All About Books

Since Darwin, evolutionary biologists have described the males of the animal kingdom as dominating and promiscuous, while females are dull, passive, and devoted. A new book takes a fresh look at animal behavior with less bias. Hear a review of “Bitch: On the Female of the Species” by Lucy Cooke

Leading a team of chemists as woman in the corporate world of the 60’s was unusual. Elizabeth Zott is the unusual main character in the novel “Lessons in Chemistry” by Bonnie Garmus. In store for Zott are single motherhood and hosting the countries best-loved cooking show. It's a witty take on mid century feminism.

Bird watching is the starting point for UNL Professor Thomas Gannon to visit other important topics. Enduring childhood poverty and prejudice, Indian Boarding School in South Dakota, and transcendent moments encountering birds of the Great Plains. Hear an interview with Gannon about his new book, “Birding While Indian: a Mixed Blood Memoir”.

“Horse” by Geraldine Brooks is a novel that leaps from 1850 to 1950 and finally to our time. It features an extraordinary race horse and the enslaved groom who helps him win and a painting of them both which haunts a modern art historian.

When a Lincoln man and his wife realized they were about to deal with Alzheimer’s together, there wasn’t a book that adequately explained everything they were to face. “Dear Judy: a Love Story Rewritten by Alzheimer’s” is the book Michael James wrote to help others make this journey.

The aptly named novel, “Trust” is about a man who accumulated a fortune in the early 20th century stock market. The flimflam nature of the stock market, its collapse in ’29 and even the unreliable nature of the story the author tells, are elements of this book that won the Noble Prize for Literature. “Trust” by Hernan Diaz

“Easy Beauty” is philosophy professor and Pulitzer Prize finalist, Chloe Cooper Jones memoir. It’s a frank depiction of her life with a congenital condition that affects her height, how she moves and her life with continuous pain- both physical, and always being seen as lesser.

In a mysterious, isolated town, motherhood has a different dimension- mothers sometimes disappear. In the novel “Elsewhere” author Alexis Schaitkin has written an allegory exploring motherhood, individual and community identity.

Three good friends leave Alabama to join the Army, eventually they're stationed in the exotic paradise of Manila. Then Pearl Harbor happened. What followed for U.S. servicemen in the Pacific was horrific. Nebraska author Tosca Lee has co-written a work of historical fiction about this time and place, “The Long March Home: A World War II Novel of the Pacific” by Marcus Brotherton and Tosca Lee.

It’s not often host Pat Leach reviews something other than a recently published book, but a novel from 1936 was mentioned to her that tells part of Nebraska’s story “Take All to Nebraska” by Sophus Keith Winter is the first in a trilogy about a family from Denmark who settled in Nebraska and struggled to adjust to a new land and culture.