Reading Recommendations: Pacific Lady, The First Woman to Sail Solo Across the World's Largest Ocean, Sharon Sites Adams with Karen J. Coates

It was an age without GPS and the Internet, without high-tech monitoring and instantaneous reporting. And it was a time when women simply did not do such things. None of this deterred Sharon Sites Adams. In June 1965 Adams made history as the first woman to sail solo from the mainland United States to Hawaii. Four years later, just as Neil Armstrong very publicly stepped onto the moon, the diminutive Adams, alone and unobserved, finally sighted Point Arguello, California, after seventy four days sailing a thirty-one-foot ketch from Japan across the violent and unpredictable Pacific. She was the first woman to do so, setting another world record.

Inspiring and exciting, Adams memoir recounts the personal path leading to her historic achievements: a tomboy childhood in the Oregon high desert, and an early marriage that ended when her husband died of cancer. In the wake of his death and almost by accident, Adams discovered sailing. Six weeks after her first sailing lesson she bought a boat, and within eight months she set out to achieve her first world record. Pacific Lady recounts the inward journey that paralleled her sailing feats, as Adams drew on every scrap of courage and navigational skill she could muster to overcome the sea sickness, exhaustion, and loneliness that marked her harrowing crossings.

And, Angels of Destruction, a novel, Keith Donohue

Angels of Destruction opens on a winter's night, when a young girl appears at the home of Mrs. Margaret Quinn, a widow who lives alone. A decade earlier, she has lost her only child, Erica, who fled with her high school sweetheart to join a Radical student group known as the Angels of Destruction. Before Margaret answers the knock in the dark The girl, who claims to be nine years old and an orphan with no place to go, beguiles Margaret, offering some solace, some compensation, for the womans' loss. Together, they hatch a plan to pass her off as her newly found granddaughter, Norah Quinn, and enlist Sean Fallon, a classmate and heartbroken boy, to guide her into the school and town.

Their conspiracy is vulnerable not only to those children and neighbors intriqued by Norah's mysterious and magical qualities but by a lone figure shadowing the girl who threatens to reveal the childs true identity and her purpose in Margaret's life. Who are these strangers really? And what is their connection to the past, the Angels, and the long missing daughter?

Angels of Destruction is an unforgettable story of hope and fear, heartache and redemption. The saga of the Quinn family unfolds against an America wracked by change. It delicately dances on the line between real and imagined, mesmerizing the reader to the last page.

And, we've all real the Chicken Soup Books-why not Chicken Soup for the Soul, The Cancer Book. 101 stories of courage, support and love, Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen and David Tabatsky. Includes the inspirational memoir, Its Just a Word by Elizabeth Bayer.

A support group you can hold in your hands. These intimate stories by cancer patients and their loved ones, medical professionals, and friends, are a must read for anyone with cancer. Writers share all their experiences, from the initial diagnosis, to breaking the news to loved ones, to discussing the effect on home, school and work. Stories also cover securing a medical team, living through an ever changing self-image, the embarrassment of losing hair and discovering a new spirituality.

Plus a Bonus Book, the inspirational frank memoir It's Just a Word by cancer patient Elizabeth Bayer

See you at Rylander!