Central Skagit Library District

Describes the author's path to escape poverty, after being raised by her sixteen-year-old single mother in 1970s Los Angeles, and examines the conditions that make it nearly impossible for others to replicate her journey.

"Young Andrew was autistic and bilingual. He spoke English-and Chicken. He would sit on the front porch deep in conversation with his best friend, an Araucana chicken named Frightful. It was a two-way dialog consisting of secrets told and secrets kept between boy and fowl. His feathery friend became his voice; his only way to communicate in a confusing world. But one day, Andrew confided to Frightful: 'I think my body is trying to kill me.' That single...

Looks at a small group of friends in a former mining town in Wales who decide to breed a racehorse, Dream Alliance, who goes on to have a prodigious career on the track.

In April 1992, a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. His name was Christopher Johnson McCandless. He had given $25,000 in savings to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet, and invented a new life for himself. Four months later, his decomposed body was found by a party of moose hunters. How McCandless came to die is the...