Ruby Sisson Library

This memoir traces Maya Angelou's childhood in a small, rural community during the 1930s. Filled with images and recollections that point to the dignity and courage of black men and women, Angelou paints a sometimes disquieting, but always affecting picture of the people-and the times-that touched her life.

"'Fans of The Chilbury Ladies' Choir and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society will adore The Jane Austen Society... A charming and memorable debut, which reminds us of the universal language of literature and the power of books to unite and heal.' -Pam Jenoff, New York Times bestselling author of The Lost Girls of Paris Just after the Second World War, in the small English village of Chawton, an unusual but like-minded group of people...

"Bird Cloud" is the name the author gave to 640 acres of Wyoming wetlands and prairie and four hundred foot cliffs plunging down to the North Platte River. On the day she first visited, a cloud in the shape of a bird hung in the evening sky. She also saw pelicans, bald eagles, golden eagles, great blue herons, ravens, scores of bluebirds, harriers, kestrels, elk, deer and a dozen antelope. She fell in love with the land, then owned by the Nature Conservancy,...

"When a pair of young lovers abscond from a Puritan colony, little do they know that their humble cabin in the woods will become the home of an extraordinary succession of human and nonhuman characters alike. An English soldier, destined for glory, abandons the battlefields of the New World to devote himself to apples. A pair of spinster twins navigate war and famine, envy and desire. A crime reporter unearths a mass grave--only to discover that the...

Returning to the struggling town of Buffalo Valley, North Dakota, Lindsay Snyder seeks to discover family secrets while reevaluating her life, an effort that provides unexpected hope to the town of her childhood vacations.

Never before have the gates of Camp David been opened to the public. Intensely private and completely secluded, the president's personal campground is situated deep in the woods, up miles of unmarked roads that are practically invisible to the untrained eye. Now, for the first time, we are allowed to travel along the mountain route and directly into the fascinating and intimate complex of rustic residential cabins, wildlife trails, and athletic courses...

"Michael Branch built his home on a remote hilltop in the Great Basin Desert of northwestern Nevada, a wild and extreme landscape where he lives with his wife and two curious little girls. Moving between pastoral passages on the beauty found in the desert and humorous tales of the humility of being a father, Raising Wild offers an intimate portrait of a landscape where mountain lions and ground squirrels can threaten in equal measure.." -- Provided...

Henry David Thoreau built his small cabin on the shore of Walden Pond in 1845. For the next two years he lived there as simply as possible, seeking "the essential facts of life" and learning to eliminate the unnecessary details-material and spiritual-that intrude upon our happiness. He described his experiences in Walden, using vivid, forceful prose that transforms his reflections on nature into richly evocative metaphors to live by. George Eliot's...

The author, a trained psychiatric social worker, at the end of WW II inherited a beautiful home in Taormina and has lived there ever since; the book is a candid examination of her life there and descriptions of the many foreign visitors who stayed in her house.

Meyers's claim that he, a longtime easterner, was prompted to move to southwestern Colorado by his longing for his father, who deserted the family in New Jersey, turns out to be a Maguffin in this collection of 15 original pieces. The real compulsion is fly fishing for trout. Meyers writes about everyday life in the San Juan mountain range.