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Leo Adam Biga is a freelance cultural journalist and nonfiction book author based in his hometown of Omaha, Neb. His feature and enterprise work as an arts and culture reporter appears in several Omaha and greater Nebraska publications. His articles occasionally appear in national magazines as well.

Assignments often find him interviewing celebrities and public figures from various fields.

Every so often Biga travels to get a story. He accompanied a group of Nebraskans who bused to the Barack Obama presidential inauguration in the nation’s capital. He spent several days and nights covering Lew Hunter’s screenwriting colony in Superior, Neb. He spent a week on the set of Alexander Payne’s film “Sideways” in the Santa Barbara, Calif., area. He made an eight-day Midwest baseball tour of Missouri, Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana. Most recently, he traveled to Uganda and Rwanda, Africa with world boxing champion Terence “Bud” Crawford and Pipeline Worldwide co-founder and executive director Jamie Nollette. That overseas reporting mission was made possible by the Andy Award for international journalism that Biga received in 2015 from his alma mater, the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

His work has been recognized by his peers at the local, state, and national levels.

In addition to the books featured on this Amazon Author’s Page, he has several book projects in development, among them: the history of Nebraska Methodist College; a celebration of Omaha’s black sports legends; and a look at Nebraska’s rich film heritage. He also wrote the script for the documentary, “The Brandeis Store.”

Read a broad sampling of the writer’s work on his popular blog, leoadambiga.com, a gallery of his “stories about people, their passions, and their magnificent obsessions.” You can follow his work there or via his Facebook page, My Inside Stories. https://www.facebook.com/LeoAdamBiga/.

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ABOUT THE BOOKS

Crossing Bridges

“The very first bridge I crossed was choosing to study for the priesthood, a decision that took me and everyone who knew me by surprise. Then came a series of bridges that once crossed brought me into contact with diverse peoples and their incredibly different yet similar needs.”

Father Vavrina has served as a priest for many years, and has served several missions trips to help the needy. Father Ken worked with lepers in Yemen, and was ultimately arrested and thrown in jail under false suspicions of spying. After being forcibly removed from Yemen, he began his tenure with Catholic Relief Services. First in the extreme poverty and over-population of Calcutta in India. Then with warlords in Liberia to deliver food and supplies to refugees in need. Father Ken also spent several years working with Mother Teresa to heal the sick and comfort the dying.

Crossing Bridges: A Priest’s Uplifting Life Among the Downtrodden is the story of Father Ken Vavrina’s life and travels – simple acts that moved him, people that inspired him, and places that astonished him. Father Ken has spent his life selflessly serving the Lord and the neediest around him, while always striving to remain a simple, humble man of God.

“I pray this account of my life is not a personal spectacle but a recounting of a most wonderful journey serving God. May its discoveries and experiences inspire your own life story of service.”

REVIEWS

A Humble Man with a Powerful Story
By Sandra Wendel on September 1, 2015
Format: Paperback

As a book editor, I find that these incredible heroes among us cross our paths rarely. I am indeed lucky to have worked with Father Ken in shaping his story, which he finally agreed to tell the world. You will enjoy his modesty and humility while serving the poorest of the poor. His story of his first days in the leper colony in Yemen is indeed compelling, as is his survival in prison in Yemen. Later, his work in Calcutta, Liberia, and Cuba made a difference.

Father Ken Vavrina
By Sandra L Vavrina on September 28, 2015
Format: Paperback Verified Purchase

Crossing Bridges. Father Ken’s life is amazing! He is my husband’s cousin and performed our wedding ceremony 51 yrs ago right after he was ordained.

great book
By ken tuttle on September 1, 2015
Format: Paperback
such an amazing life story

Open Wide                                                                                                                                              

By M. Marill on May 10, 2014
Format: Kindle Edition Verified Purchase

In people or in art, according to Dr. Mark Manhart, “You may not like nor understand everything you see, but at least you will have a truer view of all that went into making the man or the artwork.” This biographical memoir takes the reader through all of his different lives – his “open life” and his “secret life”. Manhart’s professional side finds him a highly trained dentist who is actively engaged in developing new treatments and therapies. His inner passion, which keeps him charged, is his involvement in theatre as a playwright, director, and sometimes an actor.

REVIEWS

The story about the man who has changed dentistry for the better. He can and ha helped peoples everywhere how care and nourish their teeth. His calcium therapy is preventative just as much as it is curative for many dental issues. Like those in holistic medicine who have bucked the medical organizations he has done so with the dental organization forging the way for alternative prevention and care . Check out his website at http://www.calcium therapy.com and educate yourself and try his affordable products before you dismiss this. He deserves recognition for what he has accomplished and I hope it comes to him.

The story of an innovative thinker, inventor, and healer
By Best reads on August 3, 2015
Format: Kindle Edition Verified Purchase

If you read “Open Wide,” you will understand what philosophies have made Dr. Manhart ” a die hard preservationist when it comes to saving peoples teeth…” (167), and how his brilliant invention of materials for dentistry allows him to work miracles, save peoples’ teeth that other dentists are ready to pull, and spare the pain, suffering, and expense of treatments that mainstream dentistry usually pushes. He is also a preservationist with respect to architecture, a talented playwright, actor, director, and producer, is engaged in civic affairs, and has additional wide ranging interests. If you are seeking more humane and successful dental treatments, this book and his website at http://www.calciumtherapy.com are both invaluable. If you want to read about a brilliant and iconoclastic thinker in many realms, this is also a great book. Richard Feynman won the Nobel Prize for physics, Linus Pauling won two Nobel Prizes (for chemistry, and for peace); Dr. Manhart’s research, discoveries, and patented materials are certainly profound enough to merit similar recognition. Unfortunately, you will also read about why dentistry as practiced in the U.S. is often not open to innovation, or able (and willing) to recognize how it has thrived from overcharging for over-treatment that sometimes causes trauma, harm, hopelessness and yet more visits to the dentist.

Alexander Payne: His Journey in Film

I’d be an Alexander Payne fan even if we didn’t share a Nebraska upbringing: he is a masterly, menschy, singular storyteller whose movies are both serious and unpretentious, delightfully funny and deeply moving. And he’s fortunate indeed to have such a thoughtful and insightful chronicler as Leo Biga. –Kurt Andersen, Host of Studio 360.

Long before Alexander Payne arrived as a world-renowned filmmaker, Leo Adam Biga spotted his talent, even screening his thesis project, The Passion of Martin, at an art cinema. By the time Payne completed Citizen Ruth and prepped Election Biga made him a special focus of his journalism. Interviewing and profiling and Payne became a highlight of the writer’s work. Feeling a rapport and trust with Biga, Payne granted exclusive access to his creative process, including a week-long visit to one of his sets. Now that Payne has moved from emerging to established cinema force through a succession of critically acclaimed and popular projects—About Schmidt, Sideways, and The Descendants—Biga has compiled his years of reporting into this book. It is the first comprehensive look anywhere at one of cinema’s most important figures. Go behind-the-scenes with the author to glimpse privileged aspects of the filmmaker at work and in private moments. The book takes the measure of Payne through Biga’s analysis, the filmmaker’s own words, and insights from some of the writer-director’s key collaborators. This must read for any casual fan or serious student of Payne provides in one volume the arc of a remarkable filmmaking journey.

REVIEWS

Biga’s book may be the best answer to this question
By Brent Spencer on November 9, 2015
Format: Kindle Edition

Leo Adam Biga writes about the major American filmmaker Alexander Payne from the perspective of a fellow townsman. The local reporter began writing about Payne from the start of the filmmaker’s career. In fact, even earlier than that. Long before Citizen Ruth, Election, About Schmidt, Sideways, The Descendants, and Cannes award-winner Nebraska. Biga was instrumental in arranging a local showing of an early student film of Payne’s, The Passion of Martin. From that moment on, Payne’s filmmaking career took off, with the reporter in hot pursuit.

The resulting book collects the pieces Biga has written about Payne over the years. The approach, which might have proven to be patchwork, instead allows the reader to follow the growth of the artist over time. Young filmmakers often ask how successful filmmakers got there. Biga’s book may be the best answer to this question, at least as far as Payne is concerned. He’s presented from his earliest days as a hometown boy to his first days in Hollywood as a scuffling outsider to his heyday as an insider working with Hollywood’s brightest stars.

If there is a problem with Biga’s approach, it’s that it can, at times, lead to redundancy. The pieces were originally written separately, for different publications, and are presented as such. This means a piece will sometimes cover the same background we’ve read in a previous piece. And some pieces were clearly written as announcements of special showings of films. But the occasional drawback of this approach is counter-balanced by the feeling you get of seeing the growth of the artist, a life and career taking shape right before your eyes, from the showing of a student film in an Omaha storefront theater to a Hollywood premiere.

But perhaps the most intriguing feature of the book is Biga’s success at getting the filmmaker to speak candidly about every step in the filmmaking process. He talks about the challenges of developing material from conception to script, finding financing, moderating the mayhem of shooting a movie, undertaking the slow and often monk-like work of editing. Biga is clearly a fan (the book comes with an endorsement from Payne himself), but he’s a fan with his eyes wide open. Alexander Payne: His Journey In Film, A Reporter’s Perspective 1998-2012 provides a unique portrait of the artist and detailed insights into the filmmaking process.

Mom and Pop Grocery Stores

Jews have a proud history as entrepreneurs and merchants. When Jewish immigrants began coming to America in greater and greater numbers during the late 19th century and early 20th century, many gravitated to the food industry, some as peddlers and fresh produce market stall hawkers, others as wholesalers, and still others as grocers. Most Jews who settled in Nebraska came from Russia and Poland, with smaller segments from Hungary, Germany, and other central and Eastern European nations. They were variously escaping pogroms, revolution, war, and poverty. The prospect of freedom and opportunity motivated Jews, just as it did other peoples, to flock here. At a time when Jews were restricted from entering certain fields, the food business was relatively wide open and affordable to enter. There was a time when for a few hundred dollars, one could put a down payment on a small store. That was still a considerable amount of money before 1960, but it was not out of reach of most working men who scrimped and put away a little every week. And that was a good thing too because obtaining capital to launch a store was difficult. Most banks would not lend credit to Jews and other minorities until after World War II. The most likely route that Jews took to becoming grocers was first working as a peddler, selling feed, selling produce by horse and wagon or truck, or apprenticing in someone else’s store. Some came to the grocery business from other endeavors or industries. The goal was the same — to save enough to buy or open a store of their own. By whatever means Jews found to enter the grocery business, enough did that during the height of this self-made era. From roughly the 1920s through the 1950s, there may have been a hundred or more Jewish-owned and operated grocery stores in the metro area at any given time. Jewish grocers almost always started out modestly, owning and operating small Mom and Pop neighborhood stores that catered to residents in the immediate area. By custom and convenience, most Jewish grocer families lived above or behind the store, although the more prosperous were able to buy or build their own free-standing home. Since most customers in Nebraska and Iowa were non-Jewish, store inventories reflected that fact, thus featuring mostly mainstream food and nonfood items, with only limited Jewish items and even fewer kosher goods. The exception to that rule was during Passover and other Jewish high holidays, when traditional Jewish fare was highlighted. Business could never be taken for granted. In lean times it could be a real struggle. Because the margin between making it and not making was often quite slim many Jewish grocers stayed open from early morning to early evening, seven days a week, even during the Sabbath, although some stores were closed a half-day on the weekend. Jewish stores that did close for the Sabbath were open on Sunday.