Central Kansas Library System

The book that made Mark Twain famous and introduced the world to that obnoxious and ubiquitous character: the American tourist Based on a series of letters first published in American newspapers, The Innocents Abroad is Mark Twain's hilarious and insightful account of an organized tour of Europe and the Holy Land undertaken in 1867.   With his trademark blend of skepticism and sincerity, Twain casts New World eyes on the people and places of the...

The stories of a young veterinarian making his way in the rugged English countryside?and of the people and animals he met along the way ? In the rolling dales of Yorkshire, a simple, rural region of northern England, a young veterinarian from Sunderland joins a new practice. A stranger in a strange land, he must quickly learn the odd dialect and humorous ways of the locals, master outdated equipment, and do his best to mend, treat, and heal pets and...

The "refreshing . . . laugh-out-loud" #1 New York Times bestseller about life in the suburbs that was adapted into a classic film comedy. One day, Tony Award–winning playwright Jean Kerr packed up her four kids (and husband, Walter, one of Broadway's sharpest critics), and left New York City. They moved to a faraway part of the world that promised a grassy utopia where daisies grew wild and homes were described as neo-gingerbread. In this collection...

Me Talk Pretty One Day contains far more than just the funniest collection of autobiographical essays - it quite well registers as a manifesto about language itself. Wherever there's a straight line, you can be sure that Sedaris lurks beneath the text, making it jagged with laughter; and just where the fault lines fall, he sits mischievously perched at the epicenter of it all. David Sedaris's new collection, Me Talk Pretty One Day, tells a most unconventional...

Investigative food journalist Barry Estabrook reveals the huge human and environmental cost of the $5 billion fresh tomato industry and the price we pay as a society when we take taste and thought out of our food purchases.

"Forgive him, Father, for Stephen Colbert has sinned. He knew it was wrong at the time. But he went ahead and did it anyway. Now he's begging for forgiveness. Based on his popular segment from The Late Show, Stephen Colbert and his team of writers now reveal his most shameful secrets to millions (although, actually, he'd like you not to tell anyone)"--Amazon.com.

First published in 1911, The Innocence of Father Brown is a series of stories involving one of the greatest characters in the history of detective fiction, G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown. A Roman Catholic priest, Father Brown has an uncanny insight to human evil. In contrast with the aristocratic arch-villains of the Sherlock Holmes stories, Father Brown solves mysteries involving local murders by small town crooks, narrowing the suspect list down...

Collection of children's essays to men and women in the U.S. armed forces and their families

For any task you might want to do, there's a right way, a wrong way, and a way so monumentally complex, excessive, and inadvisable that no one would ever try it. Munroe has created a guide to the third kind of approach. He provides highly impractical advice for everything from landing a plane to digging a hole. Cartoonist Randall Munroe (xkcd) explains how to predict the weather by analyzing the pixels of your Facebook photos. He teaches you how to...