Hell and High-Water - 08 May 2008

Man sentenced to life may be innocent by Matt Goodlett M. Night Shyamalan probably would have stopped in his tracks to say, “What a twist,” if he’d seen the headlines in 1993. The man accused of breaking the levee that caused the flooding of Quincy, Mo., and 14,000 acres of farmland, was said to have done it because he wanted to strand his wife on the other side of the river and have a night of partying. It was the kind of “man bites dog” quirk that led newspapers and networks to run the story into the ground, and caused public opinion to convict the accused long before his trial. James Scott, who in 1994, and again in 1998, was the first to be convicted breaking an obscure Missouri law, Intentionally Causing a Catastrophe, was sentenced to life in prison. In Adam Pitluck’s Damned to Eternity: The Story of the Man Who They Say Caused the Flood both sides of the case are presented with little editorializing from Pitluck, but the narrative is steered to suggest Scott didn’t receive a fair shake. The book implies Scott was the fall guy for the Army Corps of Engineers whose reports — never entered into evidence at trial — concluded he didn’t cause the flooding. Also at stake was the property of farmers who lacked flood insurance and needed an act of vandalism rather than an “Act of God” to collect on their homeowner’s insurance.

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Boba Fettish - 01 May 2008

Actor Jeremy Bulloch seeks a bounty in Omaha by Jared Cvetas The character of Boba Fett, the bounty hunter, is among the most popular and recognizable from the Star Wars saga’s “Episodes.” Brooding and mysterious, his presence demands fear and respect. Fett made his first appearance in a holiday cartoon, then starred in films, numerous novels and comic book series. That’s pretty solid for a character with a combined movie screen time of fewer than 10 minutes with only a handful of dialogue. What was it like for the man behind the mask? Ask Jeremy Bulloch yourself when he takes off the helmet to make an appearance on the 7th-annual Free Comic Book Day. “It still amazes me that Boba Fett is so popular,” Bulloch said. “I get many, many letters from all over the world.”

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Media’s Cool Dude - 23 Apr 2008

Has staunch conservative McCain charmed the liberal press? by Steve Eskew In Free Ride, David Brock and Paul Waldman note that, for several decades, American news media have defined the images of candidates for voters. They charge that the press has shamefully abused its power in regard to Sen. John McCain, the Republican presidential hopeful, “by reading heroic qualities into the Arizona senator’s every facet,” failing to provide an accurate portrait of him. Mike Wallace of “60 Minutes” declared “There’s something authentic about [McCain],” and Jake Tapper of Salon summed up the 71-year-old senator as “Basically, just a cool dude.” Brock and Waldman said the media portray McCain as a “larger-than-life anti-politician unbeholden to special interests and driven not by ambition but by a sense of duty.”

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Creating Your Own Reality - 16 Apr 2008

Author Scott Heim explores memory by Kyle Tonniges When author Scott Heim was working on his master’s thesis at Columbia in the mid-’90s, he had no idea that Mysterious Skin would a) get published and b) be adapted as a film. That’s sort of like winning the lottery. Twice. Heim will appear at Film Streams Monday, April 21 at 7 p.m. to discuss his first novel as well as his latest, We Disappear, after a screening of Mysterious Skin. He has seen the movie some 20 times, and there are things he’d like to change about the story. “Not so much with the movie,” he said from his home in Boston. “That was really [director Gregg Araki’s] vision. But when I was getting my undergraduate degree in Kansas, my writing professor always told me that once you publish a novel you should never look at it again because you’ll always see things you want to change,” Heim said. “So I try to live by that rule.”

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You Gonna Eat That? - 09 Apr 2008

An illuminating look at mankind’s oldest taboo by Kyle Tonniges “The truth is, we all have cannibals in our closets,” Carole Travis-Henikoff writes in her introduction to this meticulously researched and compulsively readable history of mankind’s greatest taboo. As she eloquently illustrates, cannibalism is an old as humanity. She asserts it’s possible the outlawing of cannibalism is rather recent in terms of recorded history. You’re probably familiar with the plight of the Chilean rugby team immortalized in Piers Paul Read’s Alive, also recounted here, but you might not know that widespread cannibalism has been documented in parts of war-torn Africa as recently as 2003, as well as in Russia and China during the 20th century. Serial killers and the oft-stereotyped tribesmen of the Amazon figure prominently in the book, but where Travis-Henikoff truly excels is in her sociological and anthropological analysis of the practice, offering thoughtful insights into the whys of cannibalism.

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Memory Banking - 02 Apr 2008

Woman’s recollections transport readers to 1930s farmland by Steve Eskew Having spent the night at her parent’s farmhouse, Lucille Marker and her college girlfriend awoke to a startling sight: Their faces had turned gray. It was 1934 and Nebraskans had just been hit by one of the worst dust storms in American history. Cars stalled because dust clogged their engines, forcing people to crawl to safe haven. That’s about as dramatic as Farm Girl by Karen Jones Gowen gets, except perhaps for the story of a man who carries a burning kerosene tank out of the house with his bare hands. Omitting sensationalized incidents and graphic sexual exploits, the book perfectly captures a young woman’s coming of age in the early decades of the 20th century. It concerns real life, relatively ordinary activities, drawn with the precision of a Norman Rockwell painting.

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Touch and Gone - 28 Mar 2008

Legendary reporter’s memoirs long overdue by Casey Logan Here’s the thing about old people: by and large, not that interesting. It isn’t their fault. We’re taught to see old people as our link to the past, but that’s a tall order. After all, it’s not just any Saul or Mildred who can freestyle a verbal medley that begins as an anecdote about street ball on the hottest day of the summer, and somehow becomes a sly lesson about the Teapot Dome Scandal. This is what makes Studs Terkel special.

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O’Brien’s War - 20 Mar 2008

Soldier-turned award-winning author now fights bad writing by Will Holmes Tim O’Brien wants to feel the creative writing of students at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. “In student fiction, as in any other fiction, I look for stories that move me — my heart, my stomach, my blood, my intellect, my tear ducts, the back of my throat, the nape of my neck,” he said via email. The author of the National Book Award-winning Going After Cacciato, O’Brien teaches creative writing at Texas State University and is among prominent authors of the Vietnam generation. Through workshops and a public reading as a writer-in-residence March 24-April 4, O’Brien will share thoughts on fiction writing with English students in UNL graduate programs, and teachers from the Lincoln Public Schools.

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Thumpin’ It - 13 Mar 2008

The use and abuse of the Bible in today’s presidential politics by Will Gardner What would Jesus debate? In a recent interview, author Jacques Berlinerblau discusses Jesus Christ’s emergence as a political candidate (as seen on the website jesusin2008.com): “When you ask people, ‘Would you want Jesus to be your president?’ people would almost always answer yes, but different people have different Jesuses. It’s when Jesus enters the public sphere that people start to argue.” I would prefer, if political candidates were going to trot out a piece of literature to quote during stump speeches, that they reference Madame Bovary. Unfortunately, citing the Bible is presently in vogue. In his introduction, Berlinerblau asserts that “the Bible is back!” Many Christian conservatives are ecstatic now that — after years of what they might consider the Bible’s “banishment” by the secular judiciary and the liberal media — the Good Book is currently given immense political weight. As Berlinerblau demonstrates in his remarkable study, though, not only do people have “different Jesuses,” but they also have different Bibles.

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Tumultuous Renaissance - 06 Mar 2008

Fear of Hispanics intensifies breach of traditional American principles by Steve Eskew In HisPanic, Geraldo Rivera shares an abundance of fundamental facts, opinions and anecdotes concerning the current immigration debate. One significant narrative involves a group of illegal immigrants from Cuba who used the system to beat the system in 2005.

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Booked - 06 Mar 2008

Brandon Ryan, a 23-year-old Bellevue resident, has completed his first book. The Emotional Struggle details Ryan’s struggle with cerebral palsy. “I have experienced such great pain, my body tells a story all by itself with the amount of scars that I have from surgery,” he writes. Part confessional, part memoir, Ryan wrote the book using only the first finger of his left hand. It took him three years to complete. The book is available online at authorhouse.com. Readers can download an electronic version for $4.95 or purchase a bound, printed version for $14.99.

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