Books
Jesus Land: A Memoir
Julia and her adopted brother David are sixteen years old. Julia is white. David is Black. It is the mid–1980s and their family has just moved to rural Indiana, a landscape of cottonwood trees, trailer parks, and an all–encompassing racism. In this riveting and heartrending memoir, Julia Scheeres takes us from the Midwest to a place beyond imagining. Surrounded by natural beauty, Escuela Caribe—a religious reform school in the Dominican Republic—is characterized by a disciplinary regime that extracts repentance from its students by any means necessary. Julia and David strive to make it through these ordeals and their tale is relayed here with startling immediacy, extreme candor, and wry humor.
“A page turner…Heart-stopping and enraging…focused, justified and without a trace of self-pity. Shot through with poignancy” - -New York Times Book Review
“[A] marvelous remembrance… JESUS LAND will break your heart and mend it again, but it won't stop haunting you.” -Entertainment Weekly (A)
A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Jonestown
In 1954, a young pastor named Jim Jones opened Peoples Temple Full Gospel Church in Indianapolis. A charismatic preacher with idealistic beliefs and he quickly filled his pews with an audience eager to hear his sermons on social justice. As Jones’s behavior became erratic and his message more ominous, his followers leaned on each other to recapture the sense of equality that had drawn them to his church. But even as the congregation thrived, Jones made it increasingly difficult for members to leave. By the time Jones moved his congregation to a remote jungle in Guyana and the U.S. government began to investigate allegations of abuse and false imprisonment in Jonestown, it was too late.
In her award-winning A Thousand Lives, Scheeres draws from recently declassified FBI documents as well as harrowing interviews with survivors to craft an unprecedented and compelling history of the doomed community. Vividly written and impossible to forget, A Thousand Lives is a story of blind loyalty and daring escapes, of corrupted ideals and senseless, haunting loss. (Excerpt)
“Riveting…unforgettable…heart-breaking…bone-chilling. You will not be able to look away.” —The San Francisco Chronicle
“Chilling and heart-wrenching, this is a brilliant testament to Jones's victims, so many of whom were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.” —Publisher's Weekly, starred review
Listen, World! How the Intrepid Elsie Robinson Became America’s Most-Read Woman
The first biography of Elsie Robinson, the most influential newspaper columnist you’ve never heard of.
At thirty-five, Elsie Robinson feared she’d lost it all. Reeling from a scandalous divorce in 1917, she had no means to support herself and her chronically ill son. She dreamed of becoming a writer and was willing to sacrifice everything for this goal, even swinging a pickax in a gold mine to pay the bills.
When the mine shut down, she moved to the Bay Area. Armed with moxie and samples of her work, she barged into the offices of the Oakland Tribune and was hired on the spot. She went on to become a nationally syndicated columnist and household name whose column ran for over thirty years and garnered more than twenty million readers.
Told in cinematic detail by bestselling author Julia Scheeres and award-winning journalist Allison Gilbert, Listen, World! is the inspiring story of a timeless maverick, capturing what it means to take a gamble on self-fulfillment and find freedom along the way.
“Listen, World! is the rarest of things — a lively piece of unknown history, a marvelous story of a woman's triumph, and a tremendous read. Scheeres and Gilbert have managed the trifecta, and we readers are the better for it.” ―Susan Orlean, New York Times bestselling author of The Library Book
“A page-turning biography of Elsie Robinson (1883–1956), a prominent 20th-century journalist and cartoonist…This entertaining account delivers.” Publisher’s Weekly