. He died in 1875.

Meek was a congenial man and made friends easily. He knew and trapped with all the legendary figures in the heyday of the fur-trade period, and was probably familiar with all the beaver streams north of the Green. Vestal's account of Meeks life is thorough, but he's sacrificed a scholarly approach for one of familiarity. Few footnotes appear and there is no annotation; details are left to hang unexamined. Worst of all, he includes invented dialogue (or what appears to be such) throughout the book. For example (just picking at random), he writes: "And Wyeth demanded, 'And why did you shoot him?'" How does he know Wyeth asked that? Is it taken from one of Wyeth's journals? No note indicates so, and Wyeth's journals are not in the bibliography. One can only assume he made up the quote. This is what Victor did in THE RIVERS OF THE WEST, which is considered by most a novel. Maybe future editions of this book will have an editor/annotator to add a serious flavor that the book is lacking. Otherwise it's a competently written (Vestal ran the writing program at the University of Oklahoma for decades), likable chronicle of Joe Meek's life and times.

Joe Meek. Definitely a colorful character of the 19th century fur trade era. Whenever reading books about the early American West, one always comes across the name Joe Meek. He came out west in 1829 at the age of nineteen desperately wanting to be a mountain man/fur trapper. Adventures were many up to the last rendevous of 1840 with the typical Indian fighting, grizzlies, starvation and thirst, etc. He then helped guide the first wagon train to Oregon and had much to do with the first government of Oregon. This is a delightful story of a charming individual. He loved life and people loved Joe, just beware of the oftentimes "backwoodsy" grammar in the book (I could have done without that).

First, I will comment on the book itself from an American point of view. The book is not easy to read because it is not a book: it is the author's journal he kept during the French Algerian War. Knowing that still, his journal entries, which at the beginning were frequent and detailed, were focused on keeping track of who was killed, tortured or who was doing the killings. It was as if the author, Mr. F.(his notation of using people's initials to hide their identity from I suppose the French secret police), was keeping a testimony of the murders occurring all around him as evidence. This makes for dull reading; however, given the events of 9-11, I made a valiant effort to immerse myself into the author's mind and try to understand this incredibly brutal civil war.

(...)

There are a few important works on the Algerian Civil War available for the English reader. Franz Fannon, Alistair Horne's history, the film "Battle of Algiers, and recently Feraoun's diary are the ones that readily come to mind. Feraoun was a western educated Algerian and well accquainted with the French. His desire for an independent Algeria was strong, but tempered by a strong sense of historical reality. He reveals the day to day impact of the violence. It is in this respect that the work is most moving, and reveals the senselessness and degradation that occurs to all people involved, Feraoun eventually a victim himself. An essential view of the psychological costs of guerrilla and anti-colonial war.

The 117 pages that comprise the text of this short satire are unusual in that other crap books are not well written, and this one is despite the use of the "N" word over a hundred times as well as other occasional R-rated words. The author was a professor of English at the University of North Carolina when he penned this. Here we have "a literary prank" according to Professor William W. Savage, Jr. at the University of Oklahoma "about which it is better not to say too much" (Savage, The Cowboy Hero, 1979, p 141).

The tale's five chapters are narrated, sometimes humorously, by Deputy Winky of the dying mining and cattle ranching town of Besterman, Wyoming Territory. He's called Winky because of the effect on his eyesight after a band of Native Americans left him castrated. The antagonist is Fiddler Jones, who has ridden into town preceded by his reputation for killing and has set himself up at Bradley's saloon to take advantage of any arising opportunities.

The protagonist is Blondie, or "The Kid", who comes into town with a giant African mute that Blondie calls his stepbrother and they go into a saloon for a plate of steak and eggs. The plot revolves around Fiddler Jones's attachment for Blondie's pouch of gold and his cat-pawing around the unusual Blondie before pouncing. It comes out that Blondie and his African stepbrother were holed up all winter buried under ten feet of snow and nearly starved to death. But Blondie was now mad as a hatter and believes his mute African brother can locate gold or even a certain playing card shuffled into a deck. The plot thickens when a gambler enters the bar, the African mute fails to find the hidden card, then exposes the gambler for cheating. The gambler is kicked out into the waist-high muddy road by Fiddler Jones, who then turns towards Blondie and makes the mistake of grabbing him by the arm. When the African mute hit Jones, the force of that one blow was more powerful than a cannon, and he dropped dead as if he was struck by a cannon ball. But the racist whites in town do not cotton to whites being killed by blacks, and they want to lynch the African.

The Sheriff, instead, wants a trial and so they have one. The trial is a bit humourous, especially when the gambler gives witness, and the trial is concluded with a "not guilty" verdict by the judge. The audience whoops and hollers in celebration but the rope hanging party outside believes it is because of a "guilty" verdict. So when the African and the celebrants get outside, in the confusion, the rope hanging party gets hold of him and tries to string him up. He fights for his life, which is eventually ended by a crow bar against his temple. Blondie shoots the man who killed him. And the judge shoots Blondie, then shoots himself. When the bodies are eventually laid out, everybody learns that "the kid" was no kid, but a woman and the African's wife.

This is a great story about two drifters who enter a western town in the 1800's and the adventures they encounter. The book grabs your attention from the very first sentence and contains some of the most humorous passages I have ever read. "The Kid" I believe is a sequel to Mr. Seelye's "The True Adventures of Huck Finn", also a wondrously funny book. I originally read "The Kid" after seeing Mr. Seeley interviewed on "The Dick Cavett Show" in the early 1970's. I purchased a hardcover edition and have treasured it ever since. "The Kid" is a must read for all Mark Twain fans.

Truth or not, this book is a fun read. I bought it because I wanted to read a first-hand account of the Glanton Gang (after reading Cormac McCarthy's excellent "Blood Meridian"). Although Chamberlain may fudge on details, I think readers can sift a pretty accurate portrait of the era from his writings.

Sam Camberlain was a 16 year old private from Boston who served in the elite 1st US Dragoons in Mexico and gives vivid descriptions of Saltillo, Monterrey, and Northern Mexico. Although he was not at the savage fighting during the capture of Monterrey, he claims to have been there so the reader is left to wonder about his other claims and the accuracy of his combat in which he lied about being involved. Perhaps he had contact with those who were actually there?

Sam Chamberlain was in the Mexican War and painted some interesting small glimpses of life & death. Reading his book is almost like listening to a veteran who seems to have been everywhere and done everything (especially with women). Sam Chamberlain relates deaths of soldiers to Mexican guerrillas and duty in the occupation but more often than not, Sam Chamberlain proclaims preposterous pick-ups with a host of women. The reader almost senses the author is bragging to fellow high schoolers in a locker room or to anyone who will listen in a bar, hence the title of the book is fitting "My Confessions: Recollections of a Rogue". This book would probably be disregarded as pure fantasy if it were not or the fact that sometimes he does detail military and daily life senarios which are proved by others.

For those interested the Mexican War, this is a "must read" book and has been used by historians as a primary source for years because Camberlain recounts many scenes which have escaped photographers and those who made lithographs, including the massacre of Mexican civilians by Arkansas troops in a cave in Northern Mexico.

Truth or Tall Tale or Both? Read this book and you be the judge.

You can take it from the head of the cow: America is a lot different than the Europhile blowhards from the International School say. This epic journey of a quasi- transcontinental romp is not for the faint-hearted or loose-boweled....this is some scary stuff. Few books are a exhilirating as this one. Pitch your tent and start reading!

I bought this after reading a little about Cabeza de Vaca in another book (Richard Grant's American Nomads--check it out). It was worth reading if you have an interest in these kinds of things: whether its history, exploration, and discovery that interest you, or wandering, roughing it, and exciting stories of survival.

I haven't looked at any other versions of this book, so I don't have anything to compare it to. That being said, this version did have a lot of background, in the forms of introductory material as well as footnotes. These were both helpful and cumbersome. A lot of the footnotes were essentially useless for my purpose in reading the book. I just wanted the story-- I didn't really care about the exact locations and time frames, which is what a lot of the footnotes were about. But I'm sure that if you were doing something more scholarly with the book, the footnotes would be invaluable.

One of it's most interesting features to me was Cabeza de Vaca's thinking. By today's standards, he's still a racist, but for his time, he's outrageously sympathetic to the Indians and their ways of life. He tries to see the reasons behind actions that his civilized contemporaries would instantly dismiss as savage.

It's a great story. A Spanish exploration goes bad, and the few survivors fight against the odds and eventually make it out alive after walking across North America. It's a true story that would put the best Hollywood screenwriter to shame. But like a lot of firsthand accounts from that time period, it can be kind of dense. I got used to that, but it did take a little time. On the plus side, the story doesn't really take off until a little ways into the book, so you can use the first part to get used to the writing style.

Native American Representations: First Encounters, Distorted Images, And Literary Appropriations is an impressive compilation of eleven scholarly essays providing students of Native American studies with a thorough examination of a wide range of representations and misrepresentations of Native Americans throughout history. From Columbus' journal entries referring to "Indios" to cigar box caricatures, to the image of Sacagawea on the dollar coin, five centuries worth of depictions and their meanings are scrutinized. ... Native American Representations is a most engaging, informative, deliberative analysis, and strongly recommended for anyone with an interest studying changing perspectives and representations of Native Americans in the dominate American & European cultures.

A few years back, I attended a seminar on Indigenous Nations Studies. One day, one of the students, who 'looked' much like me, and had often expressed his commitment to contemporary social theory, announced that he fantasized about the day when the 'colonizer' would sail back across the Atlantic. In response, several other students, who 'looked' Native American and expressed a commitment to particular tribes, and generally expressed no interest for social theory, asked 'I'm half white; should half of me stay here and the other half leave?'

This anecdote highlights, for me, the sort of difficulties one may encounter in Native American studies (especially as a non-Native scholar in these identity-conscious times). There are obvious tensions: between academic and more practical concerns; between tribal identities, a general 'Native American' identity, and hybrid identities. And there is the matter of just when and how any of these issues should be considered.

Such difficulties are found in Native American Representations. After reading the introduction to the book, and the introductions to several chapters, I had high hopes for the book; but after reading the work with more focus, I was disappointed with the book's shortcomings. This is not to say that it lacks successes. On the contrary, it does address a lack of theoretically informed scholarship on Native American literature; including popularly and scholarly media, film, and even Native American views of Euro-Americans. It considers as well different cultural perspectives on language, property, and landscape, attempting to work beyond the assumptions of a generally 'Western' audience, and strives to include Native American voices in the both the dominant literary and theoretical canons. Such aims, in fact, define the 'ethics' of the book.

Representation is the core concern. As the editor, puts it in her afterword, the ultimate aim is 're-presentation', rather than simple textual 'representation'. Re-presentation requires a deep understanding of self and Other. This is all for a rather simple (still complex) reason: 'For American Indian people, stories can cure or kill.' What this means, for this reader at least, is that language, what words are used by whom and in what manner, should be the focus of an ethics of criticism.

Unfortunately, I think, the reason the book fails in several important respects owes much to this explicit ethical concern. Basically, the ethical demands made by the contributors (generally upon others; less often upon themselves) can't be met within the text. It is a significant question whether any written text can capture the nuances of cultural traditions that are largely oral and performative, that draw so heavily on place-based experiences. Such a question, however, does not often come up in this book. What I perceive, then, as failures and shortcomings in the book are really instances in which theory (as ethics) and practice do not match.

A few examples should suffice to indicate the sources of my discontent. The book opens with two chapters by 'Native American authors', both of whom note the breach between concerns of academics and Indians living on reservations (where the pressing issues are not representation and hegemony, but health care, education, drug abuse). Yet for that these chapters are concerned principally with academic interests. One of these contributors, further, begins by highlighting the lack of Native American voices in contemporary theory (both in its production and within key texts, e.g., Bhabha's The Location of Culture), and yet rarely gets beyond such theory himself. He even criticizes N. Scott Momaday, saying that 'an aboriginal writer has finally learned to write like the colonial center that determines legitimate discourse', but without turning such a critical eye on his own position in that very same center (and within that same legitimizing discourse).

Another contributor displays a remarkable lack of historical-geographical sensitivity in his elision of historically, geographically, and culturally specific practices (the Ghost Dance) and symbols (the buffalo) into a generalized 'Native American' identity. While, he claims, that within the American e pluribus unum, there is no 'space' for Native Americans, one can easily draw on his own arguments to suggest that within such a general signifier as 'Native American', as it is used in this text, there is no 'space' for Dine, Cherokee, Lakota. In fact, in several of the essays, there seems to be an implicit assumption that 'Native American' and 'Euro-American' can be neatly distinguished. This is not necessarily a bad thing; one of the familiar ethical commitments in the text is to maintaining a distinct and viable Native American identity. To insist, however, on an 'innate Indian consciousness' or 'inherent difference between Indians and Europeans' is (as William Apess, an important figure in Native American letters noted) 'a crucial step in denying Indians' political status'. And, even more simply, to operationalize such general categories as 'American' undermines the early invocation of Said and his warning against seeing the 'other' as only a creation of 'our own culture'.

But this is not, to reiterate, to suggest that the entire book is flawed (although some of these flaws I noted seem pretty significant, considering the explicit aims of the text). There are good and interesting chapters on Native American views of whites, filmic (movie and television) representations of Native Americans, and the structure (and demands) made by Native American oral narratives. This latter chapter I found especially interesting. In addition to highlighting the profound difficulty of capturing in a written text all that transpires in an oral narrative, the author pays close attention to the role of place and landscape in Native American cultural traditions, and recognizes that in 'opting to see Native American personal narrators as powerless victims...we simply perpetuate the colonial process' (an insight that seems lost on several other contributors).

Dufour's book remains the best account of the fall of New Orleans in April 1862 to Admiral David Farragut's Western Gulf Blockading Squadron and (after the fact) troops from Gen. Ben Butler's Department of the Gulf. This is surprising considering the book was initially published in 1960. Dufour does an excellent job describing the preparation (more accurately the lack of preparation) for the defense of New Orleans from the declaration of secession to the eventual fall of the South's greatest city. He also describes the preparations in the North to subdue New Orleans, from the Department of the Navy to David Porter's mortar fleet to the naming of David Farragut to command the Western Gulf Blockading Squadron which took the city. Dufour has a very readable style and I was able to finish the book over several evenings. The book contains 354 pages of text, with the bibliography, notes and index filling the remainder of the 427 pages. Scanning through Dufour's sources, he has made good use of primary records in the form of diaries, newspaper accounts, and especially of the correspondence between the Confederate Government in Richmond and Gen. Mansfield Lovell, the commander at New Orleans. The lack of maps is a major flaw though, IMHO. The book contains only one map of the area around the two forts guarding the city (75 miles south), and it is not a very good one. You will want to have other maps of the area present when reading the book to have a proper grasp of the relationship of various places to one another. And the last shortcoming is the lack of any kind of Order of Battle. Dufour does give the number of guns in Fort Jackson, Fort St. Philip, and some of the ships in the text itself, but he does not go into any kind of detail. 427 pp., 1 map

Charles Dufour's "The Night the War was Lost" is the best book written on the campaign for New Orleans in 1862. Dufour has done an amazing amount of research and combines correct historical facts in an easy to read format. This book answers the question how did New Orleans fall and how did the Confederate Government let its biggest city fall into the hands of the Yankees. A great book and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the story of Confederate New Orleans.

Reuchlin was one of the first Christian authors to attempt to make the Jewish Kabbalah accessible to a Latin-reading audience. The publishers of this work are to be thanked for printing such a classic.

However, this edition is not without its faults. As others have noted, there is no scholarly apparatus, which would have helped the reader make sense of what admittedly is a difficult text. The format of the text on the page is poor (although the Latin pages seem to be reproducing the pages from the first printed edition, so for that half of the book, the formatting is excuseable). I find the English translation to be idiosyncratic, and just plain erroneous in points. Fortunately, with the Latin right there, these mistakes are not that difficult to spot.

But for someone willing to put up with these problems, this edition of Reuchlin's work can be a helpful entre into the world of Christian Cabala.

Johannes Reuchlin (1455-1522) wrote _De arte cabalistica_ (1517) as a kind of synthesis of his Kabbalistic thought. It is constructed in the form of a conversation among three thinkers, the most important being Simon, the Jewish explicator of Kabbalah. This work is in a sense a sequel to Reuchlin's _De verbo mirifico_ [On the wonder-working word], but focuses almost entirely on the Kabbalistic side of things.

As an introduction to Kabbalah in an ordinary sense, the text is not particularly useful, since Reuchlin has his own somewhat idiosyncratic spin on what is most important. As an introduction to Christian Kabbalah, however, it is a seminal work, and along with _De verbo mirifico_ and Pico's _900 Theses_ required reading. Reuchlin's opinions probably did more than anything else to encourage the spread of Jewish mystical thought into the Christian West, and this is one of the books at the heart of that movement.

The edition is useful, including both an English translation and a facsimile of the Latin text. Unfortunately the layout is poor, so that the translation often ends up several pages off from the Latin, preventing direct comparison. The translation itself is good, although it would be improved by more scholarly apparatus and notes, which are conspicuously thin. Fortunately the volume is inexpensive, which makes up for quite a bit.

A decent library of early modern occult thought should have this book. The modern practitioner will not, I suspect, find it terribly useful, nor will those interested primarily in Jewish mysticism and Kabbalah. The principal value of the book is that it makes available a text which greatly influenced later Christian occult thinkers, notably Agrippa, Dee, Bruno, Fludd, and others.

L. Frank Baum is known best for The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, a children's fantasy that has achieved classic status through its multiple reprintings and because of the movies based on it, including the MGM classic The Wizard of Oz starring Judy Garland and the 70s musical The Wiz. Part of the appeal of Baum's fantasy is that it is quintessentially American, set in the heart of the midwest, and in some ways deals with the American spirit. Academic commentators have gone further in their study of Baum's work, saying that it can be read as a treatise on the America of the late 1800s, citing various political undercurrents in the novel. These arguments are based on Baum's work as a newspaper publisher, editor and columnist in South Dakota. Now the University of Nebraska press has made available a collection of the "Our Landlady" columns[1] written by Baum from January 1890 to February 1891--forty-eight installments about a fictitious boarding house in the town of Aberdeen where Baum's newspaper was published.

The columns are edited and annotated by Nancy Tystad Koupal, who does an outstanding job of placing the column in the appropriate time setting, explaining to the modern reader the differences that one hundred years have made on newspapers, political parties, mercantile exchange, and other aspects of frontier life. This is especially important in the context of the "Our Landlady" columns which were intended as editorials on the doings of city hall and the state legislature. The column also mentions, by name, actual townspeople in Aberdeen, and these people are described by both Koupal's annotations and in a separate index of important people and places of South Dakota in 1890.

For adult readers of Baum's children books, these columns are a rare insight into the mind of the author, dealing as they do with his strongest personal opinions. His advocacy of suffrage and the rights of women help explain the strong female characters in the Oz books (best seen in the strength of Glenda the Good's magic compared to the ineffectual humbuggery of the Wizard). One can also see his interest in the future, including fantasies of unlimited electrical power and methods of irrigating the plains, interests that were then displayed in the Oz books as different magical lands. Finally, you can also see him honing his talent for satire and humor, from broad-based visual pratfalls to punning wordplay, all things that would late prove useful in his career as a children's novelist.

Baum failed as a newspaper publisher and editor in 1891, just as he had failed years earlier as a shop keeper. But these failures proved useful when he finally found his calling as an author of whimsical children's novels, as he turned his experiences on the frontier into settings and characters for his books. Today, Baum's books are constantly in print and remain in the hearts of children of all ages. Koupal's rescue of Baum's earlier work is a blessing for those people interested in the real Wizard of Oz.

"Our Landlady" is a book filled with the newspaper columns Baum wrote for his newspaper. They are stories about daily life and problems during the 1880s-1890s. Baum wrote thse before his Oz books, but they are just as good and just as funny. (For example, Mrs. Bilkins, the landlady, says when talking about a group of girls that fight in the army "They are all single, and are bound to stay that way until they get married.") I would strongly recommend reading "Our Landlady" if you like to read Oz and other books by L. Frank Baum. I'm sure you'll love this as much as the other books.