The author takes the reader through four generations of her family, beginning in the late 1800's. The family left Burgos, Spain and settled Burgos, Mexico in the state of Tamaulipas. Eventually, Dolores, the author's mother married and moved to the border in Brownsville, Texas. The reader will experience a fascinating "first-hand" account of Spanish Mexican culture as well as life along the border in South Texas. Irma Barrientes Sherman vividly brings to life her family's deep faith in Christ, their music, marriage customs, food, dress and folklore. The account focuses on her mother, Dolores from her birth in a small town in northern Mexico to marriage and raising a family of nine siblings in South Texas.

The author takes the reader through four generations of her family, beginning in the late 1800's. The family left Burgos, Spain and settled Burgos, Mexico in the state of Tamaulipas. Eventually, Dolores, the author's mother married and moved to the border in Brownsville, Texas. The reader will experience a fascinating "first-hand" account of Spanish Mexican culture as well as life along the border in South Texas. Irma Barrientes Sherman vividly brings to life her family's deep faith in Christ, their music, marriage customs, food, dress and folklore. The account focuses on her mother, Dolores from her birth in a small town in northern Mexico to marriage and raising a family of nine siblings in South Texas.

The author takes the reader through four generations of her family, beginning in the late 1800's. The family left Burgos, Spain and settled Burgos, Mexico in the state of Tamaulipas. Eventually, Dolores, the author's mother married and moved to the border in Brownsville, Texas. The reader will experience a fascinating "first-hand" account of Spanish Mexican culture as well as life along the border in South Texas. Irma Barrientes Sherman vividly brings to life her family's deep faith in Christ, their music, marriage customs, food, dress and folklore. The account focuses on her mother, Dolores from her birth in a small town in northern Mexico to marriage and raising a family of nine siblings in South Texas.

This account of growing up with a mentally ill mother “belongs on a shelf of classic memoirs, alongside The Liars’ Club and Angela’s Ashes” (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times). As an NPR correspondent, Jacki Lyden visited some dangerous war zones—but her childhood was a war zone of a different kind. Lyden’s mother suffered from what is now called bipolar disorder or manic depression. But in a small Wisconsin town in the sixties and seventies she was simply “crazy.” In her delusions, Lyden’s mother was a woman of power: Marie Antoinette or the Queen of Sheba. But in reality, she had married the nefarious local doctor, who drugged her to keep her moods in check and terrorized the children to keep them quiet. Holding their lives together was Lyden’s hardscrabble Irish grandmother, a woman who had her first child at the age of fourteen and lost her husband in a barroom brawl. In this memoir, Lyden vividly captures the seductive energy of her mother’s delusions and the effect they had on her own life. She paints a portrait of three remarkable women—mother, daughter, and grandmother—revealing their obstinate devotion to one another against all odds, and their scrappy genius for survival. “What distinguishes Daughter of the Queen of Sheba from any other book about dysfunctional parents . . . and turns this exotic memoir into compelling literature is the dreamy poetry of Lyden’s prose. In graceful imagery as original (and occasionally as highly wrought) as her mother’s costumes, Lyden—a senior correspondent for National Public Radio—loops and loops again around the central fact of her mother’s manic depression and how that illness shaped Lyden’s life growing up with two younger sisters, a scrappy Irish grandmother (whose memory she holds like ‘a cotton rag around a cut’), a father who left, and a hated stepfather.” —Entertainment Weekly

As Lola helps her mother at the family's hotel, she learns about compassion, social injustice, and how one voice can lead to change. Includes author's note on Dolores Huerta, a labor organizer who co-founded the National Farm Workers Association.

A searing anatomy of a New Orleans murder trial and a system of justice gone wrong. In a New Orleans supermarket parking lot in the fall of 1984 ,two disparate lives become inextricably bound for the next fourteen years. The first, the life of Delores Dye, a white housewife and grandmother. The second, a young black man with a gun in hand. Moments following their maybe not so chance encounter, Mrs. Dye lay dead on the sunbaked macadam, and the killer had made off with her purse, her groceries, and her car. Four days later, following a tip, authorities arrested a known drug dealer and father of five named Curtis Kyles. Kyles would then be tried for Mrs. Dye's murder an unprecedented five times, though he maintained his innocence throughout each trial. Convicted and sentenced to death in his second trial, he would spend fourteen years on death row. After a fifth jury was unable to reach a verdict, New Orleans Parish District Attorney Harry Connick, Sr., finally conceded defeat and dropped the murder charge. But the case slowly yielded a deeper drama: The crime turned out to have been the side effect of an intricately plotted act of revenge. That police and prosecutors may have been complicit in the vengeance that framed Kyles cuts to the heart of a system of justice for Southern blacks in the era since lynch mobs were shamed into obsolescence. A compellingly written legal drama that has at its heart passionate intrigue and justice gone awry. Desire Street is a 2006 Edgar Award Nominee for Best Fact Crime.