Akron Public Library

"In the early 1980s, farmers were suffering through the worst economic crisis to hit rural America since the Great Depression. Land prices were down, operating costs and interest rates were up, and severe weather devastated crops. Instead of receiving assistance from the government as they had in the 1930s, these hardworking family farmers were threatened with foreclosure by the very agency that Franklin Delano Roosevelt created to help them. Desperate,...

Trixie, My Shetland Pony" is a story about Dr. Keller's first horse on their early Dakota prairie farm. The time i the 1930's in Strasburg, North Dakota. Keller creates a memory story of this special relationship between boy and animal during his early years on the family farm.

Defiant Sophie leaves home with her beau, but when tragedy strikes and a heartbroken Sophie wishes to return, she may not be welcome.

Catherine Weldon, a portrait painter from 1890s Brooklyn, travels to Dakota to paint a portrait of Sitting Bull and becomes embroiled in the Lakota peoples' struggle over the rights to their land.

"A vivid window into the world of working class men and the value of hard labor, set during the Bakken fracking boom in North Dakota Shiftless and unsatisfied in his life, Michael Patrick Smith decided in his mid-thirties to seek out the hardest work he could find, to see if he could do it. He wanted to be a person, unlike his father, who knew how to work and get things done. He found himself in the oil fields of North Dakota during the Bakken fracking...