Category Archives: Books & Reading

The Nebraska Publications Clearinghouse receives documents every month from all Nebraska state agencies, including the University of Nebraska Press (UNP).  UNP books, as well as all Nebraska state documents, are available for checkout by libraries and librarians for their patrons.

Here are the UNP books the Clearinghouse received in July and August, 2025:

Autobiography of a Kiowa Indian, by Charles E. Apekaum. Series: American Indian Lives.

Born during the final years of the Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache Reservation, Charles E. Apekaum, grandson of Kiowa chief Stumbling Bear, served as the principal interpreter for the Santa Fe Laboratory of Anthropology field expedition in 1935. Educated, bilingual, and world traveled, Apekaum’s services as a translator were sought by anyone who dealt with the Kiowa Indian Agency personnel, politicians, and scholars.

The following year, Apekaum traveled throughout Oklahoma with anthropologist Weston La Barre and ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes, serving as their liaison as they documented the peyote religion. During off days, Apekaum narrated his life story to La Barre, recounting the final days of the reservation, allotment, the early days of Anadarko, Oklahoma, his seventeen years attending boarding schools, service in the navy during World War I and then as a state game warden, his work translating for politicians, and his involvement in the Native American Church. La Barre never published the manuscript, which contains rich details about intertribal variants of the sacred peyote rite as well as about Apekaum’s life experience.

In Autobiography of a Kiowa Indian Benjamin R. Kracht presents Apekaum’s autobiography for the first time. This eyewitness account is an important addition to Native American life narratives and the reconstruction of Kiowa cultural, social, and religious life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the southern Great Plains.

Character Witness: a Memoir, by Jason Brown. Series: American Lives.

When Jason Brown’s mother is arrested for stealing $38,000, he agrees to serve as a character witness for her, hoping to keep her out of prison.

Thus begins Character Witness, a memoir, a chronicle of a mother’s struggle with mental illness, addiction, and poverty, and an inquiry into whether we can escape the legacy of the past. Brown realizes that his troubles as a young man mirrored his mother’s, and as he chronicles how sexual abuse can pass down through generations—from father to daughter, and later from mother to son—he begins to look for answers about whether people can change.

Brown and his mother share a difficult history, but they also share a common sense of humor and a sense of the absurd. More than simply a recovery narrative, Character Witness centers the necessity of staying with loved ones even in their worst moments.

The Earth is Evil, by Steven Swarbrick. Series: Provocations.

The Earth Is Evil examines the connection between subjectivity and lack, arguing for a destituent ecology that sees lack as the universalist core of social, political, and environmental struggles. Steven Swarbrick maintains that psychoanalysis does not simply help us integrate our desires into a constituency of multispecies actors. Instead, psychoanalysis destitutes our fantasies of ecological and psychic wholeness. That destitution, he argues, is the unconscious source of our enjoyment. Exploring films by Lars von Trier, Kelly Reichardt, Daniel Kwan, and Daniel Scheinert, among others, and intervening in trenchant debates about negativity and desire, Swarbrick urges a return to the existentialist subject of lack against the flattening of subjectivity by ecocriticism. The Earth Is Evil is a vigorous attempt to construct a leftist environmental movement in dialogue with the most radical currents of critical theory.

Freethinkers and Labor Leaders: Women, Social Change, and Politics in Modern Mexico, by María Teresa Fernández Aceves, translated by Tanya Huntington. Series: Confluencias.

The interpretation of the revisionist historiography of the Mexican Revolution (1910–17) has focused primarily on revolutionary leaders who were men, pushing the heroines of the war to the sidelines. If women happened to be mentioned, they appeared only as symbols, not as social agents. However, the role of the Adelitas, the Cristeras, the Hijas del Anáhuac, and the women of the Ácrata Group were essential to the revolution. In Freethinkers and Labor Leaders María Teresa Fernández Aceves tells the stories of five militant feminist women who aided in the creation of a modern culture in revolutionary and postrevolutionary Mexico and, in some ways, Latin America as a whole: Belén de Sárraga Hernández (1872–1950), Atala Apodaca Anaya (1884–1977), María Arcelia Díaz (1896–1939), María Guadalupe Martínez Villanueva (1906–2002), and María Guadalupe Urzúa Flores (1912–2004).

These five women formed part of two cultural generations that participated together in the Mexican Revolution, in the consolidation of state cooperative institutions, and in the antiestablishment and dissident politics that evolved in the late 1940s. Through these social processes and their struggles as women, mothers, and workers, these women fought for secular education, labor rights, and the civil and political rights of women, redefining cultural and social constructions. Based on original, pathbreaking research, Freethinkers and Labor Leaders demonstrates how five women transformed Latin American society’s ideas of citizenship, femininity, masculinity, and politics.

Invitation: Stories, by Mi Jin Kim. Series: The Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction.

Winner of the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction.

In Invitation, men and women try and fail to connect to the people they want to be with. As they remember the first people who dominated their lives—parents, best friends, cousins, crushes—they find themselves repeating old patterns. A boy shares seemingly disturbing details about his mother’s disappearance with an aloof tutor. A man stalks an ex-girlfriend but finds her missing. A woman wakes up in an empty apartment—and to every mother’s worst nightmare. When a callous young man penetrates the bell jar of an elderly couple’s quiet life, their live-in assistant learns a cruel lesson about loyalty.

The Perils of Girlhood: a Memoir in Essays, by Melissa Fraterrigo. Series: American Lives.

Like many girls growing up in the eighties and nineties, Melissa Fraterrigo leaned on popular culture to transition from childhood to adolescence and beyond. Judy Blume told stories about girls embracing their imperfections; Madonna encouraged bold moves. But Fraterrigo’s experiences with dating and attempts to refashion her body through diet and exercise left her feeling far from empowered. It wasn’t until Fraterrigo became a mother to twin daughters and they began their own self-criticisms that she questioned how she might help them navigate their own girlhoods.

A handsome swim coach’s advances, an anxious daughter soothing her father’s temper, the history of Mace, and the joy of female friendship: these are some of the memories that shape Fraterrigo’s worldview as an adult. Written with lyricism and insight, The Perils of Girlhood provides a reckoning and a reclamation. And while these personal narratives developed from Fraterrigo’s desire to guide her daughters, their universal truths compel us to consider how best to bring all of our daughters into the future.

Recovering Ancestors in Anthropological Traditions, edited by Regna Darnell and Frederic W. Gleach. Series: Histories of Anthropology Annual

Recovering Ancestors in Anthropological Traditions, volume 15 of the Histories of Anthropology Annual, focuses on themes of individual scholars and national developments, with each specific case building toward an understanding of an international discipline. Similar to the cultures that anthropologists study, anthropology’s four-field discipline contains myriad practices, theories, and methodologies that are often divergent, contradictory, and associated with nationally based schools of thought, contributing to a vital and diverse global discipline.

This volume emphasizes the challenges international scholars face as they engage both local and global movements. Several European traditions are represented, including two chapters adding to the body of work on Portugal from previous volumes in the series. North American traditions are well represented, including a collection of works on Nancy Lurie. Also included is an important examination of the collection of human skeletal remains in Argentina, presented in English for the first time. Readers will find both new information and new ways of understanding this complex history.

Ties That Bind: People and Perception in U.S. and Korean Transnational Relations, 1905–1965 by Hannah Kim. Series: Studies in Pacific Worlds

Ties That Bind narrates five stories of how a transnational community helped shape American perceptions and understandings of Korea and Koreans, from a time when only a small number of Americans knew anything about Korea to a time when most Americans were aware of Korea’s geopolitical significance. Three of the moments took place when Korea was a colony of Japan: the so-called Conspiracy Case in 1911, the independence movement of 1919, and the efforts to recognize Korean independence during World War II. The other two moments transpired in the context of the Cold War, when Korean orphans and Korean exchange students came to the United States in the 1950s.

In these five stories, the interplay of people, perceptions, and official and unofficial policy can be seen in the work of people who tried to influence U.S. and Korean relations by binding Americans and Koreans through shared values and experiences. They did so by portraying Koreans as Christian converts, as supporters of democracy and democratic ideals, and as people embracing Western or American cultural norms. The actors in this book did not always succeed in their goals, but through their endeavors, they facilitated policy discussions, forged ties between the United States and Korea, and began to break down cultural barriers between Koreans and Americans.

Top Gun Performance: From the Cockpit to the Boardroom, by Ted Carter and Jack A. Stark.

Top Gun Performance can help readers learn to achieve happiness, success, and health in school, sports, work, and life. Ted Carter, a Top Gun graduate, and Jack Stark, a performance psychologist and psychotherapist, have observed, commanded, and treated the behaviors of thousands of individuals. Both understand the need to pursue a specific lifestyle to perform at the very top. Both are tuned in to what people want out of life, what is getting in their way, and what they can do to overcome the mental and physical obstacles keeping them from achieving a Top Gun performance in all areas of their lives.

Carter and Stark use their personal and professional histories to teach readers the psychological and mental performance tools they can use on a daily basis to meet the challenges they face. The authors share behind-the-scenes stories, techniques, and analysis to provide readers with a blueprint for building their own exceptional performance. Reviewing their careers in helping other people obtain successful outcomes, Carter and Stark offer a program readers can use in their own lives.

**Pictures and Synopses courtesy of University of Nebraska Press.