The best-selling author of Alice's Tulips and other popular novels, Sandra Dallas exhibits a well-honed talent for evoking the past. In The Persian Pickle Club, Dallas transports listeners to 1930s Kansas, where a club of quilters welcomes a new member-and then must turn to each other for support when a startling secret comes to light. "A colorful exploration of Depression-era Kansas and the meaning of friendship."-New York Times Book Review

Reverend John Ames is dying in 1956 in Gilead, Iowa. Glory Boughton has returned to care for her dying father and soon her brother, Jack, the prodigal son, comes home, too. As the Reverend John Ames approaches the hour of his own death, he writes a letter to his son chronicling three previous generations of his family, a story that stretches back to the Civil War and reveals uncomfortable family secrets. In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames's...

"The Walnut Valley Festival was launched in 1972 when a guitar maker, a farmer and a businessman built their own music festival from the ground up. It has made the small town of Winfield into an annual destination for acoustic musicians and music lovers from around the world, and it has always been participatory, with the informal campsite pickin' as much a part of the event as the stage shows and instrumental contests. The Walnut Valley Festival...

Since the last wild bison found refuge on the back of a nickel, the public image of natural Kansas has progressed from Great American Desert to dust bowl to flyover country that has been landscaped, fenced, and farmed. But look a little harder, George Frazier suggests, and you can find the last places where tenacious stretches of prairie, forest, and wetland cheat death and incubate the DNA of lost, wild America. Documenting three years spent roaming...

Latest edition of the atlas features new and revised maps showing the lay of the land, its character and use, the state's travel routes, locations of population centers, and the gradual unfolding of economic and political development. Maps also show changes in congressional and judicial districts, railroads, airline routes, employment figures, petroleum and natural gas resources, irrigation and groundwater, agriculture, and colleges and universities...