Ruby Sisson Library

If you'd told 46-year old Laura Friedman Williams that in a few years she'd be having some of the best sex of her life with men who were not her husband, she'd have laughed in your face. She was a happily married stay-at-home mother with three children and plans to grow old with her husband. Sure, their sex had become a little formulaic, and yes, their life together mostly revolved around their kids, but whose doesn't? Then came the shocking, utterly...

'Punished' is the inspiring true story of an unusual little girl, Vanessa, whose childhood was devastated by torture and abuse at the hands of her sadistic mother. Vanessa was nearly destroyed until she discovered a secret that ultimately saved her life. From the age of 3, Vanessa lived in daily terror of her mother's unpredictable rage. If she was 'naughty', her mother would lash out at her - with beatings, torture, starvation and making Vanessa...

"The Hollywood Ending of an Adrenaline-Filled and, By Turns, Harrowing and Funny Odyssey of Crime and Redemption in America's War on Drugs Smuggler's Blues, the first book in Richard Stratton's memoir of his criminal career, detailed his years as a kingpin in the Hippie Mafia. Kingpin, the second book, traced his eight-year journey through the criminal justice system, through two federal trials and myriad jails and prisons, and culminating in his...

"Jim Gaffigan meets Cheryl Strayed in this blisteringly funny memoir about the call of the wild, from one of Scandinavia's biggest comedians. Sometime around his forties, Are Kalvø starts losing his friends ... to the mountains. Friends who used to meet him at the pub are now hiking and skiing every weekend, and when they do show up, all they talk about is feeling at one with nature (without a hint of irony). When Are realizes he's the only person...

Between December 1968 and December 1972, twenty-four men captured the imagination of the world as they voyaged to the moon. In For All Mankind, Harry Hurt III presents a dramatic, engrossing, and expansive account of those journeys. Based on extensive research and exclusive interviews with the Apollo astronauts, For All Mankind remains one of the most comprehensive and revealing firsthand accounts of space travel ever assembled. In their own words,...

"When his wife and two of his children were killed in a drunk-driving accident, Chris Williams made the most important decision of his life"--Provided by publisher.

"Friend, asshole, angel, mutant," singer-songwriter Vic Chesnutt "came along and made us gross and broken people seem...I dunno, cooler, I guess." A quadriplegic who could play only simple chords on his guitar, Chesnutt recorded seventeen critically acclaimed albums before his death in 2009, including “About to Choke”, “North Star Deserter”, and “At the Cut”. In 2006, NPR placed him in the top five of the ten best living songwriters, along...

A warm, witty memoir of a young family's rugged adventure living in the newly established Big Bend National Park in the 1940s. A woman who went West with her husband in the 1840s must have expected hardships and privation, but during the 1940s, when Etta Koch stopped off in Big Bend with her young family and a twenty-three-foot travel trailer in tow, which they named Porky, the Road Hog, she anticipated a brief, civilized camping trip between her...

"In March 1942, at the age of 25, kindergarten teacher Magda Hellinger was deported from her hometown in Slovakia along with 998 other young women. They were some of the first Jews to be sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp. Very few would survive the next three years until liberation. The SS soon discovered that by putting prisoners in day-to-day charge of the accommodation blocks and even the camps at large-so called Blockalteste and Lageralteste...

"In this riveting, poignant memoir of three generations of women and the white dresses that adorned them--television producer Mary Pflum Peterson recounts a journey through loss and redemption, and her battle to rescue her mother, a former nun, from compulsive hoarding" --