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  My Appalachia - A Memoir

  Sidney Saylor Farr

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  This remarkable memoir is “both one person’s extraordinary life story and a first-hand look at life in the mountains in a time that is fading from memory” (Kentucky Monthly). 
   
  My family lived as far back in the hollers as it was possible to go in Bell County, Kentucky. Dad worked in the timber woods and at a sawmill, when there was employment to be found. We ate what we grew on the place or could glean from the hillsides. Just about everything was made by hand. We had little contact with people outside the region . . . 
   
  Sidney Saylor Farr grew up in the mountains of southeastern Kentucky, the eldest of ten children. Her devotion to her family led her to accept heavy responsibilities from a very young age: At three, she remembers being put in charge of her baby sister while her parents worked in the corn field, and at twelve, she was forced to leave school to care for her ailing mother and younger siblings. Though she didn’t have much time to pursue her own goals, life in the mountains nourished and shaped Farr and the writer she would become. 
   
  Her great-grandmother was a master storyteller, and stories passed down from generation to generation fueled her imagination. Her Aunt Dellie, a voracious reader, received discarded books from the Pineville library, and as she shared these volumes with young Sidney, she opened the world to her eager niece. Eventually, Farr’s intense determination compelled her to find her own path and gave her the strength to become one of the most influential figures in Appalachian literature. Living in Appalachia was difficult—many people of Farr’s generation left the mountains for good—but she persisted through countless challenges, including poverty, discrimination, and personal loss, and managed to thrive. Composed of a rich mix of folklore, family history, and spiritual and intellectual exploration, Farr’s memoir shares the stories of her struggles and triumphs to create a vivid picture of a culture as enduring as the mountains. 
   
  Winner of the Appalachian Book of the Year Award

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  Essays book 1

  Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

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  Michel Eyquem de Montaigne is one of the most influential writers of the French Renaissance, known for popularising the essay as a literary genre and is popularly thought of as the father of Modern Skepticism. He became famous for his effortless ability to merge serious intellectual speculation with casual anecdotes and autobiography—and his massive volume Essais (translated literally as "Attempts") contains, to this day, some of the most widely influential essays ever written. (Summary extracted from Wikipedia)

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  Serial Killers - Biographies of...

  Kelly Mass

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  Today, you will be introduced to three sick serial killers. Their biographies will be summarized and explained. The said individuals are as follows: 
  Ted Bundy - Ted Bundy was one of the most infamous rapists and sexual predators, necrophiles, and murderers in the western part of the United States. Having been abused in his childhood and fed pornographic material from an early age, his crimes became more daring, violent, and vicious as he got a thrill from dismembering or sexually tormenting one victim after another. 
  At the end of his life, after several escapes from prison, he was convicted and got the electric chair. Even then, despite his confessions, his manipulative ways seemed to have so much influence on the women he had dated, that many still proclaimed their love for him and were sad to see him leave this world. 
  Al Capone - Al Capone was an infamous mob boss between the two world wars, in the city of New York and surrounding areas. His name and style have been emulated in movies. The mass shootings, tax evasion, and revenge on Italian murders in the mafia gangs on the United States east coast were so notorious that they have become iconic and stereotyped. 
  How did Al Capone get the scars on his face? How did he manage to control so much of the gangs in the cities? How was he able to bribe the police, evade taxes, and become a terror for anyone who opposed him? And how did his life finally come to an end? 
  Jack the Ripper - Jack the Ripper was an unknown serial killer active in the mainly poor parts around the Whitechapel district of London in the year 1888. In both the criminal case files and modern journalistic books, the killer was referred to as the Whitechapel Killer and Leather Apron. 
  He caused quite some havoc, going after some of the most impoverished neighborhoods and killing victim after victim, without ever being found.

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  Damon Runyon Theater - That...

  Damon Runyon

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  The Damon Runyon Theatre Hour.  Damon Runyon is acknowledged as one of the great writers to come out of twentieth century America.  Runyon's short stories are almost always told in the first person by a narrator who is never named, and whose role is unclear; he knows many gangsters and has no job that can be gleaned from his musings, nor does he admit to any criminal involvement; He’s a bystander, an observer, an average street-corner Joe.  Runyon described himself as "being known to one and all as a guy who is just around".  That line seems to say a lot about Runyon and his life.  It was like you were with him on some street corner hustle or some shady dive and he was filling you in on all the angles, all the gossip, all of life. He was who so many people wanted to be with……or so many people wanted to be.  Of course, the cliché about newspapermen and writers is that they are heavy drinkers, chain-smokers, gamblers and obsessively chase women with a sideline in the gathering of stories and facts and actually getting something written just before the deadline hits. That seems like Damon Runyon and his life summed up in one sentence.  His stories became legendary ways of looking that bit differently at America, of soaking up the atmosphere of a glamorous and rip-roaring age and distilling it into the black and white type or, in our case, The Damon Runyon Theatre Hour.

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  How I Got Into Art School (and...

  William McLellan

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  THE TRUE STORY OF HOW ONE MAN OVERCAME HIS DEMONS AND UNLEASHED HIS CREATIVITY -- IN A FASCIST JAIL It's 1972. William is a creative boy in a dead-end job, his dream of becoming an artist fading fast. So when his best friend hatches a plan to fund a year's painting in Morocco, William leaps at the chance. The only problem is, first he has to get through Franco's fascist Spain with a suitcase of drugs. Like most things in William's life, the plan goes wrong and he is thrown into the notorious Modelo jail in Barcelona. Abandoned by friends and family, unable to speak the language, surrounded by hardened criminals, lost hippies and brutal prison guards and with no idea when, if ever, he will be released, he quickly spirals into despair. It is only when he begins to secretly draw his visions and nightmares that William starts to deal with his remorse and self-hatred. But it is the facing-up to long-repressed childhood memories of abuse, neglect and poverty that ultimately leads to his redemption ... and freedom.

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  My Life in Dire Straits - The...

  John Illsley

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  Dire Straits filled giant stadiums around the world and sold hundreds of millions of records. Their classic songs—‘Sultans of Swing’, ‘Romeo  Juliet’, ‘Money for Nothing’, ‘Brothers in Arms’—formed the soundtrack of a generation and live on today: still racking up sales, still being played on the radio on every continent. Starting with his own unlikely beginnings in Middle England, John Illsley recounts the band’s rise from humble origins in London’s spit-and-sawdust pubs to the best-known venues in the world, the working men’s clubs to Madison Square Garden, sharing gigs with wild punk bands to the Live Aid stage at Wembley until, ultimately, the shattering demands of touring on a global scale and living life in the spotlight took their inevitable toll. John’s story is also a tribute to his great friend Mark Knopfler, the band’s lead singer, songwriter and gifted guitarist. They were the only band members to stay the fifteen-year distance. Told with searching honesty, soulful reflection and wry humour, this is the first and only account of that incredible story.

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