Twenty Miles

Isabel Norris has never left the ice. Her father was a hockey legend who died before she was born, and her grandparents have raised her in his skates. When Iz leaves her grandmother behind to play for the Winnipeg University Scarlets, she struggles to fit in on this team of hard-hitting, tough-talking women with a penchant for buffets, beer bongs and raunchy humour - and a fierce loyalty to one another and to their sport. But in their raucous midst, Iz can't quite find her own place in the game. As she moves between the rowdy hilarity of the Scarlets' dressing room and quiet, lyrical contemplations, Iz tries to navigate the ways loss plays out on the ice. Based largely on author Cara Hedley's three seasons on the University of Manitoba Bison, Twenty Miles celebrates women's hockey and offers an uncompromising look at the ways in which the sport both haunts and redeems the women who play it.

Twenty Miles of Fence recounts a decade of transformation when Bob West, a westerner at heart, decided to escape the pretense of his unfulfilling architectural life and to become, quite simply, a cowboy. A cowboy? That old cliché about biting off more than you can chew fittingly describes the lessons learned when West and his family bought the Devil's Washtub Ranch in Wyoming. Already owning two horses, housed in a stylish stable on five acres near the yuppie haven of Boulder, Colorado, West soon discovered that ownership of two horses does not equal twenty miles of fence, 3,200 deeded acres, 400 BLM acres, 154 head of black angus, two and a half miles of the North Laramie River--and what would become for him the very best of times. Little did West know how those years would test him, inspire him, and lead him back to his true character.

Twenty Miles of Fence recounts a decade of transformation when Bob West, a westerner at heart, decided to escape the pretense of his unfulfilling architectural life and to become, quite simply, a cowboy. A cowboy? That old cliché about biting off more than you can chew fittingly describes the lessons learned when West and his family bought the Devil’s Washtub Ranch in Wyoming. Already owning two horses, housed in a stylish stable on five acres near the yuppie haven of Boulder, Colorado, West soon discovered that ownership of two horses does not equal twenty miles of fence, 3,200 deeded acres, 400 BLM acres, 154 head of black angus, two and a half miles of the North Laramie River—and what would become for him the very best of times. Little did West know how those years would test him, inspire him, and lead him back to his true character.

Twenty Miles From a Match, originally published in 1978, is the autobiography of an indomitable woman and her family’s twenty years of adventures and misadventures in a desert wilderness. In 1908, a venturesome woman named Sarah Olds packed up her brood and went homesteading in the deserts north of Reno, west of Sutcliffe on Pyramid Lake. Her ailing husband said, welcoming her to their new home, "There, old lady. There’s your home, and it’s damn near in the heart of Egypt." Olds tells of the hardships, frustrations, poverty, and other tribulations her family suffered from shortly after the turn of the century until well into the Great Depression. Through it all, however, runs a thread of humor, cheerfulness, and the ability to laugh at adversity. The foreword is by her daughter, Leslie Olds Zurfluh, the fourth of Sarah and A. J. Olds's six children.