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Anyone familiar with John Krakauer's book Under the Banner of Heaven will be familiar with the polygamous, Fundamentalist Church of the Latter Day Saints (FLDS). In that book Krakauer recounts how religious polygamy was often used as a cover for pedophilia, and how anyone who questioned the motives...

Rose and Norah were little girls when their little mother died. They both came in from playing in the yard to find their mom dead in the bathroom, an apparent suicide. As the two girls grow up, that day shapes their lives. Rose is a single mother working hard as a house cleaner to raise her son, while...

The Ripest Moments is a simple pleasure to read. While reading this memoir of growing up in the 40s and 50s in Jasper and rural Dubois County, Indiana, I found myself reminded over and over again of my own childhood in northern Indiana, and the cousins, aunts, and uncles we'd often visit in Ohio...

It is sometimes hard to believe that I graduated from USI over five years ago. That may seem like no time at all for some people, but sometimes I still feel like I am 21 again. Sometimes I forget that I am a "grown-up" with a "grown-up" job and bills, house payments, etc. Many of...

In September of 1965 Lorree Rackstraw was a graduate student in her second year at the Iowa Writer's Workshop, apprehensive about her new teacher, a relatively unknown writer named Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut had published just three books: The Sirens of Titan , Mother Night , and Cat's Cradle ....

Are you a fan of the Shopaholic Series by Sophie Kinsella? If so, let me introduce you to Kinsella's alter ego, Madeleine Wickham. Both personas write about English women who have found themselves in a predicament. Whether it be money (Shopaholic series), quitting a job and winding up in the country...

When he died in 1910, Samuel Langhorne Clemens - better known by the nom de plume Mark Twain - left behind the largest trove of literary papers of any nineteenth-century American author. Included were letters diaries, travelogues, a huge autobiography, notebooks, literary manuscripts, "easily half...