Nebraska: No Place Quite Like It

This book deals with men and women and events in Nebraska between 1924 and 1944. It is a collection of Hamil's memories of experiences there and the people with whom he shared them. While the narrative centers on a relatively small area of Mid-America, it profiles much that was common in people's thoughts and actions during a tumultuous period in national life. Hamil, attending Hastings College in the 1920s, prepared to be a teacher, but he took his English major into journalism. For 12 years much that he observed and experienced was as reporter, city editor and managing editor of the Hastings Daily Tribune. Pearl Harbor caught him barely settled at Lincoln as director of the school of journalism of the University of Nebraska. The author contends that the ebb and flow of human events can be measured by "little things in the lives of little people as well as by the grand pageantry in which states and nations, empires and armies are the actors of record." And so this book includes sketches of scores of interesting people.