Mary Clearman Blew s education began at home, on a remote cattle ranch in Montana. She graduated to a one-room rural school, then escaped, via scholarship, to the University of Montana, where, still in her teens, she met and married her first husband. This Is Not the Ivy League is her account of what it was to be that girl, and then that woman pressured by husband and parents to be the conventional wife of the 1950s, persisting in her pursuit of an education, trailed by a reluctant husband and small children through graduate school, and finally entering the job market with a PhD in...
Mary Clearman Blew s education began at home, on a remote cattle ranch in Montana. She graduated to a one-room rural school, then escaped, via scholar...
Tamsen Donner. For most the name conjures the ill-fated Donner party trapped in the snows of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in 1846-47. Others might know Tamsen as the stoic pioneer woman who saw her children to safety but stayed with her dying husband at the cost of her own life. For Gabrielle Burton, Tamsen's story, fascinating in its own right, had long seemed something more: the story of a woman's life writ large, one whose impossible balancing of self, motherhood, and marriage spoke to Burton's own experience.
This book tells of Burton's search to solve the mystery of...
Tamsen Donner. For most the name conjures the ill-fated Donner party trapped in the snows of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in 1846-47. Other...
This mature, exquisite collection of personal essays by Hilary Masters offers a rare pleasure. Here are meditations and reflections distilled in fine prose from a long and varied life musings that, in the distinguished tradition of essays carried on since the days of Montaigne, articulate the piquant insights of the writer s experience. In this collection, one of the most illustrious contemporary essayists transfigures incidents and observations into something far more a finely crafted window into the workings of experience and memory. Masters makes readers privy to a youthful love affair; an...
This mature, exquisite collection of personal essays by Hilary Masters offers a rare pleasure. Here are meditations and reflections distilled in fine ...
There was always the incantation: "Whoever wishes you harm, may harm come to them " And just in case that didn't work, there were garlic and cloves to repel the Evil Eye--or, better yet, the dried foreskin from a baby boy's circumcision, ground to a fine powder. But whatever precautions Brenda Serotte was subjected to, they were not enough. Shortly before her eighth birthday, in the fall of 1954, she came down with polio--painfully singled out in a world already marked by differences. Her bout with the dreaded disease is at the heart of this poignant and heartbreakingly hilarious memoir of...
There was always the incantation: "Whoever wishes you harm, may harm come to them " And just in case that didn't work, there were garlic and cloves to...
What is identity when you re a girl adopted as an infant by a Cuban American family of Jehovah s Witnesses? The answer isn t easy. You won t find it in books. And you certainly won t find it in the neighborhood. This is just the beginning of Joy Castro s unmoored life of searching and striving that she s turned to account with literary alchemy in Island of Bones.
In personal essays that plumb the depths of not-belonging, Castro takes the all-too-raw materials of her adolescence and young adulthood and views them through the prism of time. The result is an exquisitely rendered,...
What is identity when you re a girl adopted as an infant by a Cuban American family of Jehovah s Witnesses? The answer isn t easy. You won t find i...
It had come to this: breast-feeding her screaming three-month-old while sitting on the cigarette-scarred floor of a union hall, lying to her husband so she could attend yet another activist meeting, and otherwise actively self-destructing. Then Sonya Huber turned to her long-dead grandfather, the family nobody, for help.
Huber s search for meaning and resonance in the life of her grandfather Heina Buschman was unusual insofar as she knew him only through dismissive family stories. He let his wife die of neglect . . . he used his infant son as a decoy when transporting anti-Nazi...
It had come to this: breast-feeding her screaming three-month-old while sitting on the cigarette-scarred floor of a union hall, lying to her husban...
I called the bishop of the local ward, and he put the date of your move into the church bulletin, and these gentlemen came to help, Brady, the real estate agent, says. Welcome to Wellsville, Utah. Good-bye, L.A.
Liz Stephens has come from Los Angeles to Utah for graduate school, and her brief stint working on a Taco Bell commercial is not much in the way of preparation for taking on the real West. In The Days Are Gods Stephens chronicles a move that is far more than a shift in geographical coordinates. With husband and dogs in tow, she searches for an authentic...
I called the bishop of the local ward, and he put the date of your move into the church bulletin, and these gentlemen came to help, Brady, the rea...
Mary Clearman Blew s education began at home, on a remote cattle ranch in Montana. She graduated to a one-room rural school, then escaped, via scholarship, to the University of Montana, where, still in her teens, she met and married her first husband. This Is Not the Ivy League is her account of what it was to be that girl, and then that woman pressured by husband and parents to be the conventional wife of the 1950s, persisting in her pursuit of an education, trailed by a reluctant husband and small children through graduate school, and finally entering the job market with a PhD in...
Mary Clearman Blew s education began at home, on a remote cattle ranch in Montana. She graduated to a one-room rural school, then escaped, via scholar...
In this candid and moving memoir, John W. Evans articulates the complicated joys of falling in love again as a young widower. Though heartbroken after his wife's violent death, Evans realizes that he cannot remain inconsolable and adrift, living with his in-laws in Indiana. Motivated by a small red X on a map, Evans musters the courage for a cross-country trip. From the Badlands to Yellowstone to the foothills of the Sierra Mountains, Evans's hope and determination propel him even as he contemplates his vulnerability and the legacy of a terrible tragedy.
Should I Still...
In this candid and moving memoir, John W. Evans articulates the complicated joys of falling in love again as a young widower. Though heartbroken af...
In Thomas Jefferson s day, 90 percent of the population worked on family farms. Today, in a world dominated by agribusiness, less than 1 percent of Americans claim farm-related occupations. What was lost along the way is something that Evelyn I. Funda experienced firsthand when, in 2001, her parents sold the last parcel of the farm they had worked since they married in 1957. Against that landscape of loss, Funda explores her family s three-generation farming experience in southern Idaho, where her Czech immigrant family spent their lives turning a patch of sagebrush into crop...
In Thomas Jefferson s day, 90 percent of the population worked on family farms. Today, in a world dominated by agribusiness, less than 1 percent of...
