Kansas summer reading: the 2009 Notable Books List
This week’s edition of The Pitch includes a cool story about The Moonflower Vine, a reportedly amazing and now revived book by a long-forgotten Western Missouri author named Jetta Carleton.
Anyone who’s looking for more books of regional interest will be interested in the 2009 Kansas Notable Books List. Released a couple of weeks ago by the State Library of Kansas, it’s a 15-book “roll of honor” put together by a committee of academics, librarians, booksellers, publishers and media folks who suggested titles from 2008; state librarian Christie Brandau had the final say on which books made the cut.
The list includes something for almost everyone. Kids’ books, cook books, histories, mysteries. (Memo to Ferruzza and Morris: I’ll expect a Fat City review of Robert Spector’s The Pizza Hut Story, which “looks at Pizza Hut and how the Wichita founders turned ‘pizza’ into a household word.”)
Me, I’ll be checking out Seeding Civil War: Kansas in the National News, 1854-1858. Craig Miner’s book is described as “A study of how 1850s newspapers played a critical role in turning Bleeding Kansas into an out-of-control inferno.” That pretty much describes the state this week, too.
