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.

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.

The Negro Motorist Green Book was a groundbreaking guide that provided African American travelers with crucial information on safe places to stay, eat, and visit during the era of segregation in the United States. This essential resource, originally published from 1936 to 1966, offered a lifeline to black motorists navigating a deeply divided nation, helping them avoid the dangers and indignities of racism on the road. More than just a travel guide, The Negro Motorist Green Book stands as a powerful symbol of resilience and resistance in the face of oppression, offering a poignant glimpse into the challenges and triumphs of the African American experience in the 20th century.

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