Americana

Try these books if you're looking for:

• Books set in the United States
• Historical
• Books about the American experience

A Long Way from Home: Growing up in the American Heartland
By Tom Brokaw
BIOGRAPHY BROKAW
This memoir focuses on Brokaw’s experiences as an all-American boy growing up in South Dakota. He lived a squeaky-clean childhood and adolescence, ruled by work, sports and family. He was the son of upstanding farmers who lived by the motto of "waste not, want not." Although he worked as a television broadcaster, he felt a deep connection to the Midwestern people, places, and values that shaped him. No matter how far he traveled or how successful a career he enjoyed, he remained a true creature of the heartlands.

A Remarkable Mother
By Jimmy Carter
BIOGRAPHY CARTER
Miss Lillian, mother of former President Jimmy Carter, emerges from this portrait as redoubtable, generous and forward-looking. She was a registered nurse, pecan grower, university housemother, Peace Corps volunteer, public speaker and renowned raconteur. Ignoring the mores and prejudices of the racially segregated South of the Great Depression years, she served as an important role model for the nation. Carter allows that his mother was the inspiration for his own life's work of commitment and faith.

The Great Depression: America in the 1930s
By T. H. Watkins
973.917 WAT
This panoramic view of a challenging and painful decade includes photographs, posters and documents. The book surveys the era's business closures, bank failures, labor movements, unemployed, disenfranchised, soup-kitchen lines, drought, farmers' strikes and homeless. Anyone interested in history and specifically the cause-and-effect relationships between history and modern life will relish this book.

O Pioneers!
By Willa Cather
F CATHER A classic novel of the Nebraska prairie, "O Pioneers!" is the story of Alexandra Bergson, the daughter of Swedish immigrant farmers, whose devotion to the land sustains her against the hardships and suffering of prairie life.