"Who's a good dog?!" They're ALL good dogs, that's who! Big or little, pedigree or mutt, rolling in stinky stuff, or stealing a T-bone meant for the barbecue grill, dogs are humankind's best hope for sanity in trying times. Dogs are eternally optimistic and somehow know how to comfort the more fragile human psyche. In A Life with Dogs Roger Welsch celebrates his lifelong admiration (as well as envy) of the canine spirit. And yet, for all their evident intellectual transparency, dogs also seem to have an understanding of life-and death-well beyond the grasp of those who think they own them. Dogs are great friends, nurses, workmates, and, if we are good students, great professors of philosophy. Roger laughs and wonders at their wile and beauty-and always appreciates that, wild or domestic, they know more about humans than we may ever know about them. Roger still mourns the dogs he has lost, and though he missed having a warm ear to rub now and then, he dared not risk further loss. Then an older dog in need came along, and Roger adopted Triumph, the Compliment Dog. With humankind's best friend nearby, all is not lost.

"Beautiful, humorous, and lucidly written, A Country Doctor's Casebook is a heartwarming and sometimes heartbreaking treasure of American rural medical history. For those who may have become disenchanted about the craft of medicine, here the enchantment returns." Pierre Delattre, author of Woman on the Cross, Episodes, and Tales of a Dalai Lama "This pioneer physician's account of medicine, life, and death in the north of northern Minnesota is suffused by humanitarian warmth and humor. We all are there: Native Americans and immigrants, our lives beset by accidents and illness, and above all the love and dedication making us who we are, helped by our own Galen. A great read."Robert Treuer, author of The Tree Farm: Replanting a Life "A Country Doctor's Casebook is a delight--wonderfully written with a wry sense of humor. These stories ring true: compassionate, gentle, loving portraits of people for whom Dr. MacDonald cared deeply."David Hilfiker, md, author of Healing the Wounds: A Physician Looks at His Work and Not All of Us Are Saints: A Doctor's Journey with the Poor

Alcohol has been with us in many forms for thousands of years and yet it remains one of the least understood of foods. Roger Welsch has his own particular take on alcohol (as he does on almost everything else) and in this book explores the history, technology, hazards, and joys of drink. If you don't agree this is one of the best reads of the year, then Roger suggests that you pour yourself another drink and try reading it again!

When he was out playing Indian, enacting Hollywood-inspired scenarios, it never occurred to the child Roger Welsch that the little girl sitting next to him in school was Indian. A lifetime of learning later, Welsch’s enthusiasm is undimmed, if somewhat more enlightened. In Embracing Fry Bread Welsch tells the story of his lifelong relationship with Native American culture, which, beginning in earnest with the study of linguistic practices of the Omaha tribe during a college anthropology course, resulted in his becoming an adopted member and kin of both the Omaha and the Pawnee tribes. With requisite humility and a healthy dose of humor, Welsch describes his long pilgrimage through Native life, from lessons in the vagaries of “Indian time� and the difficulties of reservation life, to the joy of being allowed to participate in special ceremonies and developing a deep and lasting love of fry bread. Navigating another culture is a complicated task, and Welsch shares his mistakes and successes with engaging candor. Through his serendipitous wanderings, he finds that the more he learns about Native culture the more he learns about himself—and about a way of life whose allure offers true insight into indigenous America.   

Roger Welsch's humorous take on his hahahaha Golden Years, a subject in which he now considers himself an expert. Portions of this book have been shared with friends facing medical problems and have each and every one found the humor encouraging and heartening. Anyone who is thinking about getting older will profit from a reading of this book...and of course anyone who is pretty much giving up might find something here that would change his mind. You can get old and complain, or get old and laugh; the choice is yours, and this volume gives you that choice.

The eternal question: fat and jolly, or skinny and mean. No problem! With the help of this book YOU can give every impression of being thin without going through the actual discomforts of BEING thin! Welsch's 24 steps to your inner skinny offer you the best of all worlds, all the advantages of being buff AND plump! At the same time!

After the Omaha Nation was officially granted its reservation land in northeastern Nebraska in 1854, Omaha culture appeared to succumb to a Euro-American standard of living under the combined onslaught of federal Indian policies, governmental officials, and missionary zealots. At the same time, however, new circular wooden structures appeared on some Omaha homesteads. Blending into the architectural environment of the mainstream culture, these lodges provided the ritual space in which dances and ceremonies could be conducted at a time when such practices were coercively suppressed. Drawing on the oral histories of forty Omaha elders collected in 1992, "Dance Lodges of the Omaha People" provides insights into how these lodges shaped Omaha cultural identity and illustrates the adaptive abilities of the modern Omaha tribe. The lodges replaced the diminished prereservation tribal institutions as maintainers of tribal cohesion and unity and at the same time provided an arena for selective acculturation of outside ideas and behaviors. A new afterword by the author highlights advances in research on these unique structures since 1992 and speculates on the connection between these lodges and the spread of the Omaha Hethushka dance across the Great Plains.

Roger and Linda Welsch matched references from Willa Cather's writing with recipes they collected from Cather family recipe files, from other period cookbooks, and from old-time ethnic cooks still living in the Bohemian tradition. Cather's Kitchens comes as close as possible to the precise recipes Cather had in mind and memory as she wrote. Roger L. Welsch is a television personality and is the author of nearly thirty books, including It's Not the End of the Earth, but You Can See It from Here and Touching the Fire: Buffalo Dancers, the Sky Bundle, and Other Tales, both available in Bison Books editions. Linda K. Welsch is an acclaimed Nebraska artist. Susan J. Rosowski (1942-2004) is the author of Birthing a Nation: Gender, Creativity, and the West in American Literature (Nebraska 1999).

Plains folklorist Roger L. Welsch has edited a lively collection of stories by some master yarnspinners--those old-time traveling horse traders. Told to Federal Writers' Project fieldworkers in the 1930s, these stories cover the span of horse trading: human and equine trickery, orneriness, debility--and generosity.

Were our forefathers liars? "You bet they were," says Roger Welsch, "and damned fine ones at that." The proof is in "Catfish at the Pump," a collection of the kind of humor that softened the hardships of pioneering on the Great Plains. From yellowed newspapers, magazines, and forgotten Nebraska Federal Writers' Project files, the well-known folklorist and humorist Roger Welsch has produced a book to be treasured. Here are jokes, anecdotes, legends, tall tales, and lugubriously funny poems about the things that preoccupied the pioneer plainsman: weather extremes; soil quality; food and whiskey; an arkload of animals, including grasshoppers, bed bugs, hoop snakes, the ubiquitous mule, and some mighty big fish; and even sickness and the poverty that would inspire black laughter again in the Great Depression.

"Catfish at the Pump" proves abundantly that the art of story telling was practiced diligently by our plains ancestors. Roger Welsch, who brought out "Shingling the Fog and Other Plains Lies" in 1972 (reprinted by the University of Nebraska Press in 1980), now issues this "book about lies and liars," knowing full well that "underlying the pioneer sense of humor is a profound respect for truth."

Folklore tells us something about almost every aspect of the life of the people. This rich and entertaining collection of Nebraska pioneer folklore, taken largely from the Nebraska Folklore Pamphlets issued by the Federal Writers' Project in the 1930s, is intended first and foremost for the general reader, for the people whose heritage it is. Songs of trail and prairie and of the Farmers' Alliance, white man's yarns and Indian tales, pioneer Nebraska folk customs, sayings, proverbs, beliefs, children's games, cooking, and cures-these "wondrously entertaining kaleidoscopic reflections of the people and environment that were inspirations of the classic literature of Mari Sandoz and Willa Cather-to name two-could be a model for Americana collectors in other states to emulate. . . . A treasury indeed."-King Features Syndicate "Parade of Books."