Growing up in Leechfield, TX. poet Karr looks at her sometimes unbearable childhood with humor and sympathetic understanding for her dysfunctional parents.
Life on a farm during the Depression was a life of hard unending toil. Small things, like a fresh picked tomato, made the author aware of the abundance of life and lead to mostly happy memories.
The late 1980's early 90's Bronx was a neighborhood of drugs, violence and crime. Sanchez is the only gang member who is not dead or incarcerated. With support from his girl friend and mother, he graduated from college and escaped the violence.
Raised by a single mother of seven, Berry was determined to be educated and successful. Her research for her first novel, Redemption Song, changed her feeling toward, race, history and slavery. Her ancestors had lived on a plantation in Delaware owned by an abolitionist Quaker, who risked his life on the Underground Railroad.
Born in 1888, Bell spent most of her long life in the new state of Montana. Her mother died when Bell was eight years old leaving her with three sisters, a stepfather and a hard life of ranching, horse breaking, cattle herding and housekeeping. Her manuscript covers her young years to age 18, the story of a survivor.