Central Skagit Library District

For the last six years of his life, Roger Deakin kept notebooks in which he wrote his daily thoughts, impressions, feelings and observations. Discursive, personal and often impassioned, they reveal the way he saw the world. This book collects the best of these writings, capturing Roger's restless curiosity about the natural and human worlds.

"No one was less likely to take her own life. That's what her Oxford thesis advisor wrote. From the moment I stumbled across the obituary, late at night when I couldn't sleep, I was captivated, and it wasn't the terrible details of her death: That she leapt from the balcony of a high rise in Century City. That she was 27, and a newlywed." So begins Jessica Teich's quest to unravel a mystery: the suicide of someone she never met. Bright and accomplished,...

The anguished, volatile intensity we associate with the artistic temperament, often described as "a fine madness," has been thought of as a defining aspect of much artistic genius. Now, Kay Jamison's brilliant work, based on years of studies as a clinical psychologist and prominent researcher in mood disorders, reveals that many artists who were subject to alternatingly exultant and then melancholic moods were, in fact, engaged in a lifelong struggle...

"Knocked off her feet after twenty years in public health nursing, Iris Graville quit her job and convinced her husband and their thirteen-year-old twins to move to Stahekin, a remote mountain village in Washington State's North Cascades. They sought adventure; she yearned for the solitude of this community of eighty-five residents accessible only by boat, float plane, or hiking. "Hiking Naked" chronicles Graville's journey through questions about...

"When Stephanie Land set out to write her memoir Maid, she never could have imagined what was to come. Handpicked by President Barack Obama as one of the best books of 2019, it was called "an eye-opening journey into the lives of the working poor" (People). Later it was adapted into the hit Netflix series Maid, which was viewed by 67 million households and was Netflix's fourth most-watched show in 2021, garnering three Primetime Emmy Award nominations....