Read an excerpt from "Changing My Name" from Driving with Dvorak: Essays on Memory and Identity by Fleda Brown:

"It is the beginning of the year at Leverett School. I know my name is next in the roll call because the teacher hesitates. I am tense, embarrassed, my name exactly matching my awkward self. I am not a Marianna or a Jane, no matter how hard I try. “Fled (as in ‘escaped’)-uh?” the teacher’s voice rises to a question mark. She has assumed a vowel between two consonants is generally short. Or she says “Frieda,” seeing not the actual letters but what she expects to see. In the sixth grade I decide to use Sue, my middle name. All of us are transmogrified that year, growing new bodies, trying the same thing with our names. When I am thirteen, I go by Sue all summer at the lake, the same summer I go without my glasses to win the love of a boy named Lee with large, soft lips, who spends the summer with his parents at KenThelm, a resort down the lake. I feel my way through a fuzz of trees all through July and August. I paddle down the lake, trusting my instincts to get me around the point, past the shallows. The last day, before we leave, the reason for my deprivation tells me he is in love with Judy Carr, whose family owns the cottage next to ours, because she is such “a sharp dresser.” Indeed, she is. I cannot argue.

Fleda and Sue represented a genteel tug-of-war between my grandmothers. My mother’s mother, Susie Pauline Rawlins Simpich, a member of DAR, family historiographer, would take me aside when I was older and suggest that I fuse FledaSue, so her Sue would not be lost when I married. The Professor Browns next door were perhaps too much for her intellectually, but she had distant relatives who sailed over on the Mayflower to become part of the few indisputable American elite, and she had John Quincy Adams as her direct ancestor. She had Nec vi standum nec metu—Neither Hesitation nor Fear—on a coat of arms. And a brick with a label varnished across its surface that proclaimed, “Made by slaves on the old Rawlins homeplace.”

At four or five, I am so intimidated by Fleda Phillips Brown that I will not call her by her name, Grandmother. The name is her choice. Susie Simpich is Nana, a name I am told I invented before I found out that half the grandmothers in the world are called Nana. But I duck my head in front of my regal Grandmother. I cannot say that I think she is wonderful: at the age of four or five I have no such clearly formed thoughts, but her presence—maybe I pick this up from my mother, who is intimidated by her—often leaves me breathless. Who knows how energy begins to collect, to turn people into icons? She looks a little like Eleanor Roosevelt, only prettier, the same weak chin, the same slightly yellowed iron-gray hair wound on her head. The same strength in the wiry body, the same conviction in the voice. “Say Grandmother,” my mother says, and I duck my head. “Oh, you can say Grandmother,” she begs, as if it were her fault. I pull away. But I sit on Grandmother’s bed and comb her long hair while she reads to me. I stroke and stroke with the ivory comb, lost in her voice, in the privilege of her long hair."

Read from the Introduction of Goodbye Wifes and Daughters by Susan Kushner Resnick:

"Bearcreek, Montana, used to be wild. In the 1920s, when it was still new, there were eleven saloons. Eleven saloons and not one church. It was a town of brothels and fistfights and rollicking parties to celebrate brides brought over from the old country. The miners worked and drank and worked some more, surviving on the miles of coal spread under the mountains. Some called it a coal camp, but it was different from the others. Montana Coal and Iron, the firm that owned the area’s largest mine, didn’t rule the community—there was no company store that the miners were forced to patronize, no company-owned houses they had to live in. The residents of Bearcreek were free to shop and sleep where they wanted. There were two hotels, rows of profitable businesses, a hospital, and a bank. People said it was a little slice of utopia, this village that sprouted up in the middle of vast natural beauty.

Bearcreek is wild today, too, but in a different way. Now, the sagebrush grows tall on hillsides once congested with streets and houses, the places where the miners held those parties and the shopkeepers laid out their shoes and skillets. Horses wander through hollowed out mine buildings that have disintegrated in the decades since the tragedy that cut off the town’s blood supply. During its glory days, almost two thousand people lived in Bearcreek. On Election Day in 2005, thirty-three voters reelected the mayor, a man named Pits who also happens to own the only saloon still in business. One saloon, with pig races that give tourists and travel writers a reason to come to town, but still, after all these years, no church. No hotels or hospital or bank, either, and the closest store is a little quilt shop. It’s technically located in Washoe, a twenty-one-resident village up the road from Bearcreek that was established enough, until the 1950s, to have its own grammar school and post office. But now Washoe blurs into Bearcreek and its tenuous hold on an identity. The cemetery on the hill is arguably Bearcreek’s most populated spot.

The people who remain and those who speak fondly of the Bearcreek they once knew refuse to call it a ghost town. But almost all of them will admit this: Bearcreek was killed, as surely as if it had been flattened by an earthquake or burned by a wildfire. Cause of death: the worst coal mine disaster in Montana’s history. The 1943 disaster killed 75 men, leaving 58 widows and 125 fatherless children. Since that day, there have only been three underground coal mine disasters in the United States that have killed more men. But none of those destroyed a community. By the time the disaster struck, Bearcreek had segued from Wild West rowdy to Norman Rockwell wholesome. Fewer people lived there, but it had become the quintessential all-American hometown. After the disaster, it was broken and nearly empty. Utopia? Never again."

Read from the introduction of American Hoops: U.S. Men's Olympic Basketball from Berlin to Beijing by Carson Cunningham:

"Over the past eighty years, basketball’s sweeping international growth has come about because of the creativity and acumen of individuals on and off the court. The history of the U.S. men’s basketball team at the Olympic Games shows this in striking fashion.

Drama packs this tale. So too do victory, loss, and redemption. Major issues arise, such as the impact of basketball and its superstars on popular culture in a world where free, socialist, and authoritarian countries compete for people’s hearts and minds. The tale resonates on personal levels as well. Take U.S. Olympic basketball players Joe Fortenberry and Sam Balter at the original 1936 tournament. Not too long after coming back from those Games, Fortenberry would serve in the U.S. military in its effort to turn back Hitler. And Balter, a Jewish American basketball player, would decide that because of Hitler’s horrificness he should not have even attended those Games.

Tracing the story of U.S. Olympic men’s basketball reveals how hard the players work, the simple joy to be found in playing, coaching, or watching the sport, and much as well about the dynamic relationship basketball fosters between individuality and teamwork. The tale highlights the pride players have felt in representing the United States but also the racism that some of those very same players have had to confront in their home country."

Carson Cunningham played basketball at Purdue University and professionally in the Continental Basketball Association and in two leagues overseas. He currently teaches history at DePaul University.

To read a longer excerpt or to purchase American Hoops, visit http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/product/American-Hoops,674141.aspx.

Here's another excerpt from our featured gift book ideas. Read from Breathing in the Fullness of Time by William Kloefkorn. Visit our holiday sale page for a special discount code.

"Desire. Without it, you might as well pack up and go home. Fran Welch, Coach Welch, had said this when the season began, then repeated it at frequent but irregular intervals as the season moved along. By now, I had decided I no longer wanted to play college football. So I turned in my gear and went home, but not before Coach Welch gave me an asschewing I'll not live long enough to forget. Before the chewing began, though, he wanted to know why in the name of Christ I was quitting.

Coach, sitting behind a wooden desk in his small office at the stadium, grimaced, as if someone had struck him in the solar plexus with a closed fist. The grimace revealed two rows of yellowing teeth. I remember thinking that those teeth appeared to be aching to bite something.

No desire, he said.

Yes, sir, I said. I have lost my desire to play football.

Coach removed his ball cap and wiped his forehead with the palm of his right hand. I was certain that the practice I had skipped that Monday afternoon had been a tough one; two days earlier the Emporia State Hornets had beaten a stubborn band of Gorillas on their home field, but the win had been sloppy. And Coach Welch did not approve of sloppiness. I could envision the entire nest of Hornets doing more wind sprints than I cared to imagine. But because my resolve to leave the team was firm, it now pleased me that I had not been one of the sprinters.

No desire, Coach said again. No goddamn desire.

Yes, sir, I said. No desire.

It was the truth. To this day I do not know what prompted my loss of desire, but I know absolutely that it vanished almost entirely—not overnight, but over a series of nights during which I had discussed my dilemma with one of my roommates, Gene Carpenter, who like me had believed at the outset that playing college football would be pretty much the same as playing the game in high school, and who, as it turned out, was also experiencing a loss of desire.

Then let's stop talking about it and turn in our gear, Gene said. I'm ready if you are."

Here's an excerpt from a featured gift book idea, Lights on a Ground of Darkness: An Evocation of a Place and Time by Ted Kooser. If you'd like to purchase Lights on a Ground of Darkness, check out our holiday sale for a special discount code.

"Summer, 1949. Above the Mississippi, the noon sun bleaches the blue from a cloudless midsummer sky. So high in their flight that they might be no more than tiny motes afloat on the surface of the eye, a few cliff swallows dive and roll. At the base of the shadowy bluffs a highway weaves through the valley, its surface shimmering like a field of wheat; to the south, a semi loaded with squealing hogs shifts down for the slow crawl up out of the bottoms and into the bright, flat cornfields of eastern Iowa. The bitter odor of exhaust clings like spider webs to the long grass lining the shoulders of the road. Toward the top of the grade the sound of the engine levels out into a brash and steady saxophone note that rattles back through the cut, and then, with a fading whine, the truck is gone, leaving the hot road shining empty down the length of the valley.

The little town of Guttenberg, Iowa, is taking a midday nap under the trees on the bank of the river. Its wide streets are quiet, its window shades drawn down against the heat. Old elms sprinkle the deserted sidewalks with lacy, drifting patterns. There’s a light breeze off the water, carrying the smell of fish and the soft, regular sound of waves lapping the sides of tied-up boats. In one back yard an old woman in a blue bathrobe and a wide-brimmed straw hat walks a plank pathway through her garden, inspecting the leaves of her beans with the tip of a cane.

Front Street, which in any other small town might be called Main Street, divides a shady riverbank park from a row of old store buildings. The Mississippi here is wide and smooth, pooled by a government lock and dam. Beyond the dark green channel islands, the bluffs of Wisconsin rise pale and vaporous. Far out, between two of the islands, a tug slowly pushes a long line of rusty coal barges north toward Minnesota. A few old men sit on shaded benches in the park, swapping stories and watching the river birds loop and skim over the water.

The buildings that face the river all date from the mid-1800 s. Nearly all of them are two stories in height, built of cut limestone or of brick, with elaborate stone cornices. The original storefronts, with their high windows and recessed entryways, have been “modernized,” but the original facades still peer over the tops of the glaring spreads of glass and the slick cummerbunds of new signs. You have to sit in the park and squint hard to see the town as it once was, a busy river port of the days of the big stern-wheelers, the fancy trim of its buildings mirroring the cut wooden gingerbread on the steamboats.

The businesses that line Front Street are those that one expects to find in any small town. There’s a hardware store, its windows full of red power mowers, green fertilizer spreaders, and blue bicycles. There’s the BonTon Dress Shop, unabashedly showing last year’s fashions on dazed and flaking mannequins. There’s the Blackbird Variety, with a leaky pop case out front. There’s a bakery and a Thom McAn shoestore. There are a couple of buildings that once were stores but have since been converted into private residences, with curtains drawn across the display windows and potted plants on the stoops. At the north end of the row of buildings sits the post office, plain as a peach crate. At its side, the draft from a window fan shakes a dead spirea bush. The American flag runs down its hot steel pole like candle wax."

Today we're highlighting one of the books featured in our cooking sale. Read from "As the Corkscrew Turns" in Corkscrewed: Adventures in the New French Wine Country byRobert V. Camuto:

"It was a perfect day to lose faith in wine. By midmorning on June 21, 2005, the heat and humidity were conspiring to make it another in a series of stifling hot days in Bordeaux. I’d set out from Saint-Émilion in my tiny Citroën rental car—windows rolled down to make up for the lack of air conditioning—en route to Vinexpo, the world’s largest wine convention held once every two years in the sprawling convention site north of the city.

As I inched along in traffic across the bridge on the Gironde River, I was thinking about the schizophrenic state of the French wine industry, which—if you believed the French—was in a state of inescapable crisis. Winemakers were rioting in Languedoc, furious over global competition and circumstances beyond their control. French people were drinking less, having ceded to the Italians their place as the world’s biggest wine drinkers. While Americans were learning from study after study about the positive effects of red wine, French government health campaigns were targeting their countrymen’s overconsumption. (To show just how serious the Republic was about cutting down on drinking and driving, gendarmes were going after the once-sacrosanct Sunday lunch crowd by staking out traffic circles across the countryside.) French wine by the tanker was going unsold, and prices of run-of-the mill wines were collapsing as the once-untouchable French wine industry appeared to be drowning in foreign wines from places like Chile, where French winemakers had taken their savoir faire. Even French actor, winemaker, and bon vivant Gérard Depardieu was quoted in news articles saying he hadn’t had a drink in six months! As for the French intellectuals, what could they do but write essays proclaiming the end of France’s wine glory?

Yet, in a seemingly cruel and simultaneous twist, the forces of globalization were inflating prices of the grandest of Bordeaux’s grand crus, wines that were already out of the reach of most mortals. Bottles of most anything French and expensive were being snapped up as status symbols—like luxury watches—by freshly minted millionaires in Russia and China who, it was said, drank Petrus with Coca-Cola.

Just the day before, I’d lunched at Saint-Émilion’s legendary Château Cheval Blanc, which is owned by a pair of regulars on the World’s Richest list: Bernard Arnault, the French founder and chief of Louis Vuitton Möet Hennessy, the world’s leading luxury brand conglomerate, and Belgian industrialist Baron Frère. The aim of the lunch was to promote Cheval Blanc’s adopted and renamed Argentinean family member, Cheval des Andes, which commanded about $70 a bottle (cheap by Cheval Blanc standards).

I was seated at this lunch next to a fellow American—a wine writer who told me he also happened to run a wine fund on the side.

“A wine what?”

A “wine fund,” he explained, bought wine futures with investors’ money for speculation. “It represents,” he said apologetically, “the dark side of wine.”

From the champagne and amuses-bouches delivered by white-jacketed roaming servers on the terrace, through the gazpacho and grilled steak accompanied by several vintages of the bold Argentinean red in the garden dining room, to the languorous finale of cigars and cognac on outdoor sofas under the shade of canvas umbrellas, one had to be impressed. Cheval Blanc’s soft-spoken managing director and legendary winemaker Pierre Lurton quietly made the rounds, his mouth stuck in a kind of permanent smile that betrayed the possibility that schmoozing might not be his thing. Then the guests departed in a stampede of Mercedeses that left a trail of dust along the picturesque plateau of vines."