KDL Recommends

DALLAS

Set during the Depression, this is the story of an unforgettable friendship between two women—eighty-six-year-old Hennie Comfort and seventeen-year-old Nit Spindle—and the deepest hardships and darkest secrets they shared with each other.

MICH JAMERSON

Nick has a choice of staying in Hamtramck to serve out probation or joining the CCC. Big Shoulders is the story of his attempt to handle the challenges of living and working in a military setting in the Upper Peninsula.

JILES

The Stoddard girls know no life but an itinerant one, trailing their father from town to town as he searches for work on the pipelines and derricks. Returning to their previously abandoned family farm, the resilient Stoddard women must now place their last hopes for salvation in a wildcat oil well that eats up what little they have left.

INSPIR MORRIS

Raising four strong-willed younger siblings after her mother’s death and her father’s imprisonment, seventeen-year-old Lanie Freeman never knows what new adventure will roll into view—such as her brother’s wild idea to turn the family’s old truck into a traveling store.

MULLEN

Follows the Depression-era adventures of Jason and Whit Fireson—bank robbers known as the Firefly Brothers by the press, the authorities, and an adoring public that worships their acts as heroic counterpunches thrown at a broken system.

STEFANIAK

Gladys Cailiff is eleven years old in 1938 when a new, well-traveled young schoolteacher turns the town upside down. The real trouble begins when she decides to revive the annual town festival as an exotic Baghdad bazaar.

CLASSIC STEINBECK

Set in the American West in the Dust Bowl years, the story follows the Joad family from the foreclosure of their farm through the long road trip along Route 66 and finally to their lives as migrant workers.

BIOGRAPHY 921 BUNDRUM

Bragg writes about his grandfather Charlie Bundrum, a man who died before Bragg was born but left an indelible imprint on the people who loved him. Drawing on their memories, Bragg reconstructs the life of an unlettered roofer who kept food on his family’s table through the worst of the Great Depression.

BUSINESS ECON 330.973 BRU

The chronicle follows one speculator’s attempt to corner the copper market, which leads to panic. In the midst of chaos, one man was able to halt the domino effect with calm, character and capital: J. Pierpont Morgan.

HISTORY US 20TH 978.032 EGA

The dust storms that terrorized America’s High Plains in the darkest years of the Depression were like nothing ever seen before or since. Egan follows a half-dozen families and their communities through the rise and fall of the region.

HISTORY US 20TH 977.162 GUP

The author’s grandfather, Sam Stone, placed an ad in the Canton, OH, newspaper shortly before Christmas in 1933, offering cash gifts to seventy-five families in distress. The author investigates a suitcase full of letters responding to these ads as he learns more about his grandfather’s hidden past as well as the suffering and triumphs of strangers during the Great Depression.

BIOGRAPHY 921 KALISH

Mildred Kalish’s story of growing up on her grandparents’ Iowa farm during the depths of the Great Depression.

HISTORY US MICHIGAN 977.4043 MIC

Michigan Remembered contains 150 FSA images, chosen to represent various geographic areas of Michigan, the economic diversity of the state and its people, and a broad range of subjects ranging from urban and industrial scenes of Detroit and the surrounding areas to images of the Upper Peninsula and rural and community life in the Lower Peninsula.

The Walton family is preparing for Christmas in the early 1930s. It’s Christmas Eve and they are waiting for father Walton to come home from his job in the city some 50 miles away.

Three escaped chain gang convicts have to travel home to try and recover buried loot from a bank heist. Along the way they meet up with some strange characters.

In 1930’s Southern US, a widow and her family try to run their cotton farm with the help of a disparate group of friends.

An extremely powerful and uplifting story about a family of black sharecroppers, the Morgans, set in rural Louisiana during the 1930s.

The life and trials of a 1930’s mountain family with strange bedtime rituals.

New Bedford, 1933. Many of the townsfolk have fallen on hard times in the wake of the Silver Dome Mine closure but matriarch May Bailey refuses to go down without a fight.