Take a trip back in time with award winning Star Tribune reporter Peg Meier.

Life stories of ordinary people of Minnesota, through the form of letters, diaries, & photographs. Every day life from the beginning of the 19th century to the dawn of World War II.

Dan Sharp, a gay missing persons investigator, accepts an invitation to a wedding on a yacht in Ontario's Prince Edward County. But the event doesn't go as planned. A member of the wedding party is swept overboard and Dan finds himself deep in troubled waters as he searches for possible killers not only in the present but also 20 years earlier.

In the summer of 1926, the Jean Goldkette jazz band, led by sax player Frankie Trumbauer and featuring 23-year-old cornetist Bix Beiderbecke, landed a season-long gig at the Blue Lantern dance hall on Hudson Lake in rural Indiana. The culture clash that resulted between the gin-swilling band members and the stuffy townspeople, fueled by Indiana Klansmen on one hand and Chicago gangsters on the other, is the subject of Toops' evocative jazz-age novel. At the center of the tale is the mercurial Beiderbecke, whose star shone brightly but briefly in the jazz world.

A newly-wed couple escape a busy confusion of their homeland for a distant and almost uninhabited lakeshore. They plan to lead a simple life there, fishing the lake, trapping the nearby woods and building a house upon the dirt between where they can raise a family. But as their every pregnancy fails, the child-obsessed husband begins to rage at this new world: the song-spun objects somehow created by his wife's beautiful singing voice, the giant and sentient bear that rules the beasts of the woods... A powerful exploration of the limits of parenthood and marriage.

Peg Meier's candid interpretation of the joys and pains of childhood through the decades--at home, at school, at play--reminds us that we were all children once, too.

The world first met Ricki Lake in 1988 as Tracy Turnblad in the film Hairspray. Weighing in at just over 200 pounds, the 5'3" teenager challenged what it meant to be an overweight woman in America: this fat girl got the guy, was part of the in crowd, and could sing and dance like nobody was watching. When she got her own talk show at twenty-four, Ricki had been transformed. She was a slender, mature woman whose long-running show changed daytime television forever. And when Ricki left it all behind to follow her heart and produce The Business of Being Born, we once again saw her in a new light, as a passionate advocate who wasn’t afraid to stand up for her beliefs and work for change. Ricki Lake’s life has been a series of rebirths—from fat to skinny, married to divorced, rich to poor, and more. In her intimate, bold, and relatable book, Ricki shows us how her unique life in the spotlight offers wisdom to anyone who has ever struggled in her own skin. She takes us behind the scenes of her troubled childhood—filled with food issues, abuse, and an unabashed yearning for a better life outside of her suburban home. She pulls back the curtain on her talk show and her early days as a “fat actress,” and she shows how she reinvented herself as an author, filmmaker, and much beloved finalist on Dancing with the Stars. Ricki weathered near-bankruptcy and an extremely difficult divorce, but, as she writes, life always hands you the unexpected—so you should never say never. Much to her surprise, Ricki has dated some of Hollywood’s most eligible bachelors, appeared on the cover of Us Weekly magazine in a swimsuit, and fell in love when she least expected it. And now she’s ready to talk about it all. Never Say Never is an inspiring, entertaining, and down-to-earth account of one woman who defied the odds and refused to give up. By trusting her gut and following her heart, Ricki Lake turned an unconventional life into an unparalleled triumph, and this memoir stands as a hopeful, hilarious, and honest exploration of how any woman can do the same.