What Is Gone is a story of violence and nostalgia, the inextricable connections between identity and place, narrated by a woman who grew up in the comforting cultural geography of Lincoln, Nebraska, a town that made her feel so safe she became almost incapable of comprehending danger. Even after her own encounter with violence--a brutal rape in nearby Omaha in 1985--she returns to her hometown convinced that it was the city she remembered, department stores staffed by familiar clerks, the buildings themselves repositories of comforting memories. But then, in the fall of 1992, Candice Harms, a first-year student at the University of Nebraska, disappears. This harrowing mystery, combined with evidence that the Lincoln she has known is disappearing--stores closing, her beloved downtown becoming strangely vacated--compels Brown to reconsider what she'd grown up accepting as truth. What Is Gone, centered in Nebraska but connecting to the larger landscape of the nation,...
Every evening our father found something wrong with Mike, who was four, five, seven, or ten or thirteen. At six he squirmed trying to cut his meat, and our father stared: “When are you going to learn...
A Memoir of Adventures within America’s National Parks
by Roland H. Wauer
Foreword by Jonathan B. Jarvis
Price: $39.95
ISBN: 9780896728851
Pub Date: September 2014
Few people have the opportunity to live and work in America's magnificent national parks, let alone in a wide diversity of those great parks. For thirty-two years, beginning when he was hired as a seasonal...
Lisa Ohlen Harris shared a household with her mother-in-law, Jeanne, for seven years. When Jeanne’s health deteriorated due to COPD, Harris became one of 65 million American family caregivers. The...
At the outset of summer break in 1959, Texas Tech senior Jerry Craft had no more enticing options than to stay home and help on the family ranch—so the telephoned offer to play for a semi-pro baseball club he’d never heard of came as a welcome surprise. But Craft was in for an even bigger surprise when he reported for tryout and discovered he’d been recruited for the West Texas Colored League. Out of his two seasons with the Stars comes an unlikely story of respect, character, humor, and ultimately friendship as the teammates came together to succeed in a game they loved.
Pat Carr spent her childhood next door to a Japanese relocation camp in Wyoming in the 1940s, grew up to pass for black in 1950s Texas, started teaching college in the Jim Crow South of the 1960s, and crossed paths with scores of other authors over half a century’s journey as a professional writer. Her memoir illuminates the path for others who have chosen the writing life. Pacing her revealing story as a series of single-page episodes, she offers distilled glimpses of the people, places, and moments that made a lasting impression and provided the fabric and fuel of her writing. At the same time Carr’s pages reveal relationships with family, friends, lovers, fellow writers; struggles with racial and gender discrimination; and above all her writing identity.
Japanese-born Hisanori Kano came to the United States in 1916 with the blessings of his influential family, the sponsorship of William Jennings Bryan, and a fervent commitment to master and apply the best of American agricultural practices on the Nebraska Plains. Forgoing an assured career in politics, the military, or business in his homeland, Kano entered the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and worked his way through as a farm laborer. Along with his dedication to farming, he brought a strong Christian faith that would lead to his ordination as an Episcopal minister and sustain him and his family through his internment during World War II. Undertaken in 1967, after half a century in his adoptive land, Father Kano’s memoir reveals how he adapted to an ever-changing American culture and landscape. Father Kano elucidates in a voice as eloquent as it is polite a sorely underrepresented aspect of diversity and rural...
Before Big Love, before Eldorado, a groundbreaking memoir explored polygamy, not with outrage but with honesty and grace. In 1984, when polygamous groups knew little but the fear and pain of secrecy and hiding, Dorothy Allred Solomon, the twenty-eighth of forty-eight children, went public with her family’s story. Descended from five generations of Mormon polygamy, Solomon evokes the fervor and dedication that bound the Allreds to “living the Principle.” She vividly renders the persecution and poverty she knew as a child, the joyous awe of a father’s too-rare presence, and an abiding hunger for autonomy. Confronting the paradox of a faith that seals loved ones as families for eternity but casts them as outlaws in the here and now, she traces the events that culminated in her father’s 1977 assassination, a tragedy that rocked all Utah. Now, more than a quarter century later, Solomon revisits her story in a new...
