Queen of Denver, The: Louise Sneed Hill and the Emergence of Modern High Society


Book Description

For more than four decades at the turn of the century, Louise Sneed Hill ruled over Denver's high society with her southern charm, societal tact and passion for success. Hill created a society group dubbed the "Sacred Thirty-Six" and held parties that encouraged animal dances, roller skating and alcohol consumption. She fashioned herself to the public as a hardworking, self-made woman. She used the press to sell her image, emphasize amusement and aid in her mission to transform society from Victorian morality to unabashed fun. She pushed boundaries at a time when American society was unsure of its social direction. Historian Shelby Carr delves into the complex story of the highly mythicized, misrepresented and misunderstood Mrs. Crawford Hill.




The Queen of Denver


Book Description

For more than four decades at the turn of the century, Louise Sneed Hill ruled over Denver's high society with her southern charm, societal tact and passion for success. Hill created a society group dubbed the "Sacred Thirty-Six" and held parties that encouraged animal dances, roller skating and alcohol consumption. She fashioned herself to the public as a hardworking, self-made woman. She used the press to sell her image, emphasize amusement and aid in her mission to transform society from Victorian morality to unabashed fun. She pushed boundaries at a time when American society was unsure of its social direction. Historian Shelby Carr delves into the complex story of the highly mythicized, misrepresented and misunderstood Mrs. Crawford Hill.




Queen City


Book Description

Welcome to Denver, Colorado. Everyone knows that an historic downtown has enormous character but no one captures that character with as much artistry and detail as Karl Christian Krumpholz. In Queen City, the skyline springs to life to tell this town's rich history. Booms and busts, historic moments, and colorful characters are all presented in this collection with personality and finesse. Over time businesses close, structures crumble and, memory of how things were in happier moments fades. Now preserved and documented with fun facts and tidbits which accompany each drawing, Queen City is a wonderful collection and a testament to Denver's lasting legacy.




Tallgrass


Book Description

An essential American novel from Sandra Dallas, an unparalleled writer of our history, and our deepest emotions... During World War II, a family finds life turned upside down when the government opens a Japanese internment camp in their small Colorado town. After a young girl is murdered, all eyes (and suspicions) turn to the newcomers, the interlopers, the strangers. This is Tallgrass as Rennie Stroud has never seen it before. She has just turned thirteen and, until this time, life has pretty much been what her father told her it should be: predictable and fair. But now the winds of change are coming and, with them, a shift in her perspective. And Rennie will discover secrets that can destroy even the most sacred things. Part thriller, part historical novel, Tallgrass is a riveting exploration of the darkest--and best--parts of the human heart.




Tina Cocolina


Book Description

Fans of Fancy Nancy and Pinkalicious will adore Tina Cocolina, a sweet little cupcake of a girl with a sense of adventure and a flair for fashion who’s on the hunt for her perfect topping. This mouthwatering picture book includes cupcake and frosting recipes from an award-winning pastry chef, maestro Martin Howard.







The Girl Who Dared to Defy


Book Description

In the wake of the violent labor disputes in Colorado’s two-year Coalfield War, a young woman and single mother resolved in 1916 to change the status quo for “girls,” as well-to-do women in Denver referred to their hired help. Her name was Jane Street, and this compelling biography is the first to chronicle her defiant efforts—and devastating misfortunes—as a leader of the so-called housemaid rebellion. A native of Indiana, Jane Street (1887–1966) began her activist endeavors as an organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). In riveting detail, author Jane Little Botkin recounts Street’s attempts to orchestrate a domestic mutiny against Denver’s elitist Capitol Hill women, including wives of the state’s national guard officers and Colorado Fuel and Iron operators. It did not take long for the housemaid rebellion to make local and national news. Despite the IWW’s initial support of the housemaids’ fight for fairness and better pay, Street soon found herself engaged in a gender war, the target of sexism within the very organization she worked so hard to support. The abuses she suffered ranged from sabotage and betrayal to arrests and abandonment. After the United States entered World War I and the first Red Scare arose, Street’s battle to balance motherhood and labor organizing began to take its toll. Legal troubles, broken relationships, and poverty threatened her very existence. In previous western labor and women’s studies accounts, Jane Street has figured only marginally, credited in passing as the founder of a housemaids’ union. To unearth the rich detail of her story, Botkin has combed through case histories, family archives, and—perhaps most significant—Street’s own writings, which express her greatest joys, her deepest sorrows, and her unfortunate dealings with systematic injustice. Setting Jane’s story within the wider context of early-twentieth-century class struggles and the women’s suffrage movement, The Girl Who Dared to Defy paints a fascinating—and ultimately heartbreaking—portrait of one woman’s courageous fight for equality.




Hardscrabble


Book Description

2019 Wrangler Award for Outstanding Juvenile Book Winner 2019 Spur Award - Western Writer's of America Finalist In 1910, after losing their farm in Iowa, the Martin family moves to Mingo, Colorado, to start anew. The US government offers 320 acres of land free to homesteaders. All they have to do is live on the land for five years and farm it. So twelve-year-old Belle Martin, along with her mother and six siblings, moves west to join her father. But while the land is free, farming is difficult and it's a hardscrabble life. Natural disasters such as storms and locusts threaten their success. And heartbreaking losses challenge their faith. Do the Martins have what it takes to not only survive but thrive in their new prairie life? Told through the eyes of a twelve-year-old girl, this new middle-grade novel from New York Times-bestselling author Sandra Dallas explores one family's homesteading efforts in 1900s Colorado.




Queen of the Road


Book Description

A pampered Long Island princess hits the road in a converted bus with her wilderness-loving husband, travels the country for one year, and brings it all hilariously to life in this offbeat and romantic memoir. Doreen and Tim are married psychiatrists with a twist: She’s a self-proclaimed Long Island princess, grouchy couch potato, and shoe addict. He's an affable, though driven, outdoorsman. When Tim suggests “chucking it all” to travel cross-country in a converted bus, Doreen asks, “Why can’t you be like a normal husband in a midlife crisis and have an affair or buy a Corvette?” But she soon shocks them both, agreeing to set forth with their sixty-pound dog, two querulous cats—and no agenda—in a 340-square-foot bus. Queen of the Road is Doreen’s offbeat and romantic tale about refusing to settle, about choosing the unconventional road with all the misadventures it brings (fire, flood, armed robbery, and finding themselves in a nudist RV park, to name just a few). The marvelous places they visit and delightful people they encounter have a life-changing effect on all the travelers, as Doreen grows to appreciate the simple life, Tim mellows, and even the pets pull together. Best of all, readers get to go along for the ride through forty-seven states in this often hilarious and always entertaining memoir, in which a boisterous marriage of polar opposites becomes stronger than ever.




Queen of the South


Book Description

The international bestseller that inspired the must-watch drama on USA Network starring Alice Braga as Teresa Mendoza. From “master of the intellectual thriller” Arturo Pérez-Reverte, a remarkable tale, spanning decades and continents—from the dusty streets of Mexico to the sparkling waters off the coast of Morocco, to the Strait of Gibraltar and Spain—in a story encompassing sensuality and cruelty, love and betrayal, and life and death. Teresa Mendoza's boyfriend is a drug smuggler who the narcos of Sinaloa, Mexico, call "the king of the short runway," because he can get a plane full of coke off the ground in three hundred yards. But in a ruthless business, life can be short, and Teresa even has a special cell phone that Guero gave her along with a dark warning. If that phone rings, it means he's dead, and she'd better run, because they're coming for her next. Then the call comes. In order to survive, she will have to say goodbye to the old Teresa, an innocent girl who once entrusted her life to a pinche narco smuggler. She will have to find inside herself a woman who is tough enough to inhabit a world as ugly and dangerous as that of the narcos-a woman she never before knew existed. Indeed, the woman who emerges will surprise even those who know her legend, that of the Queen of the South.