Frank Carlson Library

On a May afternoon in 1943, an Army Air Forces bomber crashed into the Pacific Ocean and disappeared, leaving only a spray of debris and a slick of oil, gasoline, and blood. Then, on the ocean surface, a face appeared--Lt. Louis Zamperini. Captured by the Japanese and driven to the limits of endurance, Zamperini would answer desperation with ingenuity; suffering with hope, resolve, and humor.

"This book uses the story of Isaac Beckley Werner, a homesteader in Stafford County, Kansas, to reveal how the Populist Movement involved and affected Kansas farmers. From 1884 until his death in 1895, Werner kept a diary whose content revolved around the advice of Henry Ward Beecher: recording events around him rather than focusing on himself. Owner of an extensive personal library, an attendee of Populist lectures who contributed columns to the...

"The never-before-told story of one woman's heroism that changed the course of the Second World War. In 1942, the Gestapo sent out an urgent transmission: "She is the most dangerous of all Allied spies. We must find and destroy her." This spy was Virginia Hall, a young American woman--rejected from the foreign service because of her gender and her prosthetic leg--who talked her way into the spy organization dubbed Churchill's "ministry of ungentlemanly...

Riding 2,000 miles on horseback from Montana to New Mexico sounds like a crazy but thrilling dream, or pure hardship and exhaustion. According to Bernice Ende, the trip was all that and more. Since swinging her leg over the saddle for that first long ride in 2005 (at the age of 51), Ende has logged more than 29,000 miles in the saddle, crisscrossing North America on horseback -- alone but for her horses and loyal dog Claire. More than once she has...