Reading recommendations: Broken, A Love Story, Horses, Humans, and Redemption on the Wind River Indian Reservation, Lisa Jones

Writer Lisa Jones went to Wyoming for a four day magazine assignment and came home four years later with a new life.

At a dusty corral on the Wind River Indian Reservation, she met Stanford Addison, a Northern Arapaho who seemed to transform everything around him. He gentled horses rather than breaking them by force. It was said that he could heal people of everything from cancer to bipolar disorder. He did all this from a wheelchair; he had been a quadriplegic for more than twenty years.

Intrigued, Lisa sat at Stanford's kitchen table and watched. She saw neighbors from the reservation and visitors from as far away as Holland bump up the dirt road to his battered modular home, seeking guidance and healing for what had broken in their lives. She followed him into the sweat lodge, a framework of willow limbs covered with quilts, where he used prayer and heat to shrink tumors and soothe agitated souls. Standing on his sun blasted porch, pit bulls padding past her, she felt the vibration from thundering bands of Arabian horses that Stanford's young nephews brought to the ring to train.

And she listened to his story. Stanford spent his teenage years busting broncos, chasing girls and dealing drugs. At twenty, he left the house for another night of partying. By morning, a violent accident had robbed him of his life as he knew it and left in its place unwelcome spiritual powers, an exchange so shocking that Stanford spent several years trying to kill himself. But eventually he surrendered to his new life and mysterious gifts.

Over the years Lisa was a frequent visitor to Stanford's place, the reservation and its people worked on her, exposing and healing the places, where she, too, was broken. Broken entwines her story with Stanford's exploring powerful spirits, material poverty, spiritual wealth, friendship, violence, confusion, death and above all else, "a love that comes before and after and above and below romantic love."

Duchess of Death, The Unauthorized Biography of Agatha Christie, Richard Hack

95 books published. An idyllic childhood shattered by World War I. 2 billion copies sold world wide. Affairs, betrayal and heartbreak. Novels translated into 105 languages. A bizarre 11-day disappearance in 1926 that has never been explained. Here at last is the biography that Agatha Christie fans have been waiting for.

She is the most popular novelist in history, yet the drama and torment of Agatha Christie's private life remains a mystery even to her most ardent fans. She made no secret of her disdain for the press and for those who wished to intrude on her private life. In this immensely readable and intimate biography, Richard Hack reveals the romance, scandal, and betrayal that drove one of the 20th century's most celebrated figures.

Drawing from over 5000 unpublished notes, letters and documents Duchess of Death provides the most complete and knowing portrait of this famed author to date.

And this last book I could not lay aside: Knockout, Interviews with the doctors who are curing cancer and how to prevent getting it in the first place, Suzanne Somers, Foreword by Julian Whitaker, M.D.

In Knockout, Suzanne Somers interviews doctors who are successfully using the most innovative cancer treatments, treatments that build up the body rather than tear it down. Somers herself has stared cancer in the face, and a decade later she has conquered her fear and has emerged with the path she's chosen. Now she shares her personal choices and outlines an array of options from doctors across the country.