The teenage son of an Appalachian single mother who dies when he is eleven uses his good looks, wit, and instincts to survive foster care, child labor, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses.

Named the guardian of her murdered sister's troubled twins, Luce struggles to build a family with the children before being targeted by the twins' father--her sister's killer--who believes that the children are in possession of a stolen cache of money.

Since its publication in 1977, The Unsettling of America has been recognized as a classic of American letters. In it, Wendell Berry argues that good farming is a cultural and spiritual discipline. Today’s agribusiness, however, takes farming out of its cultural context and away from families. As a result, we as a nation are more estranged from the land from the intimate knowledge, love, and care of it. Sadly, his arguments and observations are more...

Relates how an enterprising teenager in Malawi builds a windmill from scraps he finds around his village and brings electricity, and a future, to his family.

When Rick Bragg, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, thought about writing an appreciation of his mother and a memoir of his life, he hesitated. How would mama feel about seeing her life in print? When he asked her, she told him, "Write it," especially since she had remained quiet about her life for 50 years. All Over but the Shoutin' tells the story of a woman who endures years of hardship and deprivation to raise her three sons. It is not a simple...

President Jimmy Carter has become an acclaimed, best-selling author since his days in the White House. In An Hour Before Daylight, he offers poignant remembrances of his childhood days in Depression-era rural Georgia. With eloquent yet conversational prose, Carter recalls the events and people who shaped his life from his earliest days. He describes the sharecropping economy of the 1930s, where hard farm labor was done by hand and those who worked...

Olivia Harker Cross owns a mountain -- or thinks she does -- in Pope County, Kentucky, a land where wolves howl at night. But now someone is killing the wolves on Big Foley Mountain, and Olivia is beginning to realize how much of her own bitter history she has never understood -- her mother's madness or her daughter's flight to California leaving her to raise William, her beloved grandson. But most of all, Olivia doesn't understand her town's rage,...