Central Kansas Library System

A conversation between friends Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark about what they've learned from their biggest mistakes, their most triumphant successes, their favorite therapists, and their mutual obsession with true crime. From growing up as latchkey kids to their formative years working at the Gap and Hot Topic to their struggles with substances and mental health, Karen and Georgia share some of the most significant moments in their lives....

The charming story of Dewey Readmore Books, the beloved library cat of Spencer, Iowa. The story of Dewey Readmore Books, the beloved library cat, starts in the worst possible way. Only a few weeks old, on the coldest night of the year, he was stuffed into the book return slot at the Spencer, Iowa, Public Library. He was found the next morning by library director, Vicki Myron, a single mother who had survived the loss of her family farm, a breast...

Continues the memoirs of Yorkshire veterinarian James Herriot, as life for Herriot, his wife, and two children gets back to normal after World War II.

Dangerous Woman? Ordained by God? Gender matters! What do pastors really do beyond the pulpit? What's it like to be a woman pastor? It's complicated. People leave congregations when the pastor wears a skirt. Other congregations become advocates for women clergy. Rev. Dorothy Nickel Friesen, an ordained Mennonite pastor, digs deep into the soul of a pastor with humor, pathos, and passion. Her memoir, a collection of short stories based on true events,...

In March 2005, Ashley Smith made headlines around the globe when she miraculously talked her way out of the hands of alleged courthouse killer Brian Nichols after he took her hostage for seven hours in her suburban Atlanta apartment. In this moving, inspirational account, the twenty-seven-year-old widowed mother of a six-year-old girl shares for the first time the little-known details of her traumatic ordeal and expands on how her faith and the bestselling...

"For forty-seven days in 1999, Phyllis Cole-Dai and James Murray lived by choice on the streets of Columbus, Ohio, the nation's fifteenth-largest city. They went to the streets to practice presence: to offer nonjudgmental attention and compassion to everyone they met, especially the chronically homeless, who are so often ignored, scorned, abused, or shunned. 'The Emptiness of Our Hands,' now in its third edition, is a meditative chronicle of their...

After the success of her first book and a near-fatal bicycle collision, the author contemplates both her spiritual and temporal recovery and reflects on how the community of Haines, Alaska, helped her through the ordeal.

During Sarah Smarsh's turbulent childhood in Kansas in the 1980s and 1990s, the forces of cyclical poverty and the country's changing economic policies solidified her family's place among the working poor. By telling the story of her life and the lives of the people she loves, Smarsh challenges us to look more closely at the class divide in our country and examine the myths about people thought to be less because they earn less. Her personal history...

"In this hilarious collection of essays, comedian Faith Salie reflects on the absurd hoops she's jumped through in order to win approval. From running in place in a darkened shower in Africa at 4 am to lose weight, to agreeing to an exorcism at the behest of her crazy ex-husband, to eating pig organs with Harrison Ford's son after her producers told her it would "make good TV", Salie has done it all in the hopes of achieving positive reinforcement...