This book opens with historian Bruce Pauley applying some of his professional habits to his family, as he pieces together the tale of his Volga German ancestors and their decision to move to the plains of Nebraska. Like so many stories in this enjoyable volume, their ultimate success is traced back to good timing and simple good luck, with plenty of hard work and perseverance thrown in. Pauley carefully fills in as much as he can about his pioneering ancestors, but the real draw of this book is his descriptions of his own experiences and career as an Austrian historian.

Pioneering History has something for everyone—stories about starting over, putting down roots, growing up in the Midwest, and taking chances. Probably of the most interest to readers of this journal will be the section in which Pauley describes falling in love with the art and culture of Vienna during his junior year abroad from Grinnell College. Equally enjoyable are the travelogues of Central and Eastern Europe during the Cold War, and the descriptions of research in the era before photocopiers and digitalization. Those of us in academe will read with interest the frank sections covering Pauley's career—one with frustrations and disappointments as well as great successes. Graduate school, he writes unapologetically, was a grind and a trial. How many of us lost sleep, weight, and/or hair in graduate school, only to be told that those were our golden years? Phooey, says Pauley, who scraped though those gloomy years with some good advice from his father and the good luck of meeting his wife. Once he has his Ph.D. in hand, there are wild sections in which Pauley is hired, sight unseen at one point, or on a handshake at another turn of the wheel, and sections in which he walks away from tenure-track jobs with nothing else lined up. Obviously, these hijinks took place early in his career. Pauley's ability to write without rancor about being turned down for tenure at one university, or being reviewed unfavorably by an unnamed chairman year after year at a second university, is humbling. He has clearly come away from “the game” with a greater sense of what is important, and for him, one senses, that has always been an enjoyable family life and a rich research agenda.

What are the lessons that Pauley imparts to his readers? Timing, it turns out, is a big component of success. Again and again we see this in his tales, be they of crop harvests in the Midwest or academic job markets in the post-boomer years. A second takeaway from these stories might be to always cultivate friendships, as you never know where they might take you. Pauley's junior-year roommate became an Austrian ambassador to several fascinating countries, providing him with travels that sparked his interest in comparative totalitarianism. Finally, keep your letters and your diaries close. One gleans from this book that Pauley was an inveterate writer from the beginning, and that it was a pleasure to compile his personal writings into this autobiography. In the age of email and texting, the creation of a work like this, drawing upon a lifetime of ego-documents, is fast becoming unthinkable. All the more reason to enjoy Pauley's autobiographical work.