Search results for ""Author Dan O'Brien""

A Project of the Center for Great Plains Studies and the School of Natural Resources, University of NebraskaGreat Plains Bison traces the history and ecology of this American symbol from the origins of the great herds that once dominated the prairie to its near extinction in the late nineteenth century and the subsequent efforts to restore the bison population.A longtime wildlife biologist and one of the most powerful literary voices on the Great Plains, Dan O’Brien has managed his own ethically run buffalo ranch since 1997. Drawing on both extensive research and decades of personal experience, he details not only the natural history of the bison but also its prominent symbolism in Native American culture and its rise as an icon of the Great Plains. Great Plains Bison is a tribute to the bison’s essential place at the heart of the North American prairie and its ability to inspire naturalists and wildlife advocates in the fight to preserve American biodiversity.

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For more than forty years the prairies of South Dakota have been Dan O’Brien’s home. Working as a writer and an endangered-species biologist, he became convinced that returning grass-fed, free-roaming buffalo to the grasslands of the northern plains would return natural balance to the region and reestablish the undulating prairie lost through poor land management and overzealous farming. In 1998 he bought his first buffalo and began the task of converting a little cattle ranch into an ethically run buffalo ranch. Wild Idea is a book about how good food choices can influence federal policies and the integrity of our food system, and about the dignity and strength of a legendary American animal. It is also a book about people: the daughter coming to womanhood in a hard landscape, the friend and ranch hand who suffers great tragedy, the venture capitalist who sees hope and opportunity in a struggling buffalo business, and the husband and wife behind the ranch who struggle daily, wondering if what they are doing will ever be enough to make a difference. At its center, Wild Idea is about a family and the people and animals that surround them—all trying to build a healthy life in a big, beautiful, and sometimes dangerous land.

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True Story: A Trilogy gathers together three documentary plays by award-winning playwright and poet Dan O’Brien concerning trauma, both political and personal. The Body of an American speaks to a moment in history when a single, stark photograph—of a US Army Ranger dragged from the wreckage of a Blackhawk helicopter through the streets of Mogadishu—altered the course of global events. In a story that ranges from Rwanda to Afghanistan to the Canadian Arctic, O’Brien dramatizes the ethical and psychological haunting of journalist Paul Watson. In The House in Scarsdale: A Memoir for the Stage the playwright applies journalistic principles to investigating the source of his childhood unhappiness, as he searches for the reason why his parents and siblings cut him off years ago. The more he learns about his family, the more mysterious the circumstances surrounding their estrangement become, until his sense of self is shaken by rumors regarding his true parentage. The trilogy concludes with New Life, a tragicomedy that finds Paul Watson in Syria and the playwright in treatment for cancer, while together they endeavor to sell a TV series about journalists in war zones. New Life explores the paradox of war as entertainment, and dares to dream of healing after catastrophe. These three gritty yet poetic plays stand as a testament to the value of witnessing, honoring, and perhaps transcending the struggles of living.

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Winner of the Western Heritage Award, this beautifully crafted historical novel from one of the West’s most popular writers tells the true story of the friendship between Valentine McGillycuddy, a young doctor plucked from his prestigious medical career and newly married wife to serve in the army during the Great Sioux War, and the fearsome chief Crazy Horse. When Crazy Horse finally agrees to surrender to the United States, mistrust and treachery on both sides generate further conflict, and he is gravely wounded. McGillycuddy declares the chief his patient and struggles through a long night to keep his spirit alive. Set in the sprawling Great Plains during the most tragic period in its history, this tale of bravery, justice, and love weaves a tapestry of time and events into the account of a single day—the last in the life of Crazy Horse—to reveal the secrets surrounding America’s past.

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From Scarsdale is an evocative and lyrical memoir of a haunted childhood in Scarsdale, New York.With a cancer diagnosis in his early forties, the author is compelled to revisit and resolve the mystery of his family’s sadness. The fourth of six children in an Irish-American household distinctly out-of-place in this affluent suburb of New York City, O’Brien grows up in a claustrophobic milieu of secrecy, lies, and mental illness. The turning point in his maturation is an older brother’s attempted suicide — an event he witnesses firsthand. From Scarsdale traces with sensitivity the complex histories and dynamics that lead to this trauma, as O’Brien investigates the psychologies of his parents, themselves the survivors of painful childhoods in Scarsdale. Then, simultaneously disturbed and catalyzed by his brother’s depression, and his own developing obsessive-compulsive disorder, the adolescent O’Brien discovers literature and the theatre as an escape, though it will take years for an actual liberation to occur. In many ways this memoir is that liberation, as his ambition here has been to tell “the story of who I am and where I’m from, with honesty, insight, and something like forgiveness. To try to leave the old place behind.” With the specificity and aching affection of William Maxwell’s Ancestors, and the impressionistic, mosaic-like structure of Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family, this book’s subject is ultimately, like all memoir, the solace and the conundrum of memory. From Scarsdale is a rare book, uniquely told, and a poignant example of the redemptive power of a true story.

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Drawing on O’Brien’s experience of cancer and of childhood abuse, and on his ongoing collaboration with a war reporter, the four essays in A Story that Happens—first written as craft lectures for the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the US Air Force Academy—offer hard-won insights into what stories are for and the reasons why, "afraid and hopeful," we begin to tell them.

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An Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge, 2nd Edition guides the reader through the key issues and debates in contemporary epistemology. Lucid, comprehensive and accessible, it is an ideal textbook for students who are new to the subject and for university undergraduates. The book is divided into five parts. Part I discusses the concept of knowledge and distinguishes between different types of knowledge. Part II surveys the sources of knowledge, considering both a priori and a posteriori knowledge. Parts III and IV provide an in-depth discussion of justification and scepticism. The final part of the book examines our alleged knowledge of the past, other minds, morality and God. In this extensively revised second edition there are expanded sections on epistemic luck, social epistemology and contextualism, and there are new sections on the contemporary debates concerning the lottery paradox, pragmatic encroachment, peer disagreement, safety, sensitivity and virtue epistemology. Engaging examples are used throughout the book, many taken from literature and the cinema. Complex issues, such as those concerning the private language argument, non-conceptual content, and the new riddle of induction, are explained in a clear and accessible way. This textbook is an invaluable guide to contemporary epistemology.

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In a 1984 interview with longtime friend Edna O’Brien, Philip Roth describes her writing as ""a piece of fine meshwork, a net of perfectly observed sensuous details that enables you to contain all the longing and pain and remorse that surge through the fiction."" The phrase ""fine meshwork"" not only captures the essence of O’Brien’s writing, but also suggests the multiple connective threads that bind her work to others’, including, most illuminatingly, Roth’s. Since the publication of their first controversial novels in the 1950s and 1960s, Roth and O’Brien have always argued against the isolation of mind from body, autobiography from fiction, life from art, and self from nation. In Fine Meshwork, Dan O’Brien investigates these shared concerns of the two authors, now regarded as literary icons of their respective countries. He traces their forty-year literary friendship and the striking parallels in their books and reception, bringing together what, at first glance, seem to be quite disparate milieus: the largely feminist and Irish scholarship on O’Brien and the American Jewish perspective on Roth. In doing so, and in considering them in a transnational context, he argues that the intertwined nature of their writing symbolizes the far-ranging symbiosis between Irish literature and it’s American—particularly Jewish-American—counterpart.

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On the fourteenth anniversary of 9/11—an event that caused their downtown apartment to become “suffused with the World Trade Center’s carcinogenic dust”—Dan O’Brien’s wife discovers a lump in her breast. Surgery and chemotherapy soon follow, and on the day of his wife’s final infusion, O’Brien learns of his own diagnosis. He has colon cancer and will need to undergo his own intensive treatment over the next nine months. Our Cancers is a compelling account of illness and commitment, of parenthood and partnership. This spare and powerful sequence creates an intimate mythology that seeks meaning in illness while also celebrating of the resilience of sufferers, caregivers, and survivors. As O’Brien explains in an introduction, “The consecutiveness of our personal disasters, with a daughter not yet two years old at the start of it, was shattering and nearly silencing. At hospital bedsides, in hospital beds myself, and at home through the cyclical assaults of our therapies, these poems came to me in fragments, as if my unconscious were attempting to reassemble our lives, our identities and memories . . . as if I were in some sense learning how to speak again.”

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Dan O’Brien’s earlier award-winning novel The Contract Surgeon introduced readers to Valentine McGillycuddy, a friend of the great war chief Crazy Horse. Through McGillycuddy’s eyes, the novel recounts the friendship that so deeply impacted history. It also chronicles the great Sioux Wars, one of the most violent periods in this nation’s history. The Indian Agent is the riveting sequel to The Contract Surgeon. After Crazy Horse’s death, McGillycuddy went on to become the youngest agent in history for the Red Cloud Agency, renamed the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, of the Oglala Lakota band of the Sioux. Although Red Cloud and McGillycuddy have diametrically opposing views, they have more in common than either suspects. They both love the land, and they both love the past. The politics and the enormous tensions of the early days on the reservation come to life here in fascinating detail, as McGillycuddy (known as “the most investigated man” in the government) urges the Sioux to adopt a life of farming. Because he had lived on the vast plains with them, no white man knew better what the Sioux had given up—or understood more fully the impossibility of returning to the old life. Full of the dynamic history of the plains, The Indian Agent is the true story of the conversion of this land from one of free nomadic people to one of settled commerce—achieved, however, at an unfathomable cost.

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Honor Book, 2011 Nebraska Book Awards, Fiction CategoryForeword Reviews, 2011 Book of the Year, Silver Award, General Fiction McDermot, Nebraska, is a pleasant, scenic western cattle town situated in the Pawnee River valley—just the place for people seeking refuge from their hectic city lives. It is also just the place for those who have made their homes on this haunting prairie since the late nineteenth century. Ideal for both, McDermot means everything to those native inhabitants and something very different to those who are looking for a new life. As the native residents wrestle with the arrival of outsiders, a local journalist uncovers a medical scandal epitomizing the problems facing the divided community. After the death of two men, it falls to the ancient but powerful district attorney to mediate a resolution between the clashing interests of the new and the old West. And the Thurston family, descended from the town’s first citizen, sets out in its own way to fight the forces threatening to destroy it. This is the story of new and old interests colliding, of small western plains towns confronting the forces of “progress.”

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An Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge, 2nd Edition guides the reader through the key issues and debates in contemporary epistemology. Lucid, comprehensive and accessible, it is an ideal textbook for students who are new to the subject and for university undergraduates. The book is divided into five parts. Part I discusses the concept of knowledge and distinguishes between different types of knowledge. Part II surveys the sources of knowledge, considering both a priori and a posteriori knowledge. Parts III and IV provide an in-depth discussion of justification and scepticism. The final part of the book examines our alleged knowledge of the past, other minds, morality and God. In this extensively revised second edition there are expanded sections on epistemic luck, social epistemology and contextualism, and there are new sections on the contemporary debates concerning the lottery paradox, pragmatic encroachment, peer disagreement, safety, sensitivity and virtue epistemology. Engaging examples are used throughout the book, many taken from literature and the cinema. Complex issues, such as those concerning the private language argument, non-conceptual content, and the new riddle of induction, are explained in a clear and accessible way. This textbook is an invaluable guide to contemporary epistemology.

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Philosophy and gardens have been closely connected from the dawn of philosophy, with many drawing on their beauty and peace for philosophical inspiration. Gardens in turn give rise to a broad spectrum of philosophical questions. For the green-fingered thinker, this book reflects on a whole host of fascinating philosophical themes. Gardens and philosophy present a fascinating combination of subjects, historically important, and yet scarcely covered within the realms of philosophy Contributions come from a wide range of authors, ranging from garden writers and gardeners, to those working in architecture, archaeology, archival studies, art history, anthropology, classics and philosophy Essays cover a broad spectrum of topics, ranging from Epicurus and Confucius to the aesthetics and philosophy of Central Park Offers new perspectives on the experience and evaluation of gardens

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