Ruby Sisson Library

By 1952, Thomas Merton's renown as the bestselling author of The Seven Storey Mountain was well established. During the years illuminated by this third volume of his private journals, Merton struggled to reconcile his celebrity with his desire for a life of hermetic silence and contemplation. Already at the Abbey of Gethsemani for over a decade, Merton was beginning to grow impatient with the strictures and shortcomings of conventional monastic life....

"For readers of Amanda Coplin and Chris Bohjalian, In Wilderness is a suspenseful and literary love story--a daring and original novel about our fierce need for companionship and our enduring will to survive. In the winter of 1966, Katherine Reid receives a shattering diagnosis. Debilitated by a terminal and painful illness, Katherine moves to an isolated cabin deep in Georgia's Appalachian Mountains. There, with little more than a sleeping bag, a...

"A wise, passionate account of the pleasures of travelling solo In our increasingly frantic daily lives, many people are genuinely fearful of the prospect of solitude, but time alone can be both rich and restorative, especially when travelling. Through on-the-ground reporting and recounting the experiences of artists, writers, and innovators who cherished solitude, Stephanie Rosenbloom considers how being alone as a traveller--and even in one's own...

Annotated edition of Thoreau's journal, expressing his philosophy of life and observations of nature, drawn from his solitary sojourn of two years in a cabin on Walden Pond near Concord, Massachusetts.

This graphic novel, narrated in Thoreau's own words, weaves together elements from "Walden," "Civil disobedience," "Walking," and Thoreau's journals to tell the story of his two years in the woods and of the night he spent in jail for refusing to pay a poll tax.