The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio introduces Evelyn Ryan, an enterprising woman who kept poverty at bay with wit, poetry, and perfect prose during the “contest era” of the 1950s and 1960s.Stepping back into a time when fledgling advertising agencies were active partners with consumers, and everyday people saw possibility in every coupon, Terry Ryan tells how her mother kept the family afloat by writing jingles and contest entries. Mom’s winning ways defied the Church, her alcoholic husband, and antiquated views of housewives. To her, flouting convention was a small price to pay when it came to securing a happy home for her six sons and four daughters. Evelyn, who would surely be a Madison Avenue executive if she were working today, composed her jingles not in the boardroom, but at the ironing board. By entering contests wherever she found them—TV, radio, newspapers, direct-mail ads—Evelyn Ryan was able to win every appliance her family ever owned, not to mention cars, television sets, bicycles, watches, a jukebox, and even trips to New York, Dallas, and Switzerland. But it wasn’t just the winning that was miraculous; it was the timing. If a toaster died, one was sure to arrive in the mail from a forgotten contest. Days after the bank called in the second mortgage on the house, a call came from the Dr Pepper company: Evelyn was the grand-prize winner in its national contest—and had won enough to pay the bank. Graced with a rare appreciation for life's inherent hilarity, Evelyn turned every financial challenge into an opportunity for fun and profit. From her frenetic supermarket shopping spree—worth $3,000 today—to her clever entries worthy of Erma Bombeck, Dorothy Parker, and Ogden Nash, the story of this irrepressible woman whose talents reached far beyond her formidable verbal skills is told in The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio with an infectious joy that shows how a winning spirit will triumph over the poverty of circumstance. Read more

A mother’s violent death. A daughter’s search for answers in small town America.Left an orphan at six years old in 1976, Kandace DeLain Davis grew up in Crossville, Illinois, at her grandparents’ kitschy roadside motor lodge. Seven years earlier, at the Anna State Hospital, Davis’s mother, Mary Ellen Stein, had met her father at what was once known as The Illinois Southern Hospital for the Insane, after suffering from mental illness and addiction most of her adult life. When Mary Ellen was found dead in 1976 with a knife protruding from her chest, her family believed it must be suicide. Fast forward to 2015 when Davis discovered a tiny article from her local small town newspaper,dated not long after her mother’s death,and Davis feared she may not have the full story. This newspaper clipping took her on a four-year journey, navigating through court documents and records of her mother’s over one hundred hospitalizations, searching for the truth of her mother’s death. Was this a case of die by suicide, or was she murdered?In Out of the Night that Covers Me, Davis narrates her family’s history and details her investigation into the years, months, weeks, and days leading to her mother’s death. Not only does Davis reveal stories of her mother’s life, but she also lovingly shares anecdotes from the life of her grandmother, Faire DeLain Stein. Faire was a woman who made boundless sacrifices to protect the innocent victims of her husband Alvin’s tyrannical behavior and Mary Ellen’s mental illness. Davis includes letters, diary entries, photos, court transcripts, and re-enactments, and these cherished heirlooms tell a heartbreaking but triumphant story. The author interweaves her present day quest for answers with the pivotal events of her family’s early years and her youth in small town America.This multi-generational family drama examines the decades-long domino effect of unhealthy choices of previous generations and the inherited heartache. However, surprising to readers, they will feel the enduring love of these three generations and realize how much we still have left to learn about mental illness. While Davis searches through her family’s history, we take a front row seat to Midwest life from the Roaring Twenties through the sixties and seventies.The Stein family story speaks to the global issues of rising suicide rates, struggles to overcome addiction, and the continued poor treatment of mentally ill individuals. As a contrast, on Davis’s path of discovery, themes of friendship, love, and survival shine through as her loved ones and much of her family support her search. But most of all, the author’s investigation of her family’s tragedy in southern Illinois leads readers to a surprise ending where Davis learns that actually…The truth can set us free. Read more

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There is no other bond like a mother's love for her child.When that connection is severed, life is never the same again.A Quiet Witness is a deeply moving memoir that touches on both sorrow and hope. Through her daughter Jensyn’s story, Kristin Salvevold reveals how faith in God sustained her and her family as they navigated the unimaginable and unexpected moments of life with a medically fragile child.With raw, heartfelt words, Kristin paints the emotional landscape of loss while highlighting the transformative power of love. A Quiet Witness is not just about tragedy; it is a personal testament to the everlasting gift of God’s goodness and the unwavering resilience of a family who battled together to embrace one of life’s most challenging trials. Her family’s journey is a reminder that even in the hard, hope remains. Read more

Who wouldn’t be surprised to learn their dad had an 89-page FBI file and was a wanted man?Who would believe you when you say your mom has been married over eight times?This is a story of a boy called Denny coming of age against all odds. It’s a story of hope for an unwanted child. And it’s a tale of setbacks, resilience, and how adults can positively influence wayward teens and gently guide them towards a more hopeful future. At 13-years-old Denny hitchhiked from Detroit, Michigan to San Bernardino, California where he took control of his own life. Read more

The story of a 17 year old sentenced to life in the Missouri Department of Corrections. The hardships he had to endure . The stories he tells of life in prison and his release after 29 years Read more

"A loving testament to the work and reward of the best friendships, the kind where your arms can’t distinguish burden from embrace.” — PeopleNew York Times Bestselling author Ann Patchett’s first work of nonfiction chronicling her decades-long friendship with the critically acclaimed and recently deceased author, Lucy Grealy.Ann Patchett and the late Lucy Grealy met in college in 1981, and, after enrolling in the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, began a friendship that would be as defining to both of their lives as their work. In Gealy's critically acclaimed and hugely successful memoir, Autobiography of a Face, she wrote about losing part of her jaw to childhood cancer, years of chemotherapy and radiation, and endless reconstructive surgeries. In Truth & Beauty, the story isn't Lucy's life or Ann's life, but the parts of their lives they shared together. This is a portrait of unwavering commitment that spans twenty years, from the long cold winters of the Midwest, to surgical wards, to book parties in New York. Through love, fame, drugs, and despair, this is what it means to be part of two lives that are intertwined...and what happens when one is left behind.This is a tender, brutal book about loving the person we cannot save. It is about loyalty and being uplifted by the sheer effervescence of someone who knew how to live life to the fullest. Read more

Now published for the first time, an eyewitness account of the Civil War by a Union soldier who fought from Bull Run to Knoxville.This remarkable book presents the transcription of some twenty pocket diaries kept throughout the first three years of the Civil War by Charles B. Haydon and sent back one by one to his home in Decatur, Michigan, to be read by his father and brother. As readable as they are lively and informative, they offer a marvelous firsthand view of the war and constitute an important addition to our Civil War library.Haydon began as a third sergeant and ended as a lieutenant colonel. In the East he witnessed the rush to the colors, the first Bull Run, the building of the Army of the Potomac, the Peninsula campaign, and the fighting at second Bull Run and Fredericksburg. Early in 1863 his regiment was transferred to the western theater, where it served in Kentucky and under Grant at Vicksburg. Haydon was severely wounded in Mississippi. During the winter of 1863-64 he was in Tennessee and engaged in the campaigning around Knoxville. In March 1864—ironically, on his way home on furlough—Haydon contracted pneumonia and died.Charles Haydon had considerably more education than the average soldier, and his “engaging” journal reflects the fact (Publishers Weekly). A good half-dozen years older than most of his fellow recruits, he had studied for four years at the University of Michigan, read law, and was in practice when he volunteered. His journal, which was meant to be read, was a deliberate and conscientious attempt to record his experiences and thoughts of the war. Read more

Settlement House Girl chronicles author Caroline Arnold’s childhood at North East Neighborhood House in Minneapolis, Minnesota, as she interacted and shared meals with other settlement house residents, participated in clubs, sports and community activities, and observed the roles of the staff and her social worker parents. It is an inside view of a working settlement house in the 1950s. The 38 chapters of the book range from her first days at the NENH nursery school, to after-school clubs and community holiday celebrations at the settlement, family and school life, and summers at Camp Bovey, the NENH camp in Wisconsin.North East Neighborhood House, founded in 1915, was part of the settlement house movement that began in England in 1884 and was brought to the US by people like Jane Addams at Hull House in Chicago. Settlement houses, often called neighborhood houses, provided social services in immigrant and poor urban neighborhoods. Activities were led by volunteers who came from other parts of the city and by staff members who lived at the settlement house.Caroline’s father, Les Scheaffer, was the NENH director from 1948 to 1966. Few families lived in settlement houses as theirs did and they were one of the last. By the 1950s, the tradition of social workers living in settlement houses was coming to an end. When Caroline’s family moved out, it was the end of an era.The stories in this book will spark memories in adults who grew up in the same time period, whether in Minneapolis or elsewhere. Librarians and teachers who know Caroline Arnold's books for children will find clues to her future life as a writer and illustrator. This book will appeal to those interested in the role of settlement houses in urban neighborhoods at mid-century and in the history of social reform movements. This book is a window onto a time when settlement houses were in transition from their roots in immigrant communities at the turn of the 20th century to becoming today’s modern social service agencies. What began as Northeast Neighborhood House more than 100 years ago, continues as East Side Neighborhood Services, and is still serving the needs of people in Northeast and East Minneapolis.Caroline's childhood at North East Neighborhood House provides a unique perspective on the role settlement houses have played in our social history. Read more

In late November of 1858 two enslaved Black women—Celia Grayson, age twenty-two, and Eliza Grayson, age twenty—escaped the Stephen F. Nuckolls household in southeastern Nebraska. John Williamson, a man of African American and Cherokee descent from Iowa, guided them through the dark to the Missouri River, where they boarded a skiff and crossed the icy waters, heading for their first stop on the Underground Railroad at Civil Bend, Iowa. In Journey to Freedom Gail Shaffer Blankenau provides the first detailed history of Black enslavement in Nebraska Territory and the escape of these two enslaved Black women from Nebraska City. Poised on the “frontier,” the Graysons’ escape demonstrated that unique opportunities beckoned at the confluence of Nebraska, Missouri, Iowa, and Kansas, and their actions challenged slavery’s tentative expansion into the West and its eventual demise in an era of territorial fluidity. Their escape and the violence that followed prompted considerable debate across the country and led to the Nebraska legislature’s move to prohibit slavery. Drawing on multiple collections, records, and slave narratives, Journey to Freedom sheds light on the Graysons’ courage and agency as they became high-profile figures in the national debate between proslavery and antislavery factions in the antebellum period. Read more

Reverend Peter Pernin was the parish priest for Peshtigo and nearby Marinette, whose churches burned to the ground. He published his account of the fire in 1874. The late William Converse Haygood served as editor of the Wisconsin Magazine of History from 1957 to 1975. He prepared this version of Father Pernin's account on the occasion of the Peshtigo Fire's centennial in 1971. Foreword writer Stephen J. Pyne is a professor at Arizona State University in Tempe and author of numerous books on wildland fire, including Fire in America. Read more

In The Education of Clarence Three Stars Philip Burnham tells the life story of the remarkable Packs the Dog, a member of the Minneconjou Lakotas who was born in 1864 east of the Black Hills. His father, Yellow Knife, died when the boy was five, and the family eventually enrolled at Pine Ridge Agency with the Oglalas under an uncle’s name, Three Stars. In 1879 Packs the Dog joined the first class of Indian students to be admitted to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. An enthusiastic student, Clarence Three Stars, as he would come to be known, was one of five Lakota children who volunteered to stay at Carlisle after the three-year plan of instruction was finished—though he eventually left the school in frustration. Three Stars returned to Pine Ridge and married Jennie Dubray, another Carlisle veteran, and they had seven children. The life of Lakota advocate Three Stars spanned a time of dramatic change for Native Americans, from the pre-reservation period through the Dawes Act of 1887 until just before the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934. Three Stars was a teacher, interpreter, catechist, lawyer, and politician who lived through the federal policy of American Indian assimilation in its many guises, including boarding school education, religious conversion, land allotment, and political reorganization. He used the fundamentals of his own boarding school education to advance the welfare of the Oglala Lakota people, even when his efforts were deemed threatening or subversive. His dedication to justice, learning, and self-governance informed a distinguished career of classroom excellence and political advocacy on his home reservation of Pine Ridge. Read more

I always assumed as a child that the village where I grew up was put there as my personal playground. The river, the town and all the thousand people in it made up such a harmonious setting that if it had not happened the way it did, God would have had to fill a special order and set it down, like Brigadoon, in the rolling green of central Wisconsin.Later I learned, of course, that communities don't just happen. They come into being for very practical and commercial reasons. They can die that way too without proper care.That my family had much to do with this process in Manawa, Wis., is something I did not learn until much later. As a tow-headed kid haunting the blacksmith shop and the feed mill and playing Huck Finn on the river, I took the good life for granted.The adventures we had--Sam and I, and the characters we came to know are the subjects of this book. I hope it can be a window to what it was like growing up in the small-town Midwest during the Depression and before World War II.It was a place where everybody knew all about everybody else, but liked them anyway.It’s a community that can never be the same again and, perhaps, never was exactly the way I picture it here, because of the filter of my memory and my desire to tell a good story. Read more

"Novelist Denise Gess and historian William Lutz brilliantly restore the event to its rightful place in the forefront of American historical imagination." ―Chicago Sun-TimesOn October 8, 1871―the same night as the Great Chicago Fire―the lumber town of Peshtigo, Wisconsin, was struck with a five-mile-wide wall of flames, borne on tornado-force winds of one hundred miles per hour that tore across more than 2,400 square miles of land, obliterating the town in less than one hour and killing more than two thousand people.At the center of the blowout were politically driven newsmen Luther Noyes and Franklin Tilton, money-seeking lumber baron Isaac Stephenson, parish priest Father Peter Pernin, and meteorologist Increase Lapham. In Firestorm at Peshtigo, Denise Gess and William Lutz vividly re-create the personal and political battles leading to this monumental natural disaster, and deliver it from the lost annals of American history. Read more

Conversations with Jim Harrison, Revised and Updated offers a judicious selection of interviews spanning the writing career of Jim Harrison (1937–2016) from its beginnings in the 1960s to the last interview he gave weeks before his death in March 2016. Harrison labeled himself and lived as a “quadra-schizoid” writer. He worked in fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and screenwriting, and he published more than forty books that attracted an international following. These interviews supply a lively narrative of his progress as a major contemporary American author. This collection showcases Harrison's pet peeves, his candor and humility, his sense of humor, and his patience. He does not shy from his authorial obsessions, especially his efforts to hone the novella, for which he is considered a contemporary master, or the frequency with which he defied polite narrative conventions and created memorable, resolute female characters. Each conversation attests to the depth and range of Harrison’s considerable intellectual and political preoccupations, his fierce social and ecological conscience, his aesthetic beliefs, and his stylistic orientations in poetry and prose. Read more

The acclaimed author of American Dirt reveals the devastating effects of a shocking tragedy in this landmark true crime book—the first ever to look intimately at the experiences of both the victims and their families.A Rip in Heaven is Jeanine Cummins’ story of a night in April, 1991, when her two cousins Julie and Robin Kerry, and her brother, Tom, were assaulted on the Old Chain of Rocks Bridge, which spans the Mississippi River just outside of St. Louis. When, after a harrowing ordeal, Tom managed to escape the attackers and flag down help, he thought the nightmare would soon be over. He couldn’t have been more wrong. Tom, his sister Jeanine, and their entire family were just at the beginning of a horrific odyssey through the aftermath of a violent crime, a world of shocking betrayal, endless heartbreak, and utter disillusionment. It was a trial by fire from which no family member would emerge unscathed. Read more

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Corey Geiger, international agricultural journalist and author of On a Wisconsin Family Farm , pairs his rural roots and lively storytelling talents to capture six generations of life in America's Dairyland. After his mother Anna was killed by a train, Elmer Pritzl was thrown into adulthood at the tender age of sixteen. A clever and crafty fellow, Elmer quickly found work at the local foundry. Promoted to foreman by age eighteen, he began supervising men double and even triple his age during the depths of the Great Depression. However, that professional career track ended abruptly five years later when Elmer fell in love with a farmer's daughter, Julia Burich. Six months after their wedding, Julia's father passed away, and with no living male relatives left in her life, Julia's mother, Anna Burich, asked, "Elmer, will you run my farm?" So, Elmer, born a city boy, transformed his life and began a love affair with a Wisconsin family farm. Read more

Eight year-old Fred gives up everything he has ever known when his family moves from Chicago to a dairy farm in Wisconsin. Culture shock ensues.When his father retires early, young Fred is forced to leave the ice cream shops, elevated trains, and bustling streets of suburban Chicago and move to a small farm in southwest Wisconsin. It is the beginning of a new life filled with adventure. There is a snake den under the back porch and the kitchen floor is covered with dead insects. There are snapping turtles to catch and farm animals to play with. There is also work to be done. Dad’s vision of being a gentleman farmer involves having his two sons help with milking the cows, taking care of the chickens, fixing fences, and shoveling snow off the driveway in addition to attending school. And the Wisconsin summers are hot and humid, the winters long and bitterly cold.This is the story of how one family of four manages the transition from Chicago to rural Wisconsin in the late 1950s to 1960s. The story unfolds in a series of vignettes seen through Fred’s eyes. The experiences will leave a permanent impression on Fred. Listening to the colorful characters in Richland Center and Yuba, exploring the farm on horseback, rounding up stray cattle, cooling off at the swimming hole on the Pine River, catching fireflies, and stargazing on clear summer nights—these are memories that last a lifetime. Read more