Central Kansas Library System

He was Sam Clemens, steamboat pilot, before he was Mark Twain, famous author. His better-known name originated with the lingo of navigation, and much of his writing was informed by his shipboard adventures on one of the world's great rivers. In this book, Twain offered recollections ranging from his salad days as a novice pilot to views from the passenger decks in the twilight of the river culture's heyday. Under the tutelage of the most celebrated...

The adventures of a mischievous young boy and his friends growing up in a Mississippi River town in the nineteenth century. Who could forget the pranks, the adventures, the sheer fun of Tom Sawyer? It's something every child should experience and every child will love. From Tom's sly trickery with the whitewashed fence, when he cleverly manipulates everyone so they happily do his work for him, to his and Becky Thatcher's calamities in Bat Cave, the...

Dramatizes the events that surround the murder of a white man in a volatile Southern community.

Comfort Snowberger is well acquainted with death since her family runs the funeral parlor in their small southern town, but even so the ten-year-old is unprepared for the series of heart-wrenching events that begins on the first day of Easter vacation with the sudden death of her beloved great-uncle Edisto.

Pregnant fifteen-year-old Esch and her family live in Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, which puts them in the path of Hurricane Katrina, and as they try to stock the small amount of food they have in preparation for the disaster, the family's love for each other will be their only hope for survival.

The life of a ten-year-old girl is shattered by two drunken and remorseless young men. Until her black father acquires an assault rifle--and takes justice into his own hands.

First published in 1929, Faulkner created his "heart's darling," the beautiful and tragic Caddy Compson, whose story Faulkner told through separate monologues by her three brothers--the idiot Benjy, the neurotic suicidal Quentin and the monstrous Jason. From the Trade Paperback edition. The novel reveals the story of the disintegration of the Compson family, doomed inhabitants of Faulkner's mythical Yoknapatawpha County, through the interior monologues...

A Coretta Scott King and Printz honor book now in paperback. A Wreath for Emmett Till is "A moving elegy," says The Bulletin. In 1955 people all over the United States knew that Emmett Louis Till was a fourteen-year-old African American boy lynched for supposedly whistling at a white woman in Mississippi. The brutality of his murder, the open-casket funeral held by his mother, Mamie Till Mobley, and the acquittal of the men tried for the crime drew...

Four black children growing up in rural Mississippi during the Depression experience racial antagonisms and hard times, but learn from their parents the pride and self-respect they need to survive.

Follows one young man from his impoverished childhood with a crack-addicted mother, through his discovery of the sport of football, to his rise to become one of the most successful, highly-paid players in the NFL.