Book Review

Review by Gene Bedient

“The Myth of the Muslim Tide: Do Immigrants Threaten the West?”
Author: Doug Sanders
Publisher: Random House

Rational: Based on or in accordance with reason or logic. Reasonable, sensible, sane, logical.

“All in the Family”: In this 1970s television series, a working-class bigot argues with his family members over issues of the day. It was wildly popular. A certain reality was revealed to me one day as I was discussing the series with one of my dear colleagues at work. While not arguing for one point of view or another, my friend told me what he didn’t like about the show. Namely that the viewers tend to side with one camp or the other because their own prejudices have already been established. The show did little to persuade viewers that their perspective should change. He was right.

For those who have already made up their minds that Muslim immigrants are taking over Western culture and civilization, this important work of Doug Saunders will have no meaning. For the reader who would like to consult a well-written, well-documented, impartial source on the subject, this book is for you.

Review by Christine C. Pappas

“Artifacts and Illuminations: Critical Essays on Loren Eiseley”
Edited and with an introduction by Tom Lynch and Susan N. Maher
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press

Who was Loren Eiseley? He was a mental time traveler, a scientific shaman who wrote in essays and poems. In his personal and professional life he lived between worlds: human or animal; artist or scientist? The essays in the volume “Artifacts and Illuminations: Critical Essays on Loren Eiseley” (edited by Tom Lynch and Susan N. Maher and published by the University of Nebraska Press) finally may provide basic insight into Eiseley that will allow his readers to break the code that has been surrounding his works for 40 years. Lynch is an associate professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Maher is the dean of the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota, Duluth. The University of Nebraska Press has been instrumental in keeping Eiseley’s books in print and offering them with new intro- ductions. Hopefully this new volume will spur more Eiseley scholarship on the themes they begin to develop.

Review by Jack L. Kennedy

“Backstage: Stories from My Life in Public Television”
Author: Ron Hull
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press

They say you can’t tell a book, or a person, by the cover.

“Backstage” by Ron Hull, with Hull on the front cover in an interviewer’s chair, is subtitled “Stories from My Life in Public Television.” This perhaps pedantic premise might lead the casual book surveyor to think that he or she is due for a nostalgic, regional, ego-driven celebrity hunt. There are some of those elements, smartly presented. But do not be myopic. Prepare to be surprised by the book’s scope and feeling, far-ranging geography and perspective.

Review by Kimberly Downing Robinson

Some people, Abraham, are just too interesting to kill.”

Grahame-Smith’s handling of Civil War history is remarkably well contextualized in “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.” Indeed, much should be expected from a novelist who thinks himself well advised to use Abraham Lincoln as a protagonist in a novel about vampires, especially when the backdrop of the story runs the gamut of the historical events that shaped Westward expansion and bipartisan politics. “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” probes American cultural and historical insecurities through an uneasy transformation of the historical novel, a genre developed by Sir Walter Scott to provide cultural commentary on behalf of the disenfranchised and to promote social activism for the reinstatement of Scottish values and traditions, some 60 years after the Battle of Culloden (1746).

Review by Jon Farrar

“Wetland Birds of the Central Plains: South Dakota, Nebraska and Kansas”
Author: Paul A. Johnsgard
Publisher: Zea E-Books

I was fortunate enough to have had Paul Johnsgard as an instructor for three courses at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. That was a long time ago, the late 1960s. Oddly enough, even though I had grown up only five miles from prairie chicken booming grounds, and only 40 miles from where sandhill cranes paused on the Platte River each spring, I first saw displaying grouse and sandhill cranes on field trips in Johnsgard’s ornithology class. I have most of his books but have passed on several, only because I was not particularly interested in birds such as “Trogons and Quetzals of the World.”

Review by Francis Moul

“The Short American Century: A Postmortem”
Editor: Andrew Bacevich
Publisher: Havard University Press

Most Americans would agree that the 20th Century was an American triumph, the “American Century” where we won two world wars, beat a depression and led the world economically, politically and socially. Well, as in Porgy and Bess: “It ain’t necessarily so.”

Henry Luce, publisher of “Life” magazine, defined the century’s past and promise in a pivotal essay, printed in the magazine on Feb. 17, 1941. This was a time when Great Britain was alone in resisting the Nazi Germany war machine, and Luce wrote that it was time to answer the call of history with a “complete opportunity of leadership” worldwide by aiding Britain.

A new world was coming, “one world, fundamentally indivisible,” and the United States, “the inheritors of all the great principles of Western civilization,” was uniquely positioned to determine the character of that world, Luce noted. American might become “the Good Samaritan of the entire world.”

Reviews by Jerry Petr

"Keynes Hayek: The Clash that Defined Modern Economics"
Author: Nicholas Wapshott
Publisher: Norton

"Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius"
Author: Sylvia Nasar
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

"23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism"
Author: Ha-Joon Chang
Publisher: Bloomsbury Press

Review by Jon Lauck

“The Big Empty: The Great Plains in the Twentieth Century”
Author: R. Douglas Hurt
Publisher: University of Arizona Press

On the bright blue afternoon of Sept. 23, 2011, at a hotel along the banks of the Minnesota River in the Blue Earth County, Minn. city of Mankato, historians interested in the prairie and Plains gathered to talk about the history of our region. The occasion was the annual meeting of the Northern Great Plains History Conference, a long-standing institution essential to the dissemination of the latest research and historical thinking about our region.

Review by Patricia H. Scudder

“A Harvest of Words: Contemporary South Dakota Poetry”
Editor: Patrick Hicks
Publisher: The Center for Western Studies

Whoever selected the title for this book of poetry has witnessed staggered lines of combines marching resolutely down fields of South Dakota wheat. Harvest, indeed, is as iconic an image for South Dakota as is Mount Rushmore. Whether there is such a thing as “South Dakota poetry,” though, is as difficult to determine as whether there is such a thing as “New Jersey poetry,” especially if you believe that the poet expresses the human condition. For me, that belief universalizes poetry rather than limiting it to a specific region, for human beings are found everywhere, even in New Jersey.

Review by John Janovy Jr.

“Rare: Portraits of America's Endangered Species”
Author: Joel Sartore
Publisher: Focal Point/National Geographic

Joel Sartore’s “Rare” is as rare as his subjects: lichens, snail, birds, cats, flowers, fish and assorted other creatures seemingly destined to depart Planet Earth forever, not as individuals but as kinds. Nebraskans, especially, have come to admire Sartore as a combination storyteller, artist, crusader and guide to natural areas the vast majority of us will never see, much less crawl about in up to our eyeballs staring at wild things through a lens. We locals have been amazed at his touch of wonder and humility on stage, his ability to turn images into extended narratives and his constant focus on mission—to make us aware not only of our place in nature but also how we are messing things up to our long-term detriment. With “Rare,” he brings all of these Sartore qualities to us in book form. And what a book it is.