Central Kansas Library System

"After 30 years, Detective Jim Scharf arrested a teenage couple's murderer-and exposed a looming battle between the pursuit of justice and the right to privacy. When Tanya Van Cuylenborg and Jay Cook were murdered during a trip to Seattle in the 1980s, detectives had few leads. The murder weapon was missing. No one witnessed any suspicious activity. And there was only a single handprint on the outside of the young couple's van. The detectives assumed...

"An account of the unsolved murder of two women in Shenandoah National Park, by a journalist with unprecedented access to all key elements of the case, and a story that reveals the challenges of wilderness forensics and the failures of our justice system"-- May 1996. Lollie Winans and Julie Williams entered Virginia's Shenandoah National Park for a week-long backcountry camping trip. The couple had met and fallen in love the previous summer while...

Vance, a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, provides an account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that offers a broader, probing look at the struggles of America's white working class. The decline of this group, a demographic of our country that has been slowly disintegrating over forty years, has been reported on with growing frequency and alarm. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like...

An ambitious firefighter hunts a notorious arsonist in the Edgar Award–winning true crime story the New York Times calls "stranger than fiction." From Joseph Wambaugh, the #1 New York Times–bestselling author of such classics as The Onion Field and The Choirboys, comes the extraordinary story of the chase for the "Pillow Pyro," called the most prolific American arsonist of the twentieth century.   Growing up in Los Angeles, John Orr idolized...

Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? Why do drug dealers still live with their moms? How much do parents really matter? What kind of impact did Roe v. Wade have on violent crime? These may not sound like typical questions for an economist to ask--but Levitt is not a typical economist. He studies the stuff and riddles of everyday life--from cheating and crime to sports and child...

"This book--the first ethnography of water conservation on the Great Plains--provides an account of High Plains aquifer decline through an exploration of the different ways in which heartland residents inhabit and understand the imminent depletion of groundwater. This literary ethnography offers a vividly sketched look into the lives and stories of this community, based on interviews with members of the community such as fellow farmers and state regulators,...

"A riveting, must-read, year-in-the-life account of three teachers, combined with reporting that reveals what's really going on behind school doors, by New York Times bestselling author and education expert Alexandra Robbins Alexandra Robbins goes behind the scenes to tell the true, sometimes shocking, always inspirational stories of three teachers as they navigate a year in the classroom. She follows Penny, a southern middle school math teacher who...

"Clemantine Wamariya was six years old when her mother and father began to speak in whispers, when neighbors began to disappear, and when she heard the loud, ugly sounds her brother said were thunder. It was 1994, and in 100 days more than 800,000 people would be murdered in Rwanda and millions more displaced. Clemantine and her fifteen-year-old sister, Claire, ran and spent the next six years wandering through seven African countries searching for...

In 1845, Henry David Thoreau moved into a cabin by Walden Pond. With the intention of immersing himself in nature and distancing himself from the distractions of social life, Thoreau sustained his retreat for just over two years. The work is considered a paean to the virtues of simplicity and self-sufficiency.

At an exclusive prep school on Long Island, Jill Newman looks forward to her senior year as a member of the school's most elite clique, the Players, until new evidence surfaces about the murder of her close friend Shaila. Gold Coast, Long Island. Freshman year Jill's best friend, Shaila Arnold, was killed by her boyfriend. After that dark night on the beach Graham confessed, the case was closed, and Jill tried to move on. Now, it is senior year,...