Ruby Sisson Library

The Deep South of the late 1950's was another country: a land of lynchings, segregated lunch counters, whites-only restrooms, and a color line etched in blood across Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. White journalist John Howard Griffin, working for the black-owned magazine Sepia, decided to cross that line. Using medication that darkened his skin to deep brown, he exchanged his privileged life as a southern white man for the disenfranchised...

A small boy enjoys playing alone in deep snow all day, and later welcomes his warm bath and snug bed-so he can go out again tomorrow!

Published in 1926 to explosive acclaim, The Sun Also Rises stands as perhaps the most impressive first novel ever written by an American writer. A roman ̉clef about a group of American and English expatriates on an excursion from Paris's Left Bank to Pamplona for the July fiesta and its climactic bull fight, a journey from the center of a civilization spiritually bankrupted by the First World War to a vital, God-haunted world in which faith and...

"When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood." So begins the luminous memoir of Frank McCourt, born in Depression-era Brooklyn to recent Irish immigrants and raised in the slums of Limerick, Ireland....

Capturing the courage of a little girl facing racism and hatred alone, the true story of Ruby Bridges reveals how she helped shape American history as the first African American child sent to first grade in a white school.

American cowboy, Stirling Haselton, taking the blame for a shooting committed by a friend, is exiled to Australia and with one loyal follower, joins a party of ranchers and drovers making the long wilderness journey to the Elaberleys. Along the way come dust storms, drought and numerous other adventures.

Newlyweds Celestial and Roy are the embodiment of both the American Dream and the New South. He is a young executive and she is an artist on the brink of an exciting career. But as they settle into the routine of their life together, they are ripped apart by circumstances neither could have imagined. Roy is arrested and sentenced to twelve years for a crime Celestial knows he didn't commit. Though fiercely independent, Celestial finds herself bereft...

"It was a soft, early spring morning with the mist still clinging to the mountain and the blackbirds just starting to swoop low over the alfalfa fields when Jo Mondragon - thirty-six with not much to show for it, a feisty hustler with a talent for trouble - slammed his battered pick-up to a stop, tugged on his gumboots, and marched into the arid patch of ground his father had once cultivated. Carefully, impulsively (and also illegally), he tapped...

"Following the turn of the seasons, eleven-year-old Eldon traces the daily routines of his life on a farm and his relationship with his older brother, Wayne. During the winter, with little work to be done on the farm, Eldon and Wayne spend the quiet hours with their family, listening to their uncle David's stories. But Eldon soon learns that, although he has lived on the same farm, in the same house with his uncle for eleven springs, summers, and...

The ordinary interactions and everyday routines of the Watsons, an African American family living in Flint, Michigan, are drastically changed after they go to visit Grandma in Alabama in the summer of 1963.