Lamar Public Library

One fall morning Jerry Ellis donned a backpack and began a long, lonely walk: retracing the Cherokee Trail of Tears, the nine hundred miles his ancestors had walked in 1838. The trail was the agonizing path of exile the Cherokees had been forced to take when they were torn from their southeastern homeland and relocated to Indian Territory. Following in their footsteps, Ellis traveled through small southern towns, along winding roads, and amid quiet...

It has been a while since seven-year-old Dolly's dad has spent time with her, just the two of them, so when he scoops her up and promises to take her on the adventure of a lifetime, Dolly is thrilled. The first days on the road are incredibly exciting. But as they travel farther south, into a country Dolly no longer recognizes, her dad's behavior grows increasingly erratic. The adventure isn't fun anymore, but home has never been so far away. --adapted...

Joan Didion, the bestselling, award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking and Let Me Tell You What I Mean, has always kept notebooks--of overheard dialogue, interviews, drafts of essays, copies of articles. Here are two extended excerpts from notebooks she kept in the 1970s; read together, they form a piercing view of the American political and cultural landscape. "Notes on the South" traces a road trip that she and her husband, John Gregory...