University of Nebraska Press

Muscogee Daughter: My Sojourn to the Miss America Pageant

tina — Sat, 30 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

On the surface, Susan Supernaw’s memoir Muscogee Daughter: My Sojourn to the Miss America Pageant is a story about an unlikely Miss Oklahoma winner and her trip to the 1971 Miss America pageant. The true story, however, is Supernaw’s struggle to escape a childhood marred by extreme poverty and violence and earn the Native American name revealed to her during a near death experience.

While reading the memoir, it was hard to keep in mind that Muscogee Daughter wasn’t a work of fiction. Supernaw’s struggles haunted me long after I finished reading the book, especially the image of her dying grandmother sharing a bed with Supernaw as an ill and abandoned infant.

Supernaw was the fourth daughter in a poor family and her birth was a major disappointment to her father. When she was just a baby her parents left her in the care of her elderly grandparents on a farm in rural Oklahoma so that her father could go back to college. It’s never made clear why her parents took the older girls and left their newborn, but whatever the reason it was ill conceived. By the time she was six months old, Supernaw’s grandmother had died and her mother returned to collect her.

Months of being confined to her grandmother’s bed and being fed cow’s milk and coffee by her inexperienced grandfather landed her in the hospital for many weeks. That would be the first of a handful of close calls in Supernaw’s life and each time she believed she was about to die, a beautiful woman appeared to comfort her. Supernaw believed she was a manifestation of the Corn Mother.

The second time the woman appeared she brought a small dancing bear, a personification of Supernaw’s Native American name. A community elder came to Supernaw’s bed side and advised her to follow her destined path in order to earn the right to her name and earning that name became her primary goal. Paralyzed after a horse riding accident, Supernaw fought to walk again and eventually, she became an athletic high school cheerleader, a Presidential scholar, an accidental beauty queen, and a unifying figure for the eastern and western tribes of Oklahoma.

Supernaw memoir reveals many painful and personal details about her life. We learn of the abusive father who left the family bereft and who was replaced by an even more tyrannical and dangerous step-father, though initially the four girls were happy to have him provide more than the ketchup sandwiches they had been accustomed to eating for dinner.

Supernaw seems to understand that her family’s story is representative of a piece of American history—one that is too often untold; however, it feels like too much was left unsaid. Though she was an anthropology major concerned with human rights, her attitude towards the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is puzzling. Supernaw says that it gave her white boyfriend “an unfair disadvantage and made me feel like I’d been given an unfair advantage.” In later pages she reveals that she “felt a lot of confusion over minority preference,” yet she also felt the sting of racism from her boyfriend who believed her Presidential award was the result of her being a minority. There were was also the cheerleaders’ parents who did not allow her in their homes; the Miss America pageant that treated her like an oddity; and the media that used offensive stereotypes to describe her.

Muscogee Daughter was both fascinating and frustrating. As a reader I wanted to know more about her family and her experience as a woman of color living between white and Native worlds. The importance of earning her Native American name is clear, but the significance of the milestone is not. Nevertheless, Susan Supernaw’s memoir is essential in the narrative of American history.

Written by: Stephanie Sylverne, October 29th 2010

Cover Me: A Health Insurance Memoir

mandy — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 10:00:00 +0000

By Sonya Huber

University of Nebraska Press

If you suspect that your experiences alone put the hell in healthcare, then Cover Me by Sonya Huber is the memoir for you. By the age of thirty-three, Huber had already endured eleven gaps in healthcare coverage, and had also been sent to collections for medical debt multiple times. She became an expert at scavenging for alternatives and at squeezing every drop of blood from the recalcitrant turnip that is the US healthcare system.

Cover Me is a moving portrait of how access to healthcare determines who is a “have” and who a “have not” and in Huber’s hands, the issues surrounding healthcare reform become clear and relatable. Improbably, given the toll the struggles exact, the author is also very funny, telling her stressful tale with an irrepressible sense of humor.

Huber began her adult employment journey as an idealistic labor activist and became a university professor. At one point, she held down three jobs at once, none of which offered healthcare benefits. The pressure to find affordable healthcare ballooned exponentially as Huber went from single working woman, to wedding a man who was also a healthcare "have not," to becoming a mother.

But even as a single woman, the challenge of good health was daunting. Diagnosed with a disabling panic disorder, Huber was forced to scrounge for low cost medical clinics and sliding scale arrangements, at one point even bartering office cleaning services for therapy. She was often left to rely on two of the universe’s most unstable forces: luck and the kindness of others. At times, sympathetic doctors offered free pharmaceutical samples and dentists forgave their fees. But there were consequences, many of which could be filed under “you get what you pay for,” or more accurately, “you get what you are able to pay for.”

As a wife and mother, Huber’s determination grew even grittier. Schlepping her infant son through the frozen Ohio tundra to register for WIC and Medicaid benefits, and expertly working the phones to correct inevitable and near catastrophic bureaucratic errors, Huber became a master of resourcefulness and tenacity. Even during a rare stretch when Huber had coverage through an HMO, she found it to be Dungeons-and-Dragons-esque, requiring the right "passwords" to gain entry. (The passwords being properly worded referrals and appeals, and an intimate familiarity with the policy’s fine print.) If it’s true that insurance companies spew gobbledygook and denials to weed out folks who lack perseverance, they never counted on someone like Huber.

Huber’s Odyssean journey through the American healthcare system throws the institution's inequities and ironies into stark relief. She describes working for a nonprofit whose mission is to provide low income workers with health insurance; however, in a stunning revelation of either outrageous hypocrisy or business-as-usual in fund-strapped nonprofits, that same organization was unwilling to provide Huber with healthcare coverage. Meanwhile, Huber’s boss, who had stellar insurance through her prominent surgeon husband, could brandish her benefits card and blithely obtain top care. Reading this, you will be tempted to hurl the book against the nearest wall, but you won’t because you’ll be too riveted to let go.

Huber’s story will resonate with anyone who has ever battled a medical bureaucracy. That is, with everybody in America. Her refusal to say “uncle” will inspire, and along the way, readers may even pick up invaluable tips on navigating the labyrinthine depths of both public and private healthcare. There is also a twist at the end that makes university bureaucracy even scarier than its medical counterpart.

One question nagged me throughout Cover Me: where is Huber’s husband? He seemed to hang back and let Huber take the front lines, a story known to too many wives and mothers. But that question aside, and because Huber is such a deliciously skilled writer, Cover Me is the best kind of memoir; it is engaging, enraging, tragic and funny. Fortunately, laughter as medicine is one thing the insurance companies have not yet managed to deny.

Written by: T. Tamara Weinstein, September 15th 2010

Colonial Metropolis: The Urban Grounds of Anti-Imperialism and Feminism in Interwar Paris

admin — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 14:19:00 +0000

By Jennifer Anne Boittin

University of Nebraska Press

Interwar Paris conjures up images of romance and renewal. From the ashes and rubble of the First World War, families reunite and rebuild under what seemed to be the end of the most dire of circumstances. Unfortunately, Colonial Metropolis fails to capture this magic, and yet it is an extremely thoughtful and methodical review of the local primary source material available, and would serve as a very strong academic referral source.

The author, Jennifer Anne Boittin, has a clear passion for the subject matter and conveys this well through her enthusiastic descriptions of the characters of the period who populated the anti-colonialism and feminist movements. The problem, for me, stems from the fact that we never feel the interaction between these players. These characters never seem to weave together into the larger story of feminist and anti-colonial activism, the tale that Boittin is seemed so hopeful to tell at the outset of the book.

Boittin lifts directly from the historical record to bring a multitude of characters from this period to life, but none so well as that as Josephine Baker. Pages and pages are dedicated to bringing her tantalizing and mischievous performances to life. Imagine the dedication and zeal of Marina Abramović crossed with the free wheeling sexual spirit of Isadora Duncan. Who wouldn’t want to be warped back to the front row for that show of an old theater in Paris?

With these high sensory moments scattered throughout, readers catch glimpses of the time gone by that was advertised to them, but even the best of these moments failed to sustain me from page to page. Clearly, Boittin’s integrity to the historical record speaks to her virtues as an academic; it just doesn’t make for a particularly interesting read.

Written by: Nicole Levitz, August 2nd 2010

Dark Heart of the Night

admin — Sat, 08 May 2010 23:59:00 +0000

By Leonora Miano

University of Nebraska Press

The gross reality of genocide brings one’s spirit to feel a deep sadness for groups and individuals who don't understand different cultures. Delineating a brutal world of power and defeat, the author of Dark Heart of the Night doesn't hold back and the shocking truth of this topic engenders an incredulous curiosity in the reader: how can a village not support their people, even those who are related to some in the village? How can the world be so out of kilter that more energy is spent killing while refusing to understand others? The power of violence resonates throughout and accompanies the overriding story.

The author depicts the harshness and pain of this specific village to help us understand the ongoing brutality of a small tribe of people. In reading Dark Heart of the Night, a person may see parallels to oppressed groups through history. The sheer stubbornness and defiant attitudes of particular individuals in the village overpower the mass of followers in the village.

Nightmarish in its intensity, the novel opens with the brutal acts of a rebel force taking place within the country. As readers, we observe protagonist Ayané, who returns to her Central African village from France to assist her dying mother; she is continually an outcast—not understood nor understanding this culture to which she returns uneasily. As a more "worldly" individual, she confronts the local leader of the village after witnessing killing in her mother's village from afar.

Throughout Dark Heart of the Night, the author depicts an ongoing conflict within the self, among others, and in the overall world. Her stark imagery brings to light gruesome and harsh experiences. Deftly utilizing only minimal words, Leonora Miano shapes the storyline with the sheer power of her writing. She elaborates on the human aspects of communication and being misunderstood in a cross-cultural situation. All character interactions bring ideas of human survival to the forefront.

Miano is originally from Cameroon, and she lives in France. Both Tamsin Black and Terese Svodboda translate Miano’s work into English for their readers. Overall, Miano presents a hearty and challenging novel to surely move the reader to action to demand fairness for those people who find themselves under the proverbial oppression of misplaced power.

Written by: Carolyn Espe, May 8th 2010

Love Goes to Press: A Comedy in Three Acts

admin — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 16:28:00 +0000

Edited by Sandra Spanier

Bison Books, University of Nebraska Press

It's impossible to dislike a female protagonist who opines, fifteen miles south of the Italian front in the second-to-last year of World War II, "If there's anything I really loathe, it's a woman protector." Delivered by Annabelle Jones, war correspondent for the San Francisco World, in conversation with Jane Mason, war correspondent for the New York Bulletin, this line refers to one of the many well-meaning men who are the butts of the jokes in the play Love Goes to Press.

Longtime friends as well as colleagues, Jones and Mason are globetrotting journalists chasing after war stories when both improbably show up in the same tiny press camp in Italy. There, amid refrains of, "No, I am not a nurse," any time one of them places an intra-military call, each of the two women pursue dangerously-won exclusive stories and navigate surprise romantic encounters, the latter portrayed as considerably more perilous than the former.

The mostly-journalist ensemble draws an easy comparison to His Girl Friday, released six years before Love Goes to Press first appeared on stage. By contrast, the play's pacing and gender commentary read as tersely contemporary, and its production history as relatively dismal. First performed in the summer of 1946, audiences in London packed theaters to see it, taking advantage of the small luxury of cheap tickets, and in co-author Martha Gellhorn's estimation, eager to laugh amid grief, rationing, wide-spread destruction, and exhaustion in the first year of peace after the war.

American audiences, however, did not crave such levity. After only four performances in New York in the first week of 1947 (where, Gellhorn further recounts, the cast was ecstatic to shop and eat as much as they could), the play folded then disappeared. American reviews from the time reflect a limited range of emotions running from irked boredom to disgust: either the veteran lady war reporters who authored the play couldn't get war quite "right," for all of their experience, or they simply had the bad taste to profane such a sacred subject in a three-act comedy. From the distance of sixty-three years—perhaps as cushy as the distance between New York drama critics of the '40s and the European theatre of war—this self-important response seems a bit comical.

Editor Sandra Spanier does a fine job, in this expanded edition of Love Goes to Press, of providing historical and literary context for the play, which did not see a first printing until 1995. Her biographical focus remains overwhelmingly on Gellhorn, whose sixty-year career was comprised of relentless war correspondence, as well as fiction and travel writing. Co-author Virginia Cowles is comparatively unknown, despite being an experienced war correspondent and prolific nonfiction writer herself. (Gellhorn and Cowles met when both women were reporting on the Spanish Civil War—Annabelle Jones and Jane Mason are based on them, respectively.)

In addition to Spanier's description of rescuing perhaps the only extant copy of the play, and her recovery and reprinting of deleted sections of Gellhorn's war reporting from the Collier's archives, Gellhorn's original introduction to the 1995 edition may be the most enjoyable historical work here. Good-humored but pitiless, Gellhorn's recounting of the more hapless accomplishments of the play's authors, which included fleeing stunned from cries of "Author! Author!" at the close of the play's premier, is like an authorial bow on behalf of both herself and Cowles, albeit regrettably late.

Written by: Kaja Katamay, April 3rd 2010

Driving with Dvořák: Essays on Memory and Identity

admin — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 01:00:00 +0000

By Fleda Brown

University of Nebraska Press

Fleda Brown’s writes almost as though she were paid by word. Every description feels as though it lasts for hours. The writing in Driving with Dvořák is self-indulgent, as though she were doing it for herself alone.

So who is really being indulged in Driving with Dvořák? The reader is deprived of the use of their imagination, and the writer dooms the endeavor. In an effort to connect with her audience, Brown name drops (for example, she compares Dvořák’s tone to Steven Spielberg’s), which is supposed to make Dvořák more accessible to the audience by seeming less “academic.” In doing this, Brown constantly underestimates her reader.

The collection centers on Brown’s parents. Brown’s mother, Mabel, is a religious housewife raised by religious parents. She is simple-minded, Sinatra-loving, and consistent in mind and body.

Brown’s father seems to be the exact opposite of her mother: a failed academic, athiestic, and unpredictable. While this is a book about Brown's memories and relationship with her entire family—parents, brother, sisters, and the following generation—the bulk of the writing is concerned with her father. He resents that Mabel does not like sex, and women are devils to him. This prompts Brown to recount the truism: men who are unable to understand women seem cursed to live with them.

In some ways, Brown wishes she could have it all—mother and woman, caretaker and receiver—the way feminists often seem to believe is possible. In the first story of the book, Brown describes the experience of changing her name. Having married young, she only had her family name for seventeen years; now, so long after establishing herself as an author whose name is her brand, she decides to change it back. It is as though Brown seeks to revert her identity to its originally form.

In reflecting on her relationships with others, Brown elucidates her view of herself. More proactive and visceral than her mother, more successful than her father, and somehow more grounded than them either, one gets the impression that, while her father was chained and her mother sainted, Brown lives for herself and not for others.

Written by: Elisheva Zakheim, February 22nd 2010

Goodbye Wifes and Daughters

admin — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 17:01:00 +0000

By Susan Kushner Resnick

University of Nebraska Press

In 1943, as the world dealt with trauma and tragedy in Europe and the Pacific during World War II, another catastrophe unfolded in Bearcreek, Montana. The Smith Coal Mine was one of the largest employers for the town, and the men worked six days a week around the clock to help provide coal for the war effort. But one morning, a fire broke out in the mine and 80 miners were trapped underground with little hope for escape. The rescue effort took days, and many women and children of the town waited with little rest or food outside of the mine waiting to see if their loved ones would come out alive. Only three made it out. One small group of miners holed up in a passageway, trying to trap and save some precious oxygen and block the poisonous carbon monoxide. As they waited, they wrote messages, and one wrote “Goodbye wifes[sic] and daughters.”

In the book of the same name, Susan Kushner Resnick tracked down the stories of what had happened. She interviewed family members and townspeople and tracked down newspaper reports, correspondence and other information to bring the 60+-year-old story to life. It reads quickly and smoothly. As a reader, you know what’s going to happen, the explosion is inevitable as is the death toll, and yet, Resnick keeps the book moving and engaging throughout.

The tragedy tore the community apart with the deaths of main earners in many families. Some women lost multiple loved ones: husbands, fathers, brothers, and uncles. Some men had to pull their fathers, grandfathers, or brothers bodies from the mine. But, it has also held the community together in a way. In present day Bearcreek, there are still anniversary events that commemorate the tragedy.

Resnick looks into those at fault for the fire and subsequent explosions. Faulty equipment, mismanagement, safety measures ignored in place of higher profits seemed to combine to cause the disaster, and yet the widows of the miners were given no money by the Montana Coal and Iron Company, who was, arguably, to blame.

I would have liked more information about the responses of the women after the tragedy, though the women are definitely mentioned and featured throughout. How did the women piece their lives back together? For those who left the town, were they ever able to leave the tragedy behind? For those who stayed, did they ever revisit the mine? Were all the deaths mourned? How did those who may have lost abusive or angry husbands or fathers responded (sadness, relief, and guilt, I would imagine)? Resnick touches on these questions, though I wanted more. Yet, perhaps it is unspeakable to sit and wait for days on end for the body of your husband or father. Perhaps some stories cannot be told.

Written by: Kristin Conard, February 10th 2010

Trailer Girl: And Other Stories

admin — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 01:00:00 +0000

By Terese Svoboda

University of Nebraska Press

One of my favorite short story collections of all time is Black Tickets, a masterpiece written by Jayne Anne Phillips in the 1970s. So hauntingly poetic and impressive were these stories written about rootless misfits by a young and relatively unknown writer that a giant of the short story genre, Raymond Carver, contributed a blurb to the book’s back cover. He wrote: “These stories of America’s disenfranchised are unlike any in our literature. She is an original, and this book of hers is a crooked beauty.”

A ‘crooked beauty’ is also what the sixteen mostly short-short stories in Svoboda’s Trailer Girl conjure up in word pictures. Written in the style of dreamy prose poems about the alienated and edgy lives of the walking wounded, these stories shimmer and dazzle with an intensity that sometimes creates the feeling of the world as a floating, melting cloud of illusion.

In the title novella, a woman is obsessed with the idea there’s a wild child living in the gully near the trailer park where she lives but nobody believes her. Is the wild child a figment of her imagination to help her deal with the sexual abuse she suffered as a child? The other trailer residents ignore her—until there is a murder.

In “Psychic” a clairvoyant suddenly discovers her client is a murderer and then proceeds to exploit him. In “Lost the Baby,” an alcoholic couple black out and can’t remember where they dropped off their child. In “Sundress” two kicked out foster children move into a house while the owners are away on vacation and pose as house-sitting relatives. For a little while, they pretend they have a home to call their own and are blissfully happy.

Models of compression, these short stories are each skillful dramas about the lives of those on the dark side of the American dream. The style is a searing and cutting edge exploration of the long lasting effects of abuse and loss. For those who like elegantly poetic stories, Svoboda’s the real deal: a writer’s writer who unflinchingly makes us see with an almost hallucinogenic double-quick timing. Her brilliance will leave you breathless.

Written by: Cheryl Reeves, February 8th 2010

Taste of Cherry

admin — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 17:01:00 +0000

By Kara Candito

University of Nebraska Press

One of the best ways to support awareness and understanding of taboo topics is to display them in a way that is non-threatening and invites discussion. Kara Candito’s Taste of Cherry is just such a collection of poetry. Bringing to life love affairs in everything from Greek myth to the HBO series Carnivale, Candito familiarizes the reader with both bizarre and mundane romantic entanglements. The collection’s chemistry is successful because she isn’t dependent on smut to get her point across: sensuality is skillfully woven in between the lines. (Let the records show that Candito’s poems also have their fair share of deliciously overt naughtiness, however. Not to worry.)

When I say sensual, I mean that in a very literal sense. While there is a certain amount of sex and romance depicted, Candito also uses her work to transmit sensual experiences on many levels. Smell, sound, touch, and taste are used to make the reader think about pain as well as pleasure. Subtlety is a powerful tool here, forcing the reader to draw connections and imagine the effect of cumulative sensory stimulation. The beauty, heat, and uncomfortable truth of each moment are fleshed out in a playful way. The casual changing of narrator gender and ambiguity regarding sexual orientation keeps the reader on his or her literary toes.

The undeniably erotic undertones to this collection of poetry are not to be outdone by political statements and what struck me as ultimatums: Candito presents a situation that is socially unacceptable, describes it as tenderly as she has the rest, and forces the reader to rethink his or her opinions. Women’s struggle between the conflict between society’s expectations and their own desires is an important theme, and part of what makes Taste of Cherry a feminist work.

Another theme is the power of suffering—from self-imposed pain, to accidents, to pain that teaches and heals. This expression can be viewed as an outlet of the female struggle between Self and Other, or perhaps the expression of an issue personal to the author that finds its way into several of the poems.

Whatever the case may be, the strength of this collection lies in Candito’s willingness to state the ugly truth, and somehow make it sound lyrical without losing meaning. Even more intriguing is her ability to pull such a high level of detail from historical accounts, published writing, and Italian opera, leaving the reader wondering how much of her writing stems from personal experience and how much is imagined.

Written by: Sam Williams, November 27th 2009

Keeping the Campfires Going: Native Women’s Activities in Urban Communities

admin — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 17:05:00 +0000

Edited by Susan Applegate Krouse, Heather A. Howard

University of Nebraska Press

Keeping the Campfires Going: Native Women's Activism in Urban Communities is a collection of essays featuring the struggles and triumphs of Native women living in urban communities. Written about people living throughout North America from San Francisco to Chicago to Vancouver to Anchorage, the essays focus on the role that women have played in keeping their native people connected as a community. The range of women and communities presented gives a broad, yet still specific, view of the conflicts overcome and those still being addressed.

Traditionally (based on reading the book and not attempting to generalize) Native and Aboriginal communities were rural, at times isolated, and not urban. Increasingly the Native and Aboriginal population is growing in cities. The challenge to holding onto one’s past and identity in the face of pressure and a changing world is magnified. The struggle in finding a home, literally and metaphorically, as both a woman and a Native American or Aboriginal is illuminated and discussed. The women are negotiating finding and keeping a place within the native community as well as making a place for themselves within the larger, non-native community.

The women are standing up to be heard and to be seen, and to confront and to change the stereotypes and misconceptions about their place in the world. A quote from a flyer distributed in Vancouver sums up much of the book for me: “We are Aboriginal women, givers of life. We are mothers, sisters, daughters, aunties and grandmothers. Not just prostitutes and drug addicts. Not welfare cheats. We stand on our Mother Earth and we demand respect. We are not here to be beaten, abused, murdered, ignored.” They are embracing their past and their heritage, and they are claiming a place in today’s society.

The essays are well-researched and professional, and while there are personal stories and anecdotes given, the focus is on academia. Many of the contributors are anthropologists and professors. The challenge they face as women is made two-fold because of their Native or Aboriginal background, and I had not before been as truly aware of the depth of the challenge.

Written by: Kristin Conard, November 17th 2009

The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman

admin — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 16:48:00 +0000

By Margot Mifflin

University of Nebraska Press

The Blue Tattoo tells the story of Olive Oatman, a nineteenth century woman with an unusual life. In 1851, Oatman was violently abducted along with her younger sister by Yavapais after watching this group of Native Americans brutally slaughter the rest of her family. What happens after this life-altering event, Mifflin argues, sheds light on American attitudes and treatment toward Native Americans, as well as the role and expectations for women in the 1800s.

It was a blue tattoo on her chin that marked Oatman for the rest of her life and served as a testament to her experience. After her abduction, Oatman was later adopted by the Mohave and assimilated into the tribe. This was evidenced by her tattoo, which Mohave women usually had themselves. Mifflin argues, despite what Oatman and others said later, that the tattoo was one symbol, among others, that she was accepted into the tribe and wanted to be a part of the tribe as well.

Years later, Oatman was “rescued” from the Mohave and had to transition back into White society as an adult. While she was an unusual woman for her time (she was the among the first white women to be tattooed in the United States and went on tour for speaking engagements, another uncommon act for a female to participate in), Oatman allowed her experience with the Mohave to be twisted into one where she was a victim of Native American oppressors. In fact, in subsequent photographs, and at some lectures, Oatman would cover up her chin tattoo with makeup, as if erasing her friendly ties to the Mohave.

Although Oatman’s story on its own is full of intrigue, Mifflin adeptly uses her tale as a springboard for larger issues of the time. Mifflin highlights America’s history of westward expansion through either war or simply seizing new land. The slaughter of Oatman’s family took place as they were heading through what was then Native American territory in the Southwest. While an occasional action by Oatman after her release gave some indication of the affection she felt toward the Mohave, she did not use the spotlight to defend Native American rights or acknowledge the kind treatment she received from the Mohave tribe. After her release, she seemed to bury any of the fondness and goodwill toward the Mohave, and instead, perpetuated the notion that Native Americans were savages.

Mifflin adds that Oatman's tale also reflects upon the unique lifestyle she had as a woman after her release. Oatman, ultimately, had only one immediate family member who survived the massacre and, therefore, little financial support after her release. This was a time when women did not work outside of the home. When faced with being reintroduced into white society, however, Oatman was forced to try to make a living for herself through endeavors like releasing a book about her experience and by attending public speaking events.

In the end, Oatman did what was necessary for her survival in White society. She did what she could to financially support herself by telling the American public what they wanted to hear about her years in captivity. We’ll never know how Oatman really felt about her time with the Mohave, but it is certain that, at the very least, Oatman did push the boundaries of what was thought to be appropriate for women during her time, even if what she did was at the expense of Native Americans.

Written by: Beverly Jenkins-Crockett, November 7th 2009

Call Me Ahab

admin — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 09:05:00 +0000

By Anne Finger

University of Nebraska Press

Anne Finger’s award-winning Call Me Ahab showcases a plethora of historical and literary characters—each of whom is in some way disabled—and imagines new scenarios for their lives. It’s an exciting concept and while several of the stories in the nine-story collection left me cold, Finger is to be lauded for her originality.

Her talent is particularly vivid in "Vincent." Here, Finger brings Vincent Van Gogh into the late twentieth century. Instead of brother Theo endlessly supporting his deranged, if talented, sibling, he cuts him off, leaving Vincent to fend for himself on the teeming streets of New York City. Vincent’s heartbreaking existence is juxtaposed with that of a young, male bureaucrat employed by the Social Security Administration. The pairing is better than a social science text on service delivery, poignantly demonstrating the system’s betrayal of them both.

"Gloucester" re-imagines King Lear, but this time through the contemporary eyes of Gloucester Barrows, a middle-aged man dying of AIDS. Although Barrows is from a prominent political family—think the Kennedy or Bush clans—his marriage dissolved when his wife-of-convenience divorced him following his diagnosis. Now blind, Gloucester is eager to settle his affairs and has no choice but to rely on his two sons. Dexter, the elder, is pursuing elected office and has little time for his ailing dad; Charlie, just twenty, is a hippie’s hippie who has renounced material privilege to live in horrifying squalor. Gloucester’s navigation of this rocky terrain is pitch perfect and emotionally riveting.

"The Blind Marksman" takes readers into a mock socialist dystopia under the rule of “the Great Pilot of Our People, the Beacon of Hope to the Proletarians of the World, the Heroic Leader of the Struggle Against the Fascist Invader,” and introduces a blind marksman whose one-time feat with a bow-and-arrow is embellished with each telling. Like the children’s game of “telephone,” the story becomes more and more absurd, until in the end regime change renders the marksman a caricature of his former self.

The story implies that socialism is no better at protecting individuals than capitalism. But is this true? Call Me Ahab, winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, is full of questions and what-ifs. For example, what if Moby Dick was told from Ahab’s perspective? What might Helen Keller and Frida Kahlo have discussed if they’d met? Finger’s "Helen and Frida" presents a bawdy conversation between the two that will leave you reeling, grinning, or both. Other stories feature those whose perspectives are not typically considered—the dwarf in painter Velasquez’ Las Meninas; a Jewish artist commissioned to draw disfigured internees for Hitler’s medics; and feeble-minded Ned Lud, the man behind the anti-machine Luddite Rebellion, among them.

Throughout, there’s attention to the Holocaust, anti-Semitism, sexism, racism, and discrimination against people with disabilities. While message is never sacrificed to craft, Finger wants readers to appreciate the contributions made by those with physical and psychological limitations. “Who is our greatest poet after Mr. Shakespeare?” she asks. “Why blind John Milton. And in my own century of origin, Monsieur Proust was by his asthma-laden lungs impaired in a major life function… I could mention fit-shaken Van Gogh, dwarf Toulouse-Lautrec, and mad Miss Woolf…Look to the signing of the Declaration of Independence. What see you? A one-legged man, and another who adds a palsied scrawl. Who raised the nation up from the depths of the Depression? Why a man with a pair of legs like cooked spaghetti.”

World affairs and letters have clearly benefited from the talents of the disabled. But Call Me Ahab is no diatribe. Instead, it is a cheering section for the forgotten and under-appreciated and a testament to creativity, whimsy, and intellect.

Written by: Eleanor J. Bader, July 16th 2009

How To Cook a Tapir: A Memoir of Belize

admin — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 16:47:00 +0000

By Joan Fry

University of Nebraska Press

There are certain experiences in one’s life that are defining in their impact. Although the actual duration may be short, these experiences help excavate the person you were meant to be and set you on the path to leading the life that you’re meant to live.

In 1962, when Joan Fry set off with her young anthropologist husband to a year-long “working honeymoon” in British Honduras (now Belize), she had no idea how this adventure would impact her life. How to Cook a Tapir is a fascinating memoir about Fry’s experiences living in a remote Kekchi village in the rainforest. Interspersed with recipes that Fry gleaned from the generous village women, the book tells a story of a twenty-year-old woman who can barely cook and her experiences as a young wife and teacher.

Fry tells of the disapproval she encountered from the village women when she spilled the precious water that she and the other women carried on their heads from the well on a daily basis. In this world, Fry, the educated westerner felt at a great disadvantage as she had no cooking or housekeeping experience. As the year progresses, Fry gains a newfound confidence stemming from the support and respect she receives from the community who value her contributions as a teacher to their children.

By the end of this defining year, Fry has started to question her relationship with her husband whom she dubs “The Answer Man” early on in the book. Interestingly enough, her experiences in Belize are what give her the courage to start a new life when she returns to the states. She writes: "I knew that if I wanted to live with the degree of independence that I enjoyed in Rio Blanco, I would have to claim it. My culture didn’t offer me the choice. Neither did my husband. Several months later, it came as no great surprise to either of us when the word 'divorce' came up in the conversation...Did living there change me? How? Yes it changed me, but I wrestled with the question for more than 50 years before I could answer it. I brought my idealism to the Maya—my willingness to fall in love and my desire to help—and they repaid me with their friendship...but then I think about Cirila and Lucia and Maxiana and all the other women who accepted a white stranger into their lives and taught her how to cook, and I have to confess I got the best of the bargain."

Written by: Gita Tewari, June 27th 2009

Searching for Tamsen Donner

admin — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 23:10:00 +0000

By Gabrielle Burton

University of Nebraska Press

Westward expansion meets the women’s movement in Gabrielle Burton’s Searching for Tamsen Donner, a memoir about a mother’s journey West in the path of the doomed Donner Party pioneers of 1846-7. Most people associate the Donner Party legacy with cannibalism. The pioneers spent a horrific winter stranded in the Sierra Nevadas with no supplies; forty-two died and many of the remaining members survived on the remains of their friends and family.

Tamsen Donner, wife of the party’s captain, stayed behind with her dying husband as the last relief party left with her children. Her name has gone down in history as a paragon of traditional womanly virtue, a loyal wife who sacrificed her own life to be with her husband in his last moments. In Searching for Tamsen Donner, Burton seeks to show a different side of Tamsen, one that showcases her many roles as wife, mother, schoolteacher, botanist, letter writer, and traveler against the background of the Donner Party legend. As William Lederer tells Burton at a Bread Loaf writer’s conference in 1972, “Most people survive by eating each other. You’re going to write a book that shows a better way.”

Five years later, Burton sets off en route to California from New York with her family, weaving together the history of Tamsen Donner through pioneer gravesites and memorials, museums, maps, scholarly research, and surviving letters and diaries from the Donner party. Burton’s memoir charts her own participation in the feminist movements of the sixties and seventies, and her decision to become a writer while caring for a husband and five daughters. Burton’s struggle to balance career with family is a central tension of her journey. “I was afraid the summer would go and we’d find we had piddled the trip away in side trips to snake farms and Stucky shops,” she writes, these family diversions suggesting that, “I was not a writer at all but always and exclusively a mother.”

Burton’s family is supportive, however, and their cooperation and support efface the home/career divide that underscores popular images of successful women. With Tamsen in the foreground, Burton reminds us that history is filled with strong women—women who juggled domestic duties and personal aspirations long before movements for political equality had met with any success. Searching for Tamsen Donner is also a road story, and much of the pleasure of reading Burton’s memoir lies in the plucky characters she meets throughout her journey. These characters straddle history and modernity, blending tales of local life with their own struggles as farmers, small business owners, and casino employees. They also tell the story of the careless destruction of American landscapes—of highways built over historical markers, vandalized memorials, and toxic government testing sites. These acts of destruction present a very different picture from the serene visual landscapes described by Tamsen in her extant letters, all of which appear in Burton’s memoir.

Burton’s emphasis on pioneer history occasionally seems to leave unquestioned the frontier mythology of discovery, the manifest destiny that masks nineteenth-century imperialist narratives of westward expansion. Burton’s self-identified focus on Tamsen shows that a more complete depiction of pioneer history and its displacements and dispossessions are beyond the scope of her memoir, but sometimes one wishes for a less peripheral depiction of Native and Mexicans populations in her retelling of Tamsen’s journey West. Burton’s quibbles with the Mormon Church and culture, too, may seem a bit strident to third wavers. But Burton’s account of her journey and Tamsen’s are (second wave) at its best, and her story is an inspiration to all women seeking to balance personal ambitions, adventure, and family.

Arriving just in time for summer road trip planning, Searching for Tamsen Donner is a moving exploration of a legendary American woman through the eyes of a modern heroine.

Written by: Barbara Barrow, April 23rd 2009

The Enigma Woman: The Death Sentence of Nellie May Madison

admin — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 19:47:00 +0000

By Kathleen A. Cairns

University of Nebraska Press

In her astonishingly well-written account of California’s first female death row inmate, Kathleen Cairns weaves the story of domestic violence and the influence of the media into her telling of one woman’s life. Nellie May Madison shot her husband in their Southern California apartment in March 1934. During this time period, the media easily conflated Nellie with the film noir femme fatal image that was popular at the time. From the introduction to the text, we know that Nellie was eventually released from prison before the courts took her life, and we also know that domestic violence and sexual abuse were the cause of this. But Cairns writes the story so well that the actual facts of the case unfold in the same way that the general public must have learned of them seventy years ago. The compelling story and Cairns' captivating writing keeps you turning each page wondering what will happen next in this horrific case.

More than just a true crime story about a woman battling the California court system, Cairns’ investigation is a critical look on the position of married women during the Great Depression. Discussing issues such as socially constructed feminine norms and the refusal of a court system to recognize that a man could sexually assault his own wife, the overarching themes of the text bridge together Nellie’s struggles with the expectations of her society. Even more interesting is Cairns’ analysis of the women’s prison system in California. During the time, the purpose of having an all-women’s prison was to be able to reward the women with good behavior in order to set them on the road to “virtue.” Virtue was defined as “the ability [of the female prisoners] to support themselves until marriage and domesticity—the ultimate goal.” Set with this as a backdrop, it’s amazing that Nellie May Madison, who was nicknamed in the press as the “Enigma Woman," the “much-married” woman or as a woman “good with ponies and pistols,” was ever able to escape the prison system.

Combining a critique of social norms and the power that the media has over profiling criminals, with the events of one woman’s astounding life, Cairns’ historical text is a pleasure to read on multiple levels. It’s smart, well written and astonishingly addictive.

Written by: Chelsey Clammer, June 22nd 2007